Inexpensive Aftermarket A/C

[Sharkey <sharkey@mrsharkey.com>]

Kind of surprised that we haven't seen any posts about adding air
conditioning to EV's. Last year, there was an ongoing thread about the ice
chest coolers for the interior of your car. Just got back from a 5-day trip
into the Eastern Oregon desert to display the car at the SolWest Renewable
Energy Fair. Had some mechanical fun on the way there, but I'll leave that
for later. Yesterday, I pulled out at about 12:00PM, 90°, full sun, so I
decided to try out my economy air conditioning.

Regard this picture:
http://www.mrsharkey.com/evgfx/ev9c.jpg

Basically, I lined the rain tray with bubble plastic, the stuff that gets
used for shipping packaging. This was to insulate the ice from the car
body, and to keep cubes from falling into the heater blower. I let a flap
of plastic ride up over the blower to form a little dam to keep out water
and ice.

My car has the original rain tray plastic, which you see in the pic, plus
the cover from an A/C Rabbit on the pass. side, and the cover that keeps
the electronics on a stock Rabbit dry on the driver's side (they're off in
this photo), so the air coming in from the cowl vent has to travel the
longest distance over the ice before getting into the car. The melt water
simply dripped out the drain glands at the bottom of the tray.

How does it work? Pretty well. It isn't like having real A/C, but having
some cold air coming out of the dash vents and down on my feet was
refreshing and quite welcome. The ice lasted about two hours in the desert
heat. This pic shows two bags of ice in the tray, there was plenty of room
for at least one more, and probably two, if you shoved it around and got it
in all the corners and under the wiper motor.

Needless to say, some beverages could be stowed up there and kept cold as
well....

-S