We are currently working closely with Andy Buxton and his SleepBreeze personal cooler. Unfortunately we can't tell you very much about their personal cooling system at this point because it has not launched yet, but if you check that page you can get more of the picture. We can reveal a few key features:
- Aimed at cooling the person, not the entire Hexayurt.
- Low energy consumption, battery powered.
- Simple enough that in volume production the price would fall into our general price range.
It's important to understand that the Hexayurt project is a mix of proprietary and open systems. Specific functions, like solar power generation, require technologies which require extremely expensive development costs of a kind which open source projects can't fund. But the fruits of those developments are what we call COTS (common, off the shelf) technologies. The SleepBreeze system is a very good technology in a COTS area: you could substitute a fan, but it would not work so well.
Andy is also consulting with us on more general cooling and thermal issues, like where to position vents and how many we need and what kinds of interior temperature ranges we could expect to see in various conditions.