With several days of 100+ temperatures so far, and with summer usually getting hotter in July and August, getting into the car to go somewhere is uncomfortable for the first several minutes until the air conditioner cools things down to something resembling a bearable temperature. Today, we created an air conditioner out of a Styrofoam cooler, a battery-powered fan, and frozen ice packs.
I had read about this here: Lifehacker AC DIY and decided it was time to give it a shot. We already had some Styrofoam coolers around the house because we've had things shipped to us that needed to stay cold, which solved the problem of finding a suitable container. Also, we have the reusable ice packs that came with the coolers, although for test purposes we used frozen peas. I'm the only one who likes peas, and the main reason we keep frozen peas on hand is because they make nice moldable ice packs for injuries (I have kids, plus I'm a guy - injuries are pretty much unavoidable). We have some plug-in-to-wall fans, too, but I wanted this to be portable, so I bought a battery-powered fan and some batteries.
So for less than $15, I was ready to create. With my trusty pocket knife, and humming the theme song to "MacGyver," I cut a hole in the lid of the ice chest just big enough for the front of the fan to fit in, facing downward (i.e., inside). Another hole in the side of the chest, towards the top, provided the outlet.
I pulled two packets of frozen peas out of the freezer, set them in the bottom of the chest, put the lid on, sat the fan on top and switched the fan on to blow down onto the peas. The resulting cold air bounced back up and came out the outlet hole. Success!
I have a plastic bottle of water in the freezer now, in addition to the reusable ice packs, so we'll have plenty of frozen things to use when we need to cool down the interior of the car a bit in the sweltering summer sun.
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