"bong" cooling unit?

hey guys, i recently read about the bong cooler, http://www.overclockers.com/articles389/index05.asp.

According to diagram on page two, the coldest you can get is ambient air temperature, because the coldest object is the air input from the fan.

yet he says that his compute with this hooked up with no radiator/peltier runs at 4C idle??

whats the go?

Page not found error with your link.

Humm are we looking at the same diagram? the diagram I am seeing is the one that shows the bong going below ambient and the radiators approaching ambient.

Bongs can go below ambient because the water requires energy to evaporate so takes it from the surrounding water.

Road Warrior

hey are so these water towers worth it????

yeh.. for testing you can make a simple bong from two juice bottles.. i got a 'bong' type cooler with only ~15cm drop and it keeps my water at 28~ load when ambient is around 25. also, for sprayhead, for simple testing you can stick a plastic bag at the end of the hose and stick few holes in it with scissors or knife.

okay, i bought a small pump, 180 litres an hour. And im starting to make this thing, but i dont quite undestand how it works.

http://homepages.ihug.com.au/~petrik/kit001.jpg

is a "model" that i made - i put a 40cm pedastal fan on high and i got a drop of 1 degree - that's crap.

basically the water gets pumped up the tube, and the fan blows air across the cloth with water, to cool it down and it drops back in, but like i said, 2 degrees.

am i doing something wrong?

Your prototype doesn't appear to have much area. You have a solid stream of water falling off your cloth. Now in a bong, it gets the surface area by spraying water into small droplets or streams. You can do it with a cloth I guess, but you'd have to make more of a bag of the cloth and let the water run out of it rather than off it. Or run it down a curtain of cloth or something. I think the reason most people haven't tried this with cloth is because it would act as a substrate for mould etc.

Once while at university when our fridge broke, we made an evaporative cooler using a cloth, basically we had a dish bowl with a large tub in it with our milk and etc in and a bath towel thrown over the top. We were putting baking soda in the water to keep it fresh, the water kept the towel wet through a wicking action. We put it in a draught near a north window and the fridge thermomenter we had in there registered 8C, a little warm for a fridge, but not bad since it was early summer and the ambient temperature was 25C.

Road Warrior

Bongs can be a pain in the rear end.
If you use one make sure you have a large res. (I had a 25L)
I was losing 1 Supper Slurpy cup a day in the summer from my bong. (5' 1'', 400GPG pump)
Humity in your Room will also UP alot.
Currently back to air cooling, but i will go water again soon.....

check out this link Pepsi has done great research, plus you may be able to get [or purchase] plans for building one from him.

remember, building a model based on an existing [and functioning] one is better; it's lighter on the pocket and it'll be a bit easier to preform controlled experiments on.

Soren