DIY Solar Powered Playhouse A/C. Does it work?
Published April 22, 2022 · 7:11 · 100,911 views
About This Video
An Earth Day project that doubles as a case study in Van's approach to problem-solving: his son's playhouse is too hot in a Topanga Canyon heat wave, so rather than installing conventional air conditioning, he rigs an EcoFlow solar panel system to power a cooling unit off-grid. The project is deliberately over-engineered for the problem size. A playhouse doesn't need solar infrastructure. But the over-engineering is the point.
Seven minutes, tight enough to function as a build video and loose enough to let the philosophy breathe. Battling canyon heat with portable solar panels isn't efficient, but efficiency was never the metric. The metric is whether the kid understands where cold air comes from. And whether the father enjoyed the afternoon of tinkering that produced it. He did.
Transcript
we built this Playhouse for our son so we can have some privacy he shares a bedroom with us the playhouse is his Sacred Space
buddy it's too hot you can't be in here it is it's not hot buddy it's 112° in here what isn't yeah you can't be in
here bud why it's too hot I want to be in here for this year's Earth Day I'm going to air condition the
playhouse air conditioning you say how does air conditioning protect the environment well this particular air
conditioning system is environmentally friendly in two ways for one we're going going to power the AC using solar energy via these
portable 220 W ecoflow solar panels and this ecoflow Delta max power station with an extra battery solar panels charge the deltax
in the extra battery Delta Max and the extra battery power the AC I hope which is to say renewable energy powers the
AC I hope the second way this system is environmentally friendly energy conservation Playhouse 288 cubic feet to
cool down our house 10,000 cubic feet to cool down cooling the 280 8 cubic foot Playhouse with solar panels power station and a 5000
BTU AC will consume a fraction of the energy our central air unit consumes to cool our 10,000 cubic foot
house and during heat waves like this one air conditioning is not optional it's a safety precaution just like those
cooling centers they have for vulnerable folks in the big [Music] cities now I don't really know if the
solar panels and Power Station can keep up with the AC this is just an idea I had I did zero research and didn't even
read the instructions but we'll worry about that later these are ecof flow's portable solar panels they come with
this carrying case they're bifacial which means both sides of the panel capture sunlight to convert it to
electricity there's translucent little slits that the sun shines through the light bounces off of the
case or whatever else is behind the [Music] panels and the photovoltaic cells on the back of the panels capture the reflected
light as well these panels plug into each other so you can multiply your energy harnessing capability my deltax can
handle up to four panels of input but I think two will do the trick these are the portable panels for
camping or van life but I'm going to make them semi-permanent by lashing them to the roof I mounted the panels to
these 2x tws from the lumber yard hoping the cells on the back and get a little bit of the light that shines
through you just plug the panels into each other then plug them into the power station it's obvious zero electrician
knowledge required thank God and AC man that's asking a lot of the Sun but I guess we'll [Applause] see so for you metric people I'm trying
to cool the playhouse down from 32° C to room temperature which is about 20° C [Music] so less than 30 minutes to cool down the
entire Playhouse let's see how much energy the air conditioner sucked up so wow it still has 95% on the Eco flow and 98% % on the
spare battery so 95% 98% that's what's left in the batteries half an hour so that's uh let's say uh 10 hours it'll run 10
hours but it's not hot for 10 hours and uh the sun will charge these things I think up to 80% in 8 hours if I
remember correctly so solar powered Playhouse 3.5% of the power station's energy storage and the sun will charge the
power station up to 10% or more per hour in other words the kit ain't going to overheat and he ain't going to
deplete the power station you're not supposed to leave the power station outside I don't think so I built this little Kyoto roof and
platform to protect it from the elements the boy's on spring break visiting Grandma right now but when he
gets home why he'll be cool as a cucumber in a bowl of hot sauce to quote a phrase thank you ecoflow for sponsoring
this episode join the ecoflow Earth Day event ecoflow will plant a tree for anyone who purchases the unit from the
ecoflow website from April 22nd to April 25th check out ecof flow's site by Link in the description to get these amazing products this week on the patreon a live stream answering your questions the link is right there
Products & Tools Mentioned
- EcoFlow essential — sponsor: 220W solar panels, Delta Max power station
- EcoFlow Delta Max essential — portable power station
- 5000 BTU air conditioner uses — AC unit for playhouse