Isn’t 3D-printing awesome?! I had a problem this morning, and this afternoon it’s fixed, cost maybe a few cents, and is perfectly what I wanted!
I recently purchased a portable air conditioner unit for my office/workshop, as it was getting damn hot in here! With 8 3D-printers working all the time, this 110 sq. ft. basement room was getting too warm to work in, especially over the summer. I've tried a few things to combat this over the years, including opening up windows, directing a fan from outside the room in, etc. We also don't have central A/C in our house -- in Colorado, it's fairly typical for older homes such as ours to use evaporative coolers. The problem with that is that it's on the roof of our 2nd story and I'm in the basement! The air just doesn't get down here very easily.
AND, an evaporative cooler is also called a swamp cooler, as it pulls the air through wet pads to cool the air, then blows it in. This adds a ton of humidity to the air - which is why it's not used and doesn't work in more humid regions - which is really bad for the quality of my 3D prints and the filament. So, it was finally time to break down and get an A/C unit since I spend all day (and some of the night) working in here!
With portable A/C units, as is true with window-mounted A/C units, you have to vent them to the outside. Typically this is done via a window unless you want a more permanent hole in your wall. So, I just routed this one up from the A/C unit on the floor up to the basement window.
My problem was that the the vent exhaust hose for my portable air conditioner was unsecured and pulled the window mount out of place. As you can see it's very securely held up there with some foil and masking tape. Still, it needed something better to hold the actual hose in place!!
I looked on Amazon, HomeDepot.com, Lowes.com, and all kinds of other places but there were no white mounts that worked as simply as I wanted. Anything I could find for this type of exhaust hose was this huge, gross, metal thing which looked like it belonged in an attic, and was expensive to boot. So, I headed over to Fusion 360 to design it up for 3D-printing myself.
It's really just a simple half-circle that straightens to go out to the wall, with flat ends with holes in them to mount to a wall. Very simple, straight-forward, even elegant in some circles. Not to mention it works well and is exactly what I wanted.
I printed two of these out on my twin CR-10S Pro V2 printers, and they turned out great. I put it on my "SUPERDRAFT" setting, which is like a 0.30mm layer height so that they wouldn't take forever to print. They don't have to be a perfectly smooth print, they just had to be strong enough to work.
I then took to mounting the wall mount bracket for 6 inch exhaust hose to the wall to hold the hose in place! It was super easy, they work well and fit perfectly, and are as simple and functional as I hoped.
Sure, the routing of my ducting isn't perfect. Since I had to join two tubes together, I used some foil tape and a padded envelope as a coupler. Not a perfect solution, but field-expedient! The next thing I think I need to design is a real coupler for this type of duct -- as my tape/padded envelope isn't quite to code!
If you're in need of something like this, check out the Wall Bracket for a Portable Air Conditioner 6 inch Exhaust Hose. And let me know what you think!