Attaching a 120mm PC fan to PVC ducting - any ideas?

[TheMushroomMan]

Hi all!

I'm currently building a new grow cab - this is what I'm starting out with.

- The orange box on top will have a 2 x 4" holes for exhaust - one on the bottom and one on the back - powered by a computer fan, using 4" PVC w/ an elbow for ducting. It'll also house the electrical supply, fan controllers, timers, etc.

- The useable footprint is 13"x13", so with a 10"x10" louvered vent for intake on the bottom of the green cab I should have enough circulation.

- I'm not using a carbon filter because my apartment building stinks like weed anyways, and in any case one plant in flower won't be overwhelming.


Ideally, I would like to insert the PC fan between two pieces of 4" PVC pipe without using a roll of duct tape, but I haven't found anything useful on ICMAG so far.

Any ideas?

Once the build gets off the ground for real I'll post a journal

 

[Gardenic]

Youre welcome;p

 

[mjconfid]

you may be able use 2 of these in place of the wooden blocks in Gardenics pic, if you remove the grille part?:

screw holes prob wouldn't be in the right place, but you cover them with tape or filler, then make screw holes in the right place for your fans with a drill or soldering iron - 4 bolts could be used to clamp everything together....might also need a bit of silicone sealant here or there.

Lots of similar type thing available if you google for "4 inch square duct outlet" - some have grills and others louvres, but they as they are made from plastic, the grill/louvre part should be easy to remove.

 

[HuffnPufferfish]

p4 cooler tubes, they used to pull fresh air from outside onto the heatsink

 

[Bush Dr]

Don't waste your time with a PC fan, they're useless but make you think you've achieved something

 

[solofoe]

Yeah... They are useless.... and so are the cheaper inline duct fans they either require periodic balancing or they will start to whine and as vibration gets worse and you get stuck with an obnoxious jet engine noise but with no awesome flames out of the back.... well maybe if you kept running it... anyways pc fans will not move enough air through ducting that's not what they are designed to do... hence nowhere to mount it

 

[Mr Jay]

That's funny, my old cab was ventilated and filtered using a two part system with PC fans ala redgreen.

The light chamber was separated from the grow chamber by plexiglass. The lights were ventilated by pushing air through with a 120mm axial fan I got at a used parts bin.

A piece of plywood was screwed in place in front of those exposed guts to seal off the light chamber from the grow.

The grow chamber had ducting coming out of the back of the cab into a rubbermaid tub up top. That tub had a smaller tub sitting in the top of it that had a screen for a bottom and a couple of inches of carbon layered in the bottom. On the lid of that smaller tub I had a server fan on 8v pulling air through. Completely eliminated scent and my temps were ambient. Cab ran as close to silent as it gets with 242+ watts of cfl/pll going.

 

[starke]

Pay no mind to the naysayers. Are PC fans an ideal cooling solution? No. Will they work quite nicely if configured correctly? Yes. Check out the thread link below. I built this box by BlueAdept and it ran perfectly. Temps stayed within 5 degrees of room temp running twelve 23 watt cfls in the hood. I used wooden blocks and made adapters for the fans to fit the PVC connections instead of just taping them with two-sided tape as BlueAdept did. Gardenic is spot on in his post above. Looks like you will have a nice cabinet. Grow on.

https://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?t=100698

 

[Mr Jay]

Hey mushman, some reading for you

Red green on ventilation:
https://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?t=112862

Red green's cab thread, lots of inspiration on using PC fans for ventilation:
https://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?t=111902