Homemade Air Conditioning and Alienation in New Jersey

I was looking online for some tips on cooling off (it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity, as they say) and found a university student’s account of building an air conditioner using nothing but a garbage can, a large fan, copper tubing, vinyl tubing, zip ties, clamps, and water. MacGyver would be proud.

Today, green blog Treehugger covered how to build a solar-powered air conditioner. Treehugger also linked to the blog lifehacker, which also posted instructions on making your own air conditioner (similar in design to the university student’s but with a “closed-circuit” system that reuses water).

I’m happy to learn that even something as unwieldy and technically incomprehensible as an air conditioner has a cheap, homemade counterpart. Of course one shouldn’t expect such units to cool one down as much as a commercial unit, but the savings in cost (on the unit itself and electricity) might make this an option worth exploring for some.

And here’s a completely unrelated quote:

“And I thought that one natural effect of life is to cover you in a thin layer of … what? A film? A residue or skin of all the things you’ve done and been and said and erred at? I’m not sure. But you are under it, and for a long time, and only rarely do you know it, except that for some unexpected reason or opportunity you come out–for an hour or even for a moment … as when you were a kid.

And you think: this must’ve been the way it was once in my life, though you didn’t know it then, and don’t really even remember it–a feeling of wind on your cheeks and your arms, of being released, let loose, of being the light-floater.”

-The Sportswriter, Richard Ford

A good book on alienation in contemporary life, set in the New Jersey suburbs outside New York City. I first read Ford in the New Yorker. His short story “Quality Time” is one of my all-time favorite pieces of literature. The story is reprinted in one of his recent collections, and I’d highly recommend it.