Summers across Japan keep hitting harder, with streets and work sites turning into open-air ovens. Workers on construction crews, factory floors, and outdoor events face rising risks of heat exhaustion every year. One response from a pair of Japanese companies is a full-size cooling booth you step into, sit down, and let chill the heat right out of your body.
SDRS, a refrigerated vending machine manufacturer, collaborated with industrial supplier Trusco Nakayama to create the Do Hiemon Box. This device is around 2 meters tall, 93 cm wide, and 1.2 meters deep, which is a fairly common size for such a thing. The exterior is comprised of stainless steel panels with an ultra fine hairline finish, while the internal walls are painted white steel and supported with thick polystyrene insulation boards to keep the chill out. There is a clear acrylic door that seals with magnets and may be opened by giving it a gentle nudge from the inside. The four casters with locking allow you to just roll the thing into position, and an extra version has eyebolts so you can hoist it up onto a site with a crane if necessary.
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Step inside, and to one side is a built-in seat, allowing you to simply plop down and begin to get some relief from the heat. The cold air begins to blast from the rear wall at around 5 degrees Celsius and is focused directly at the back of your neck, head, and shoulders. The temperature inside the space remains very stable at roughly 15 degrees Celsius. The front panel has three buttons for controlling the strength of the airflow and cooling. Most people experience relief after only five minutes, and a ten-minute stay inside will lower your core temperature sufficiently to alleviate the early symptoms of heat exhaustion. After around twenty minutes, the device simply turns down on its own to ensure that you do not become too cold.
Simply plug it into a conventional 100-volt outlet and connect a three-metre rainproof wire, and you’re ready to go. Even when it’s 35 degrees outside, the unit only consumes 0.51 kilowatt-hours of power, which is nearly half of what a standard spot cooler consumes and costs around 16 yen per hour to operate. It has an clever system for dealing with the water that accumulates within; a large fan just blasts it out the back, and there’s an LED light to prevent you from tripping around in the dark. It’s a pretty sturdy piece of gear, with an IPX3 rating for light outside use. It can support a weight of up to 150 kg, which should be plenty to keep one person cool.
The regular model starts at 1.5 million yen before tax, which equates to around $9,200, but you can spend extra for the model with crane eyebolts and additional options that come with a portable power station. They are primarily marketing to businesses rather than consumers, thus building companies, warehouses, manufacturers, event organizers, and local governments are likely to be interested. They even have one of these units in the lobby of Maebashi City Hall, where it is available for public use on extremely hot days. You don’t need to do any additional wiring or construction to get it running; simply put it in the shop and plug it in.
Photo credit: Yahoo
The design is based on SDRS’s extensive vending machine construction experience. Those boxed designs and enclosed cooling systems were quite straightforward to scale up to a personal booth, and an excellent solution for situations when air conditioning cannot reach every worker or when people are continuously on the move and must transition between warm regions.
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