Conversion Question: Air Conditioning

by Brad Wheeler
(Brisbane, Australia)

The Kooleraire

The Kooleraire

Air conditioning is one of my concerns. Do those that convert their cars to electric simply do away with that little luxury?

Hi, Brad -

Yes, a lot of EV people just roll down the windows and think of icebergs.

Personally, there's not a snowball's chance in Vegas that I'm EVER going to do without air conditioning in the car, either, and I live in Seattle. In Brisbane, you NEED air conditioning. I took a peek at today's weather, and this is not a luxury for you, it's a requirement.

Sigh. So where does that leave us, Brad? Well, taking matters into our own hands, of course.

Here's a neat 12v gadget I came across the other day.
It's called the Kooleraire, and how it works is you fill a cooler with ice (or frozen 2L soda bottles) and install the Kooleraire 12v fan ($40 USD), and it fills your car (or boat; it was originally designed for marine applications) with blessed coolness for as long as the ice lasts. A simple PVC elbow joint ($1 USD) allows you to direct the cold air wherever you want.

Don't laugh, it's brilliant.

There are other solutions, more expensive, heavier, and draining more of your auxiliary battery power. One may be found at Masterflux, a company that makes air conditioners and heaters for golf carts (among other things).

Another possibility for desert dwellers (not us, too humid where we live) is a portable swamp cooler. Old cars used to have these evaporative coolers, and they work great...in dry regions. If the humidity is over 40%, forget it.

Bonus: The Kooleraire works perfectly well with bottles of Guinness nestled among the ice blocks in the cooler. How many air conditioners can you say that about?

Regards,
Lynne

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Electric AC for EV
by: Joseph P. Rebel

GrassRoots sells an electric AC unit called "COOL BLUE" (120vac, 60Hz) as well as an adapter called (I think)"BLUE FLASH" which will turn the 120v - 144v of the battery pack to the required AC-60Hz that the unit needs. Look into it online using keywords "Air conditioning", "for", "EV". Also, the inverterstore.com may sell an inverter converting the DC voltage to AC voltage.
Disclaimer: check with either sources about the feasability of this.

Just a thought . . .

Joseph P. Rebel - jprhotnews at yahoo dot com

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Air Conditioner
by: Jay

To run Air Conditioner in a Electric Vehicle, Buy a Motor that has the shaft coming out of both ends , one for the Drive and use the other to drive the compressor

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EV Aircon
by: Ian

As one who is trying to get everything together for a self build EV I researched a aircon unit for my future car by trying one out in my existing ICE car.I went to a local aircon repair shop and they took a room aircon unit apart and replaced the compressor with a Swedish 12V unit and fitted the compressor and condensor coil in the boot and the evaporator on the back seat and used a reverse cycle setup to provide heating and everything has been working well for the last 3 months. When I get building I am going to install the unit as normally fitted to a car and use the battery heat as the primary heat source and jut dump the heat for summer
Great Site

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Air conditioning
by: dan bentler

Stuart
Brisbane Australia - gets warm there does it?
BTW Lynne on submarine we chilled Cokes in the airconditioning duct.

Anyway you can have air conditioning.

Cheapest Salvage old compressor. Keep the electric clutch. Remount so it can drive off the drive motor. You will need some way to turn on the clutch and compressor (existing HVAC control)
AND you will need a way to sense motor current and to turn off compressor to prevent motor overload. Easiest is to watch amps and turn off w manual switch.

REGEN you can use the compressor for regen braking probably the easiest is to have a manual switch to engage clutch.

Next cheapest get a "small" DC motor and drive compressor off that.

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