Author Topic: Fan Aspirator for a Cotton Region Shelter  (Read 999 times)

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Offline flyingvranch

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Fan Aspirator for a Cotton Region Shelter
« on: October 26, 2022, 04:19:17 PM »
I recently built a solar powered fan aspirator for my wooden instrument shelter. Hopefully this will eliminate some of the temperature spikes seen on the graphs on those hot summer days. It was an easy project and you can read about it and see more photos on my weather station blog here;
https://ki5omm.budbrinkley.com/

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« Last Edit: October 26, 2022, 04:22:01 PM by flyingvranch »

Offline BoDuke

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Re: Fan Aspirator for a Cotton Region Shelter
« Reply #1 on: October 27, 2022, 10:25:45 AM »
Hi,

Thanks for sharing your project and photos.  The fan should definitely help but I think some other modifications to your shelter could improve it, too.  The (medium) cotton region shelters that I've seen have slightly sloped, double roofs which help reduce the impact of the powerful direct solar radiation.

https://novalynx.com/brochures/380-shelters.pdf

I can't find any great pictures of the roofs but a local meteorologist has some pictures of his structure here:
https://www.weatherbriefing.com/weather-blog/2016/8/21/cotton-region-shelter

More discussion can be found here on the double roof and ventilation holes:
https://www.wxforum.net/index.php?topic=35906.25

A more crude, but probably still effective alternative:
https://www.instructables.com/Stevenson-Screen-weather-station/#step0

Offline flyingvranch

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Re: Fan Aspirator for a Cotton Region Shelter
« Reply #2 on: October 27, 2022, 03:10:21 PM »
Thank you for the links and information. The photos do not show it well, but my shelter does in fact have a sloped double roof arrangement. I built this shelter several years ago, and it has served me well. The fan aspirator is probably not even necessary, but I wanted to try and set something up anyway. The temp spikes are really only noticeable during the peak sun, >100F deg. days.

The whole fan and solar panel setup was around $25 from Amazon, so I figured that I would give it a shot and experiment.

Offline BoDuke

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Re: Fan Aspirator for a Cotton Region Shelter
« Reply #3 on: October 27, 2022, 04:03:02 PM »
I'm glad to hear that you do have the sloped double roof as I believe it's a very, very important part of a shelter.  From the pictures of yours, I really couldn't tell.  Hopefully the fan improves the accuracy even more.
 UU