Ok, I'm Chilled. I'm Chilled. Relax....56K Warning!

[Naja002]

I love a good 'ol a/c convert. and it crunches! nice implementation and craftsmanship, again.

Me too! I should have done this a ways back, but I've enjoyed the other projects.


Well, the controller arrived a couple of days ago. I had picked up the wiring--went with 14 gauge. Call me crazy, but I would rather burn up the controller then burn down the building! I'm just kinda quirky like that! I got it wired up, no problem, but had 1 minor issue. While waiting for it to arrive, I learned that the probe (sensor) is not supposed to be submerged. Well, that kinda screws things up! So, I had a choice:

1) Purchase a $30 "Bulb Well Assembly", pay another shipping charge and wait a bit longer, Or....

2) Improvise.

I chose #2. First was coming up with at least a temporary fix. I considered siliconing, epoxying, etc the sensor and wiring, but I really didn't want to do that. So, I got out a couple of aquarium heater holders and some pvc:



I knew this was going to be temporary, so I glued the bottom submersed cap on, but not the top cap. Drilled a hole in the top cap that the sensor would squeeze through and then babysat the system for a little while. Actually worked pretty good really. The thermal conductivity of pvc is like 0.19 or something low, so I was curious what my temp range was going to be. I set the differential for 2F--it turned out not to be more then ~4F which is actually pretty darn good. But not good enough.....

I knew I had a +1Ft piece of 1/2" copper pipe laying around, but also knew that I did not have any caps for it. So, a stop by lowes fixed that and while I was there I went ahead and picked up a rubber grommet. Yesterday I was pretty tired and I knew things could hold another day, so I procrastinated until today. Got my butt out there and got this fix fixed!

Sweated on the bottom copper cap:




Got the grommet over the sensor and a hole drilled through the top cap:




Even though I could have sweat the top cap on and inserted the probe after things cooled--I knew that some time in the future I would want to remove that probe--the hole is tight, so I can't necessarily just get it back out. I chose to silicone the cap on and silicone over the grommet and wiring:



I have no intention of submersing the top of this thing, so the silicone should do a good job of keeping the moisture out long term--that's all that's really needed.

So, next I needed to mount it into the cooler. Why not go with a good thing already? I knew that the heater holders would not clip onto the copper pipe because it's just too narrow. So, time to improvise again. Took a small scrap piece of 3/4" pvc, cut it into 4 pieces, clipped 1 piece into each heater clip and slid the copper setup right down in there:



Picked up a couple more gals of anti-freeze at walmart when I hit lowes, so I added that:





So, now there is ~7.75 gals of anti-freeze and 17 gals of water. I need to do another time study to see how long my on/off cycles times are now. I doubt I'll do it today, but hopefully some time this weekend.


Just a larger view:







Oh, yeah, I fixed the return bulkhead leak by loosening the bulkhead and siliconing under and all around it. Not the preferred way to go, but useful in these types of situations. The preferred route is no leaking bulkhead to start with....



So far so good:



Max temp over the last 30+ mins is 70C. The mins kinda worry me though. I may move everything up a couple of degrees after everything settles in. I would rather move my max temp up to say 75C than deal with condensation!

Oh, and I lowered my OC down to ~4.0 for now.....



More Updates at Post #46