Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Poor Mans A/C

I got this idea because my room is on the 3rd floor and the ambient temperature is 85 degrees (F). This build isn't exactly a poor man's, but at the end of this post I will list what you could have done to make it even cheaper. I spent a little less than $50 on this. I didn't count the box fan because I already had it.

Mod a reciever with fans

I inherited 4 large 1980's floor standing speakers. I couldn't use them unless I had a receiver to drive them. I went on ebay and picked up a Sony STR-DG800 for $44 (it had a broken knob). It worked well at first. I then started to notice how hot this thing got. It could literally make my breakfast. So I got the idea that I should add some fans on this to circulate some air in there. It was already a perfect form factor to be modded anyways with all of the holes. So I opened it up to see what the insides look like and how much space I was given.

Mod a Router with a 80mm fan

About a year ago, me and my roommate bear24rw were looking for a suitable router for our house. We came upon this Rosewill router. It was cheap, gigabit, and had wireless N. When reading the reviews, we saw that most of the bad reviews were from the router overheating. We decided to get it anyways. When we plugged it in, this thing was scorching hot after a few minutes of being on. We took it apart to see what we were dealing with. We dremeled a hole on top of the heat sinks to try and get maximum efficiency out of the air cooling.