There’s a Cheaper Way to Build a Cold Plunge

it's been almost 3 years since the last time I've built a coal plunge using a horse trough and it's absolutely incredible I love it the only thing that I don't like about it is that it doesn't have any filtration stays really cold but the filtration sucks well today we're going to change that we're going to build a brand new cold plune save ourselves thousands of dollars keep it nice and cold and most importantly nice and clean I picked up on Facebook Marketplace a 1985 chest freezer and really all I need this for is insulation purposes this is what 175 bucks on Facebook Marketplace gets you this is a 12 cubic foot deep freezer uh already I don't like that this doesn't open all the way back but I'm 6'2 200 lb I think this will be damn near perfect I mean yeah the arms are extended a little bit but you can kind of slouch down or go on the other side where there's no bench now the only thing I'm not too thrilled about is the condition of the Plastics as you could tell 39 years uh it's bound to have all the cracks it will have and also it's beat up on the side so matter how well I paint it you'll still see all the Cosmetic dings and all that stuff but uh we're going to change all that today so I think first order of business is to remove anything and everything that I can the badges I'm going to see if I can get these Plastics off hopefully it's a solid piece but I doubt I'm pretty sure it's exposed but uh we'll strip it all down sand it as much as we can and start doing some uh Bondo body work to fill this thing in so that's about as much as I want to take down this allowed for me to see where all the high spots and low spots as you can see this is one of going to be our bigger problems uh these are small little dings but I still want to get them all cleaned up and I got two big Corner ones in the back which I'm not concerned but since we're going to do the body work on it anyways look at body work like we're doing shop repair uh we might as well get done I think we got one big one here and then one corner there got some Bondo Automotive stuff got to mix it up with a hardener the nice thing is the stuff dries pretty quickly putty it on Sand it and then maybe repeat the process one or two more times I definitely put more harder than should have but I I'm trying to get through this in one step and not mess too much time now I got a big crack right here and I don't know if this is going to work but Bondo is pretty tough I want to see if I could shape my own Corner um cuz there's no way I'm going to find a replacement part for this this old freezer come on we got probably another hour of the Bondo to dry so while I'm not wasting time I'm going to start working on creating a liquid tight environment in here most freezers already have silicone and cocked Corners this one does for sure if yours doesn't make sure you do it uh but what I'm going to do is I'm going to drill my drain holes pump holes all the holes that I need for the plumbing because I don't want to have debris in there I'm going to then apply some flexia liquid to make sure there's an added layer of protection of creating a liquid typ environment in here that nothing leaks towards my electronics or [Music] anything I just punctured the freon this is officially just nothing but a chest cavity I should get back you don't want to be breathing that stuff so I don't know if you could see it but there's a little tube that looks like a copper tube that I cut right through and that just let all the freon escape and I think the way these are set up is that these tubes are running like coils all the way through this instulation material so I mean unless you have a way of detecting them which I don't uh you're going to run into problems like this all right guys over the last few years we've been Transforming Our home with major home improvements from the inside and out and the best part about is that it all helps to increase the value of our home well that is why I'm excited to talk 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protection I'm going to let this coat dry give it one more coat so it's not so translucent and I think uh that part will be nice and uh ready for us on the next St but in the meantime I think the bondo's dry so let's start sing that down [Music] all right I think it looks freaking cool I do I think we did the best we could with all these little transition pieces I'm very happy with how the body showed up even the corners that were dinged didn't realize I had it in me to do some body work like this kind of makes me wonder should I do some like Automotive Restorations on this channel but she's all ready for primer this is an automotive self- etching primer which is perfect for the metal it'll create that etching for the primer to actually ad heat to really strongly um apart from that I just realized I got to tape off my seal cuz I don't want to get that all dirty but in paint but uh I think we're about ready [Applause] [Music] all right so I think the primer is nice and dry and ready for paint paint I swear I just spent like 30 minutes just staring at paint I was debating between I I wanted the hammered texture just because they're really tough on mailboxes it gives a little Dimension besides when we put Bondo on here the freezers already have a little texture to them so by the time you put Bondo on them it Smooths it out so it's inconsistent kind of kind of regret going black cuz it shows a lot of imperfections uh I really wanted to go with brown but I thought it might date this thing to make it look old again so uh we'll go with this color cuz uh I'm going to add some cedar accent stuff to it which will make it pop and it's going to match the sauna anyway so that's what we're going for so uh full transparency here uh this paint sucked uh I don't know if it's user error maybe I'm just terrible applying it it was blotchy super blotchy but also the instruction say don't apply it when it's over 90° and it was 95 in the sunlight so that could have been the case didn't come out hammered at all like the texture that's supposed to and it was all blotchy so I found out that they also have it in a liquid form same hammered stuff same exact brand so I decided to roll on about two coats and I did it already it looks better it's not blotchy it looks like it's kind of hammering a little bit you can see the separation of bubbles that's how they kind of created but there's one problem oh by the way it's like 80° right now it's still morning in the shade but because it's a I'm going to guess like an epoxy kind of paint it doesn't blend in like traditional wall paint does so you see the roller streaks I'm not happy about it but I'm optimistic that perhaps it'll cure and flatten out but we shall see it sucks cuz I did such a good job cleaning up fixing all the dents um and then we have this issue so this is our water chiller this is an aquarium water chiller that I used on my horse trough uh cold plunge the first version it does a great job it cools it down to 39° um it does a good job as long as it's ventilated well soon as you cover it with like a cover to conceal it it drops it into almost like 4950 de which is still good but I like it in that 39 range and when it's like 80° outside it does a great job doing what it needs to do this is a half horsepower they're spendy quarter horsepower they're not enough I think to cool down the big volume of water we're dealing with I bought on eBay for about 600 bucks spendy it's used but a half horsepower very happy with it so if you're going to do it sick to have horsepower what we're going to do here part of this design process is I need to conceal this number one I need to conceal all my Plumbing that I have right over here I have three stages of filtration that we'll cover later I have the ozonator I have a UV cleaner I have filter cleaners I got a whole lot of Plumbing here that will go in that we'll do once everything's done but we need to conceal everything so I'm thinking about building a box at a cedar that'll have like a three tier that'll also act as steps I'm 6'2 so to get into this no problem at all my wife's like 5'4 she's going to have to be jumping into this thing so to help her out and anybody else out we're going to build a two-tier platform here uh this is going to get built up probably up to here which would be cool cuz you could put a timer on there for the three or 5 minutes you're going to be in there it's going to act like a secondary step and then another little platform here just to make sure this looks like a nice built-in unit all right we got the absolute perfect Dimensions we have a nice two tier step thing going here uh I went by two with 2 x two material just cuz I wanted to keep a smaller profile and I think this is going to be plenty strong and the reason I think it's going to be plenty strong because the next step is we're going to wrap this with cedar planks and I want to Gap them out because I need this puppy to breathe and besides I want the cool cleated look on the side [Music] this is incredible now I did Screw Up full disclosure I should have planned ahead for the elevation of the steps so that these cleats would continue all the way through but I don't think it looks terrible I think you know doesn't really catch the aisle that much I'm also leaving the back exposed because for the water chiller I wanted to have as much breathability as possible besides all the plumbing is going to go through here so it's almost going to be like wasted material but I got one more board left hopefully it's enough to create a CET system on top I'm not going to make it as wide this is about a/ qu inch Gap I think I'm going to make it maybe like an eighth and maybe actually I think a good idea would be make him tight so not as water not as much water goes down even though this thing it's it's meant to be taken water like there's all these seals on top here this is this is pretty solid I've had it rained on and completely worked just fine nobody got electrocuted yet we've accomplished exactly what we want to accomplish and damn it looks freaking cool now I'm going to give it a samp and round over some of these edges and I'm going to hit it up with some boiled linseed oil this is a great product to use on Cedar it covers oil particles right into those pores so it doesn't discolor it it makes actually more contrasted and it keeps it more weather resistant or making it last a lot longer uh for time to come [Music] our steps and cover are done the freezer is ready let's start working on the plumbing so there's a slight problem here I got these little watertight fittings that are meant to thread anything else you want on it which I used on the coal plunge but the problem is is this is too thick for it to grab onto if you're using a horse trough they're pretty thin steel so you could get it on perfectly here I can't so the solution that I found since it's steel or aluminum whatever probably Steel on the outside and steel on the inside what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut out maybe almost like a utility box to the front take the insulation of the front out and then just leave the steel plate in the back there so this thing can actually grab onto something and it won't look as pretty but I can't find these to be any longer really I dang I had no idea how many these copper pipes are running through there's really actually I don't think a way to drill through without hitting one unless you have one of those thermal scanners so you can actually see the grid but dang they're all over the place there's one two there's one uh three coming down here and I'm sure the next one's going up there so it's probably this crazy grid light pattern we're going to start throwing these on it's got a gasket on the inside bolting these on and the cool thing about these they have thread so you can thread a pump like we will or you could thread any connector through it I'm going to throw a bead of 100% silicone around it just to make sure we have a double protection here we don't want any surprises later down the road uh This Is My Water getting poured out this one's going to be my water getting sucked in these chillers don't don't have a pump built in they they only stay stagnant until you add a a pump to it so this one I've had for a long time you can get these for fountains water featur stuff like that so I'm going to thread this on ahead of time and then feed it through and then tighten the nut from the other side Mak are really hard to tighten I needed a few more inches of my arms all right this is our water drainage which in hindsight I don't know why I need it since my pump is sitting so low well actually I do need it because it'll be culating through the bottom so yeah this is our drainage okay so here's how our filtration system is going to work uh I think I have three levels of filtration uh first level is we have an ozonator here so it does something with the ozone layer I know it creates these bubbles oxidizes them maybe they use them on fish tanks they recommended for this so we're using a ozonator we have the second stage is this filter that is just sitting inside of it that's like an aquarium filter and then the third stage is this built-in filter also has UV light so water gets sucked in gets hit with the UV light kills any bacteria that shouldn't be there and then pumps it right out but there's no way for me to plumb this into this circuit staying outside of it I don't want a bunch of stuff in there uh because it relies on this filter to be completely submerged and it's not enough juice to pump it out into here so we're going to have water sucked in sucked out via this pump and then we're going to have this filter sitting at the base of the feet so it's not in the way and then it'll be doing its UV and regular aquatic aquatic filtration it's all a bunch of nonsense to me but I know how much it sucks not having this stuff and your water just goes bad within weeks [Music] I know it looked like a hodge podge but let me again explain so pump in here that's screwed onto my Inlet starts sucking water through here goes into the chiller runs it through the freon and everything the refrigerant All That Jazz pumps the cold water out here then I have my ozonator right here getting pumped into the outlet system pushing the ozonated I don't know what the right word is oxygenated ozonated whatever filtered water through into our tub and it Cycles it through now we're going to take our UV filter and the mesh filter and we're going to probably put it underneath that little bench by your feet so that's not in a way or possibly all the way down by the feet we'll see which one works best that doesn't look too bad the wiring is the only thing that's kind of irritating me manam that sucks these suction cups don't want to hold to save their life I know this thing's supposed to be plenty submerged so maybe we can do it that's actually not bad at all right in the corner kind of out of the way but these suction cups are killing me you got to bring out your redneck Ingenuity here 100% waterproof silicone has held under mount sinks for years I just hope I'm mounting in the right direction oh good thing I verified [Music] that all right hopefully that doesn't move this tape doesn't want to stick to the waterproofing Flex Seal that we put in here all right that should be ready in a couple hours my biggest irritation here is making sure that this area is not cluttered with a bunch of stuff and this cable is a big problem in the old uh horse Tropic Co plunge it was just sitting on the opposite side just over the lid you didn't really notice it here it's submerged quite a bit down there it's going to work way more efficiently I couldn't find any waterproofing method through the middle so I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab my calipers I'm going to cut this off uh probably way further down the road get my calipers measure the thickness of this cable feed it through silicone the living snot out of it and um and once it dry silicone it more and fingers crossed it won't leak on us [Music] just like that we got a brand new cable I just got to throw some electrical tape to bundle all together so they're not all exposed but the heat shrink was perfect move for this plug all the stuff in tons of thing to plug in we got 1 2 3 4 five things to plug in so we're going to need a nice heavy duty all right the pump's already going oh Bator on Chiller on I'm going to disconnect it cuz you don't want to run it all dry let's fill this puppy up and see if we got any leaks uh we'll put the stand on here I still got to paint with Appliance paint this white trim here that we Bondo it up and then uh we'll fire it up let it sit overnight chill as much as we can and then we'll check back in in the morning to see if we got adequate temperatures and we'll jump in [Music] n [Music] all right let's talk about the price breakdown for this cold plch the chest freezer was 175 on Facebook Marketplace $50 for Bondo waterproofing and and the paint the Aquatic Chiller was $600 the $30 were spent on the filter pump with the UV filtration as well the ozone filter was $30 the water feature pump was $80 and the lumber for all the steps and conceal everything was $200 making this grand total of $1,165 all right guys here she is the paint turned out great super durable we've already had it out for probably about a week so the water uh this is as murky as it's gotten in a week and keep in mind you're jumping in there after sauna you're already sweating so it's kind of your body stuff but it's not hazy which is great and then if we look at our temp probe our little rubber ducky we're just sitting at 40° right now Fahrenheit 10 out of 10 love exactly how this turned out I'm a big fan of the fact that it actually has seals and it has a thinner profile for insulation way better than the first generation coal plch that I built if you haven't seen it I'll link a video…