I have something neat I would like to share with everyone. Remember last week when we had a few really humid days? My air conditioner leaks a lot of water when it’s really humid, and for some reason this year it started leaking on the inside, too. It never used to do that until this year. Since I had first put in back in June my room has had this mold smell, like a musty small. I was never able to get rid of it, then I found out it was my air conditioner and that it had been leaking out all of this water onto my window sill and all over the carpet, and I mean a lot of water. The most of it was last week. I had kept a few clean folded up shirts there by the window for a few days, and when I picked them up to put them on my shelves I noticed they were wet, and a few papers I had there as well were soggy. Last week when it got to it’s very worst with how much water it was emptying into my room, I looked into how much it was actually leaking. The whole carpet was very damp and soggy and wouldn’t dry, the sheetrock of the wall right beneath the window with the air conditioner was all soggy and looked like there was a very little tiny bit of mold starting to grow, down a little behind the baseboard heater, just two or three small dark green dots. The heater and all inside it was shiny from dripping wetness, not to mention the window sill had this big puddle of water on it dripping all this water off. I was not happy, the air conditioner is supposed to empty the condensation outside, not inside. I looked and it was also leaking outside at the same time.
I just had to make some type of hookup to collect all of the water before it did any more damage to my wall and floor. I wanted to hook up some type of hose and have it empty to a container of some sort so I can empty it into the sink when it fills up, keeping my floor dry. Last Thursday night after I came home from the Ducks game I got right to work on it. I cut the bottom off of an empty small clear plastic soda bottle, then I got a small plastic pluming hose, and an empty one gallon jug which was from my windshield washer fluid that I got a while back.
I further cut the soda bottle to fit snug under right side of the air conditioner. The air conditioner slants to the right side a little bit which is good anyway, that way the water has been only dripping out from the right corner. I drilled a little hole on the side of the soda bottle that was just about the right size for the pluming hose. Then I one end of the pluming hose into the hole and put in lots of hot glue sealing it up really tight from both sides.
After that, I cut the other end of the pluming hose to just the right length and fitted it into a hole I drilled into the cap of the gallon jug. I didn’t hot glue that end, there was no need to there, that way I can just pull out the hose when I needed to empty the jug. I was so surprised at how well this wacky hookup worked, it emptied all of the water into that jug and kept my floor and wall from getting any wetter. I just kept saying how watching all of those years of McGiver paid off.
It was amazing how much water that air conditioner put out, the next day, last Friday night, I went to bed at about two in the morning and emptied out the jug before going to sleep. I woke up at about seven in the morning on Saturday to go to the bathroom and saw that the jug was overflowing from the cap. There was a little puddle under the jug, but I caught it in time. In just those few hours my air conditioner put out one gallon of water, now that is just sick!! I never let it overflow again, I made sure I had the thermostat not too high (which was one of the cases Friday night/Saturday morning) and that I checked it once in a while. The picture above was taken that same Saturday morning at about ten AM, just a few hours from seven, and look how full it was already, it was about half full by that point. Now that it’s not that humid as it was last week it’s not dripping inside and filling up my jug anymore. I don’t know why it even started that in the first place, it never used to do that.
How about you, what wacky hookups has anyone done in the past? Were any of them as helpful or had they worked at all or as expected? It was weird for me because my hookups don’t usually work as good for me, Murphy’s Law usually has it that my idea won’t help me. Well, looks like Murphy was wrong for me this time. Share with the board of any neat hookups you have done.