IE : 78- year-old invents ice cooler at home : Sept 27 , 2007
ARJUN JASSAL
NEW DELHI, SEPT 26
t was a hot summer day June, the electricity had ie off at M B Lal’s Saket
me and, sweating profusely, the septuagenarian aught up his first `invent an
ice-cooler.
“The electricity department said it would take four five hours to restore
power; I thought I was going melt,” says Lat. At 78,the large spectacles,
and a W frame, Lal doesn’t look :e the mad inventor that ovies and cartoon
would ;e us to believe. Yet, he has devised this way to keep his home cool,
even when the rest of the city seethes under the post-summer heat and
humidity. Toying with the idea since that June day, Lal invented his
ice-cooled air conditioner over the past fortnight.
“I can’t take the Delhi heat anymore,” he says. “That day, I asked my wife
to bring me a tub of water but, instead, she brought all the ice from the
fridge. And the entire room cooled down.” It was then, Lal says, that he
decided to harness ice as a cooling agent. A retired journalist who worked
with The Statesman in Delhi for 31 years, Lal has no experience in
engineering or manufacturing, yet he had to think of a way in which air
could be optimally cooled without melting all the ice at once. “At that time
I was thinking about desert coolers, so I decided to create a method by
which air would be forced through ice and cool it down.”
That’s when the neighborhood carpenter stepped in. “We took a wooden box and
created spiral grooves in it,” Lal says. “We latex put metal foil on them
and placed a metal box full of ice in it.” With the help of a small but
powerful fan, the air was forced to move around the cold metal box, in a
spiral dictated by the grooves. “By the time the fan pushed out the air it
was actually cold.”
But his experimenting didn’t stop there, for Lal wanted to make his
contraption even more efficient. So, with further assistance from the
carpenter, Lal was able to change the ice-cooler to fit it smugly into a
large plastic drum. Today, it stands proudly in his room, blowing cold air
with a reassuring hum.
“Everything I used was locally available. Even the fan, which is very
powerful, uses less than half the energy of a 60-watt bulb.” Put together,
the ice cooler is able to quickly bring down temperature by around seven
degrees centigrade, for Lal that difference is a lifesaver. “Getting the ice
is also not a problem. If you can’t freeze it yourself, you can buy it from
vendors; there are plentiful of those everywhere.” A Gandhian, Lal doesn’t
want to patent his invention. “Anyone can make one of these coolers, and
only if they do will we know how to improve it.”
Publication : IE; Section : National Network; Pg : 13; Date : 27/9/07