writ­ten 6/17/24, updat­ed 7/28/24

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Overview

Materials and Cost

PVC Fittings

For this 6′ x 4′ x 6′ canopy, I bought 4′ long PVC at 1″ width (you can choose oth­er sizes and lengths) and used the ratch­et­ing PVC cut­ter to cut the pieces to 2′ to cre­ate 6′ lengths. T

Fit­tings need­ed for the 1″ PVC

FORMUFIT, a com­pa­ny that spe­cial­izes in fur­ni­ture-grade PVC sells all of these plus more options in many col­ors. 100% USA made. I bought every­thing but the 3‑way elbows at a local big box store in the PVC aisle because FOR­MU­FIT’s prod­ucts come in packs of 10.

• 3‑Way Elbow (4 qty)
• 90-Degree Elbow (4 qty)
• Exter­nal Cou­pling (4 qty)
• Stan­dard Tee (4 qty)

Option­al Foot­ers

Schematics

Here’s a hand-drawn dia­gram show­ing dimen­sions. This is 6′ x 4′ x 6′ (L x W x H) or 72″ x 48″ x 72″.

For ref­er­ence:

Bed Size (USA)	Dimen­sions (L x W)
Twin	75 in x 38 in (6¼ ft x 3⅙ ft)
Twin XL	80 in x 38 in (6⅔ ft x 3⅙ ft)
Full	75 in x 54 in (6¼ ft x 4½ ft)
Queen	80 in x 60 in (6⅔ ft x 5 ft)
King	80 in x 76 in (6⅔ ft x 6⅓ ft)
Cal­i­for­nia King	84 in x 72 in (7 ft x 6 ft)

Why 4′ width when a twin bed is only 3⅙’ wide?

In this instance it’s to try and cap­ture the cool air blow­ing from the floor duct reg­is­ter, under the over­hang­ing side

Cutting the PVC

There are many options! And they most­ly depend on what’s avail­able in your house, how much you want to spend, how much time you mind spend­ing, what mess you want to make/clean up, and future use­ful­ness of any new­ly bought tools (or will it just sit in a box some­where for the rest of your life). Options include any­thing that cuts from man­u­al saws to pow­ered saws to ded­i­cat­ed PVC cut­ters.

Method 1

My first go-to was the Cord­less Mul­ti-tool I’d bought but had yet to use.

VERDICT: It will CUT. But it will also make a mess, cre­ate rough edges, time con­sum­ing, and requires clamps, and it took me a while to fig­ure out if there’s a best blade to use for PVC.

Method 2

I decid­ed to buy a Ratch­et­ing PVC Cut­ter for $14

VERDICT: It will KEAL and lac­er­ate the PVC. This method is supe­ri­or. No set­ting up, no mess at all, smooth edges, and super-fast. No pow­er source

Assembly

Well. There’s not much to say here. You push the pipes into the fit­tings and form them into what­ev­er shape you want. The hard­est part is hold­ing them in place while you fit more. This is why a 2nd per­son could be use­ful. I did it by myself.

Fastening

Now, this is option­al, espe­cial­ly if your struc­ture will be a tem­po­rary one. Before putting them togeth­er, I mulled over this a lot. If the shape you formed is sol­id, you like­ly don’t need to secure the parts as they’re pret­ty tight just dry-fit­ted. How­ev­er, you have the option of cre­at­ing per­ma­nent or secure-yet-tem­po­rary bonds.

Permanent

Secure-Yet-Removable

There are dif­fer­ent meth­ods of doing this: You can use a screw, you can use wood dow­els, I read some­thing about using rub­ber hos­ing, heck you can use tape if you want to. I test­ed out a method that’s sim­i­lar to the oth­ers, just a lit­tle fanci­er.

While the first pin could not ful­ly engage the hole (per­haps I drilled it at an angle instead of straight through), the sec­ond one did. Advice: err on the larg­er side when choos­ing a drill bit. I had to use the bit to ream out the open­ing from many angles just to get the pin to fit

The pin secures the pipe to the fit­ting, ensur­ing that it will not come apart. The only flaw in this is that if you use many fit­tings, that’s a lot of secure­ments! I chose the top cor­ners of the frame as it would pre­vent the ends from bow­ing out if the canopy mate­r­i­al end­ed up being too heavy for the frame.

Canopy

This part, I’m still not super hap­py about. It was hard to find any canopy curtain/top/fabric at all, let alone one that appealed to me. Aside from sewing one myself from a cho­sen, ide­al fab­ric (which I may end up doing in the future), I end­ed up choos­ing a can­vas tarp. My orig­i­nal idea was to use an old fit­ted sheet. I did­n’t con­sid­er how slip­pery the PVC is and after about 15 min­utes of wran­gling, I gave up. Plus, how would I secure the fit­ted sheet? The can­vas tarp was not only as thick as I want­ed it to be, but it came in a white col­or. If I want to trap cool air, I don’t want it to absorb heat as a dark­er col­or.

Assem­bly

8′ x 10′ seems large, does­n’t it? It kind of is… I thought that hav­ing the extra length would make it eas­i­er to drape and less like­ly to slip off. Also, that way, I can let the sides down as I please. Lat­er, I thought about spi­ders mak­ing webs in the folds…

Then a new prob­lem arose:

What to do? How to fas­ten? To this day, I don’t real­ly know the best option apart from cut­ting it and sewing it togeth­er (which would bring me back to square one with the canopy). I just kind of did some­thing.

Does it Work?

After all of that, does the canopy work? Does it trap cool air? I have to be hon­est, I’m not ful­ly sure! I think there is an improve­ment, yes, but it’s still not an end-all solu­tion. On the very hot days, I was hot and stuffy and found it hard to sleep. Low­er­ing the sides did make a dif­fer­ence, and I also end­ed up buy­ing an Air­tight Rip­stop Nylon Fab­ric think­ing that per­haps the tarp, which was made to be breath­able, was TOO breath­able.

HOWEVER. I do have a FLIR cam­era, so here are two inter­est­ing FLIR images (note: these images were tak­en before the addi­tion of the air­tight fab­ric on top):

Blue is cool and yel­low is hot. The A/C reg­is­ter is on the right side of the right­most image. There IS a cool­ness to the canopy com­pared to the area out­side of the canopy. So, yes, in a word, yes, I think it does work.

VERDICT: Yes. It does trap cool air and main­tains cool­er tem­per­a­tures than the sur­round­ing air. Hav­ing a fan to fur­ther direct the air com­ing from the reg­is­ter might make it more effec­tive at cool­ing.

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