Cold Room - modifying window A/C

Systems, Gear, & DIY
1

Now that it’s warming up, I need to finish off my cold room.

The window unit I’m planning to use does not want to cool below 60 degrees.  I have it hooked to a Johnson Controls temp controller, but the issue is with the unit itself.

I’ve pulled off the front panel and located the temperature sensor.  My approach for the time being is to put the sensor into a coffee can with a small incandescent bulb to warm it up, thus hopefully bringing the room temp down below 60.

Does anyone have advice/recommendations/links for a more elegant way of rigging this?  Duct-taping a coffee can to the side of the a/c seems a tad hill-billy.

I haven’t pulled the controls fully apart to see if I can bypass the temp sensor as I’ll need to pull the unit out of the window to open the case further.  It needs to come out anyway so I can finish painting and insulating so I may get to that this weekend.

Nonetheless, I’m sure others have dealt with this before and I could benefit from some advice.

2

When I had hopes and dreams of turning the storage room in my garage into a walk-in I had planned to buy one of these.

-J.K.L.

3

Sounds like you need to yank the factory control, and just hard wire it. That’s how I did mine. Should be easy as a phillips screw driver, and a wire nut.

4

I think that it is basically the same thing.

If the AC is analog there may be a screw that you can adjust to lower the temperature.

5

I use a window shaker AC to cool my “fermentorium” to 66-68F.  All of my meads and ales are fermented there.  Anything that needs to be cooler than that goes into a converted chest freezer or small under-counter refrigerators, all of which are temp controlled with external thermostats.

Electricty currenty costs $0.45/kWh here (pun intended).  Trying to keep the fermentorium cooler than 66F would cost way too much.

The freezer and friges are not inside the fermentorium

6

not sure here but, if you override the therm control the evaporator will freeze up. it has to cycle to defrost it.

7

Well, for the time being my hill billy rig with the coffee can seems to be working.  We’ll see if it can take it down to 55 degrees.

It looks like garbage, but it was cheap and easy.

FWIW - I’m not worried about freezing the condensor.  I’m only trying to get down to 50 at most and this hopefully does the trick.  The JC temp controller ought to provide enough cycling to keep the A/C alive. If it dies, I’m out nothing as it’s been sitting in the basement taking up space for years.