I don’t deal well with heat, and I've never dealt well with heat. I would get sick on car trips as a kid, and I found that it helped to be cool. But, the back seat was too far from the A/C, so I used tape and some plastic trash bags to create a hose that would blow cold air right into my face. My parents actually took a picture of an early version (below).
When it comes to car camping, I
can endure the occasional blazing inferno if absolutely necessary, but there
must be a better way. For a while, I used some magnetic window screens custom
made for my vehicle, made by a family in the St. Louis area…
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| One Happy (and cool) Kid |
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The screens are an innovative and effective solution, and I have used them successfully and often. However, several
years ago, on a car camping adventure near the Smoky Mountains in mid-August, I
tried to sleep one evening, but the temp was 90, and this was at nine o’clock at
night. At that point, all I had was a fan, but fans don’t touch the misery of a
guy from Wisconsin trying to sleep at 90 degrees with intense humidity. Screens
don’t fix 90.
So, on that miserably hot and humid trip, I started looking
into options for cooling a car. Sure, I could just leave the car running all
night, but I didn’t want to use the fuel, and I certainly didn’t want the wear
and tear issues of leaving a car idling for 8-10 hours. Plus, I wasn’t wild
about the possibility of being overcome with carbon monoxide and waking up
dead.
So I started researching portable air conditioners. For a
brief moment, I considered the idea of freezing water in a 5-gallon bucket with
a fan on top, but how do I re-freeze a bucket of water while camping? This
might help a little bit for one night, but I’m gone for more than a week at a
time. Plus, this wouldn’t touch the humidity issues; in fact, it would probably
make it worse (a fan blowing warm air over a block of ice all night).
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I considered a commercially available portable A/C unit, the
kind they make for doghouses and for cooling small places like computer closets.
I thought about mounting the main unit on a roof rack or roof basket and
running the vent hoses down through a specially designed window fitting in a
partially closed window. Most of these units, though, are more than $500, and
I’m trying to save money, not spend more money.
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A slightly cheaper option is a portable room air
conditioner, often available at places like Home Depot. I could put one of
these in the passenger seat and vent the warm exhaust out a window. But these
things are huge. Plus, as I started reading, I realized that many of them
either need a drain or have a bucket that needs to be constantly emptied (like
a dehumidifier). There must be a better way.
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At some point, I took our car in for service, and our mechanic had posted a clipping of a beat-up old car with a generator strapped on the trunk and a window A/C unit sticking out one of the windows. That’s it! But since my car is already wired for “shore power” (see my previous post on this), I definitely don’t need the generator. So, I went home and did some more research. I’ll admit that some of my motivation came from some sites like this one:
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| Crazy A/C |
I took some measurements, did some more research online,
went on Amazon and ordered the smallest window unit I could find, the Frigidaire
FFRA0511R1 5,000 BTU 115V Window-Mounted Mini-Compact Air Conditioner with
Mechanical Controls, 15 x 16 x 12 inches:
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| Amazon: Frigidaire Window Unit A/C |
Once the unit arrived, I set out to find a way to mount it
in the window in a way that would be safe and fairly weather-tight, and in a
way that would be cheap (using materials from our local Habitat Restore). The unit would also need to tip ever so slightly
outward, to keep the condensation from running back into the car. After some
trial and error, I cut a piece of plywood the exact size of the bottom of the
unit, carefully measured, and then screwed two pieces of old wooden handrail on
the bottom of the plywood (nearly, but not quite parallel to each other, due to
the fact that my “window ledge” is slightly wider at the back than at the
front). After finishing the ledge in weatherproof exterior paint, I then carefully screwed the
plywood contraption to the bottom of the A/C unit, being very careful to not
puncture anything critical. Since the outer handrail would be resting on the exterior finish of the car, I covered it with a piece of pipe insulation. Once everything was together, the unit fit
perfectly on the ledge and was perfectly balanced.
I then made a cardboard template of the hole that was left
around the outside of the A/C unit. This is the gap that would need to be
filled to seal out hot air and rain. I considered some kind of wooden trim, but
the side of the car curves inward toward the top, so it needed to be flexible.
I toyed with the idea of foam sheeting (from a craft store) or some kind of
sheet of rubber (like in an inner tube), but these would be a little too flimsy.
While roaming our local Menard’s store, I walked by the floor runners that are
available by the foot. This might work! I ultimately decided on a rubber floor
runner, since it is rather substantial and thicker than a sheet of rubber. I
got about three feet, took it home, and cut it according to the template. I
then used some industrial-strength rubber adhesive to glue a series of
crazy-strong magnets on what would be the outside of the rubber trim, but I
only installed the magnets (obviously) where they would make contact (through the rubber mat) with the
steel of the car.
The contraption was coming together, but I still needed a
way to make the gap a little more secure. So, I went back to our local Habitat
Restore and got some kind of steel channel about ¾” deep. I cut two of these to
the appropriate length and mounted them with screws (at the appropriate angle,
matching the angle of the car exterior) to both sides of the A/C unit. This
would be somewhat weatherproof and would give a good barrier between the hot
side and the cold side of the A/C unit.
Finally, success! On the day I worked on this project, the
temp was around 90, so it was the perfect opportunity to run a test. With the
A/C unit perched on the window ledge, I deployed the rubber trim, plugged in
the unit, and turned it on. Within minutes, the temp in the car started plummeting, and within half an hour, the temp in the car was down in the mid 60’s.
Yes!!!
When I called my wife outside to show her the contraption,
she rolled her eyes and said she would be getting me some of those stick-on
jewels to go on the outside of it. “Why?” I asked. “Glamping,” she said. I had
finally crossed the line from camping to glamping (a combination of "glamorous" and "camping," I'm afraid).
Before wrapping it up, I got a little concerned about the
unit falling out of the car. My concern was rolling over in the middle of the
night, giving it a good elbow-jab, and having it scratch the whole side of the
car on it’s way down to disastrous contact with the earth. So, I got a length
of strap and a buckle, installed an old drawer pull under the outer lip of the
base, and whenever I deploy this thing, I simply run the strap around the roof
rail. This lets some of the weight rest on the outward side, pretty much
preventing it from falling inward, while assuring it won’t fall outward. I also
became slightly concerned about how watertight this would be in a driving rain.
So, I basically built an awning that hooks over the roof rail and deploys right
to the edge of the unit.
I have now used this contraption on two ten-day trips to
Tennessee in August, and it has been awesome. I store it just inside the back
driver’s side of the Outback, right next to the end of the bed platform. The
rubber mat stores quite nicely on the upside down awning, and this travels on the end of
the bed platform. When I set up camp for the night, I plug in, deploy the A/C,
and within 20 minutes or so, the interior is rather chilly. Before dozing off,
I usually turn it on low, and it has been great.
On my way down to Tennessee last week, I camped at Turkey
Run State Park in west-central Indiana, and some fellow campers stopped by a
took some pictures of the setup. I’m not sure whether they were impressed with
the idea or perplexed by the crazy old guy from Wisconsin. Either way, I had a
cool night of peaceful sleep.
