Thread: My System
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Old 07-16-2011, 06:59 PM
GpsFrontier GpsFrontier is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2009
Location: Lake Havasu AZ.
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The ice chest as a reservoir is a good idea, however unless you find some used ones at a garage sale or something, they aren't cheep. Especially the bigger they are. Because of the summer heat we have here, I came up with a design to build what I call a cooling box. Witch is really nothing more than a big custom made ice chest. My original concept was for it to house two 32 gallon trash cans as reservoirs (inside the cooling box). But the idea is easily customized to anything you want. You can use it with the water directly in it, with or without the bottom drain, and even make it any size you want. I even have plans to use the design as a large walk in refrigerator for harvested produce storage, and a small window AC unit for the cooling source. I also have plans to make some smaller ones for transporting produce to the farmers market. Cooling them either with dry ice, or a thermoelectric heat sinks, like they use in the coolers that plug into your cars cigarette lighter.

Anyhow I posted pictures of the cooling box I had in mind. The one in the drawings was designed to easily hold two 32 gallon trash cans, and cost of materials I estimated to be around $80. OSB board generally runs about $8 a sheet (4x8), and the 2 inch thick Styrofoam runs a little under $20 a sheet here (4x8). The side support 1x2's run about $0.94 for a 8 foot piece. You can even use 2x3's that run $1.84 here. I have the whole design and building instructions in a PDF file, but I cant post PDF's in this forum. My design also calls for using foamboard adhesive to glue the Styrofoam to the OSB, and water proofing the seams using foamboard adhesive and silicone. Water proofing the flat inside surface can be done using many different materials, but I like rolled vinyl sheeting the best so far (price wise) anyway.
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Last edited by GpsFrontier; 07-17-2011 at 05:38 PM.
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