Cooling with clay

Chris Gupta of New Media Explorer reports:

This is Mohammed Bah Abba's Pot-in-pot invention. In northern Nigeria, where Mohammed is from, over 90% of the villages have no electricity. His invention, which he won a Rolex Award for (and $100,000), is a refrigerator than runs without electricity.

Here's how it works. You take a smaller pot and put it inside a larger pot. Fill the space in between them with wet sand, and cover the top with a wet cloth. When the water evaporates, it pulls the heat out with it, making the inside cold. It's a natural, cheap, easy-to-make refrigerator.


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Newest 5 Comments

The Australian Coolgardie Safe.

"The Coolgardie Safe was made of wire mesh, hessian, a wooden frame and had a galvanised iron tray on top. The galvanised iron tray was filled with water. The hessian bag was hung over the side with one of the ends in the tray to soak up the water.

Gradually the hessian bag would get wet. When a breeze came it would go through the wet bag and evaporate the water. This would cool the air and in turn cool the food stored in the safe.

It was usually placed on a veranda where there was a breeze. The Coolgardie safe was a common household item in Australia up to the mid-twentieth century. Safes could be purchased ready-made or fairly easily constructed at home. Some of the metal panel safes are very highly decorated, showing the great creativity of their makers."

Source Wikipedia
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The guy didn't invent the principle, but engineered the widespread use of it. If someone comes up with a cure for cancer that cost fifty cents, I don't care if the ancient chinese discovered it, the person who cures me with it is the hero.

I would like to know how much cooler it makes the food. Does it drop the temperature more than 20 degrees?
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Woops - forgot important part, we used to cover the top of the cool box with a damp tea towel/ dishcloth to finish the trick. Ok, where can I collect my $100,000?
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Lol! I remember doing that when we went camping as a kid - we would get an ordinary cool box and put all our milk, eggs and stuff in it & then surround it in layers of water soaked newspapers and that was that!! It was perfect...though this was in Ireland where there doesn't tend to be too much trouble keeping things cool in summer^_^
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Hundreds of books get destroyed and shredded for recycling on a daily basis. When a locally owned bookstore goes out of business, what do you suppose happens to the inventory of books that don't get sold?

Yes, some might get donated to worth causes, but a large number of them go to facilities where they are sorted and shredded so that the paper can be recycled.

Perhaps some of those books that were destined to be destroyed made there way into this sculpture instead.

I do wonder, as others have, however, what happens when the books get wet.
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I saw something similar in Mexico last year,

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150253603399618&set=a.211168469617.124260.613474617&type=3&theater

in the rain
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It does look very cool but I wonder about practical things like what happens to this when it rains? Do all those books get soaking wet? Has the extra weight been calculated into the structural design? Who cleans it up when the books are all sodden?
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The good thing about conceptual art is that the "artist" need not master any artistic skill. Just scale up everyday objects or move them to novel environments.
Yawn!
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