Wicking Material

Depending on the volume that you want to move. But you can use cotton string or cotton Bed sheets cut into 2" stripes or what ever width you want.

Yes, a towel is suprisingly effective at syphoning water out of a bath and onto the floor...

As anyone who has left a towel dangling in a bath will know!!

John.

This sounds like a field refrigerator. When working in a remote field you need to keep your lunch cold until break time. Put your metal lunch box on top of a rock that elevates it over a pan of water. Drape a burlap sack over your lunch box with the open end of the sack resting in the water. Water wicks up the sides and across the top of the sack. Evaporation by the sun keeps your lunch cool. Its been successfully employed for at least a hundred years. Instead of a lunch box and rock, a wooden orange crate turned on end is often used. That covers your dimensions. I can't say burlap is the most efficient material to use, but it is proven. Used for packaging nuts, potato, onion, corn, rice, seed, and animal feed it was always readily available where men were working in fields.

slo

How perceptive you are. I have never heard of a field refrigerator before, but that is the concept I want to develop. I got the idea from a water canteen bottle covered in felt, which you soak in water and after a couple of hours out in the sun, you have ice-cold water. I am looking at developing the idea to make a camping refrigerator / chilly-bin. I am in NZ, and burlap is not something that we are familiar with, however I suppose that is the same as hessian sacking. I really am looking for a more efficient wicking material, however your input is greatly appreciated.

Regards,

Ordinary ceramics also provide wicking action for evaporative cooling. Have a look at

Mohammed Bah Abba's Pot-in-pot invention: Low-Tech Refrigerator

http://boingboing.net/2004/03/22/inventor_of_noelectr.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A2116766

Svengali,

Thanks for your input. Unfortunately, there would be a problem with weight if using ceramics. I found the site about the Pot-In-Pot and also the reference to the Amish / Quakers method of refrigeration very interesting. I guess in todays world, nothing is new, everything just an adaption of previously known concepts.

Where I live I've seen large cold rooms using this cooling method. A 3m x 3m building is buid with a double wall and a cavity between the walls. The bricks are in such a way that there is holes in both walls so that the wind can help with the evaporation. Cavity between the two walls gets filled with charcoal, newspaper, hessian, or coconut hair. Anything that can hold moisture yet have a large surface area exposed. The water is fed through pipes from the top with holes in to drip feed. Water drips and runs down in the cavity. The bricks are also wet and helps to expose more water to the air. On a smaller scale we used to build a small frame with sticks and thread, covered it with newspaper (few layers) and outside with sack cloth (hessian) This will hang in a tree (keeps insects away and in the shade) with a plastic 2litre bottle hanging upside down, a small hole in the lid. Dripping water on top of the small composite box.. you can see if the water is finished. Dripping at more or less the same pace the evaporation takes place. The hole must be small and pin hole on the other end of the bottle to avoid vacuum. So effective we made jelly stall on a hot day. Hope this will inspire your product, not a new invention but if you could package this oldie well it will sell..