Beating the heat in a cool house is not a luxury everyone can afford but Geoff Milburn didn't let the lack of cash stop him. The University of Waterloo civil engineering student built his own air conditioner for about $25 and the cost of a bucket of ice.

Milburn brought his invention into Canada AM's studio to show just how simple the device is. It's comprised of an ordinary oscillating floor fan, whose front is covered in a coil of copper tubing that leads to a large bucket of ice water.

The tubing is attached to the fan using zip ties – though Milburn admits it's not an easy job wrapping the tubing.

"The hardest part was getting 25 feet of copper tubing in a 10x15-foot room. The paint got a little chipped but it all got taken care of," he laughed.

Milburn siphons the cold water into the tube where it's pushed through the coil around the fan. The fan pushes air across the tubes, cooling the air and warming the water before it leaves the tube.

For now, the warm water has to go down a sink or out a window into a garden. But Milburn hopes to improve the design so that it can conserve water.

"Next paycheque will go to an aquarium pump for a closed system. It's a work in progress," he explains.

Milburn came up with his idea as he suffered through Ontario's seemingly interminable heat wave this summer. And as the expression goes, necessity became the mother of invention.

"I was hot and miserable. I was talking with my friend Paul and saying there had to be some way we could rig together something to cool it off just a little bit," he explains.

"We were talking and we realized you had to have some sort of heat transfer. Copper's good for that, and water's cheap."

So Milburn got building and was pleased to find his idea worked perfectly.

"It works. It cools me off. Takes the edge off before I go to bed, knocks it down five, six, seven degrees, just enough to let me get to sleep and not be sweating and miserable when I wake up."

Milburn decided to show off the mechanics of his idea on his University of Waterloo webpage – where he shamelessly appeals for a co-op work position with an engineering firm.

There's no word on how the job search is going but the air conditioner idea has been a runaway success. He's already been interviewed by newspapers and by National Public Radio in the States.

"The attention has been unbelievable. And if you told me I would have been on CTV's Canada AM a month ago, I wouldn't have believed you one bit," he says. "It's unreal. It's been crazy."