Home Made/Portable AC

[EcoNepenthe]

Word of advise...keep away from the remote/digital a/c units. Will not reset to on if power outage, like bcBoy stated. No fun comin home to see the digital clocks blinkin the amount of time that's passed since the power went off. Ckeck the room and f*ck the temps are in the 90's. Yup, picked up a nice n cheap manual, same Btu. The assurance and peace of mind...priceless. Oh, did I mention easier to incorporate CO2 into the room if you decide to in the future.

Just a suggestion.

Success w/ya grow!!!
Stay safe.

Eco

Watch em grow!!!

 

[vhGhost]

DIY .. thats all i gotto say about this Subject

http://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/~gmilburn/ac/

http://www.instructables.com/id/EIYO2TKH8AEPA8L3IO/

 

[Helix]

On using car compressors:

No. You would need a hella powerful electric motor to drive that monkey, and it just would not be worth it, noise and power consumption and complexity of setting up the loop, vac'ing, gassing...just not worth it.

The igloo / fan / copper tube type setups - eeh, whatever works, but I wouldn't even bother with something like this, it would just be far easier to buy a sub $100 window a/c and use that, its going to do a much better job of cooling your grow space anyways, and has the side benefit of taking some of the humidity out of the air. It also depends on how big the space is and the heat load that you are trying to cool. Of course, bigger units are going to be more efficient in the long run as they will not have to work nearly as hard to move that heat and moisture out of your grow space. I dabble in HVAC and will be building my own units (for the challange and experience).

Of course, this is just my opinion.

 

[cadillachydro]

LOL, those fans are true peices of ART!!!

 

[Guest]

I use a portable in a sealed room with co2 and I just exhaust up through the ceiling into the attic,I cant tell any smell from up there.The intake hose goes through the wall to the adjascent room so as not to suck up all my co2

 

[Helix]

To all those people talking about the pricing of a portable A/C's, do what I'm doing, learn how to build them yourself. Phase change is not that hard, and finding parts is easy as pie (and CMEMORY!) if you know where to look, and if you get the right kind of parts you can build ANY sized system and "tune" it to any specific type of heat load. My main interest is building them for PC's (overclocking) but with that knowledge its not hard to design a simple, very efficient cooling system.

 

[Buzzsmirk!]

Lets say you have a completely sealed growroom and have co2 setup to where you exhaust the room a certain amount of times a day and goes through a carbon scrubber on exit...

then you have a portable a/c unit inside the unit, when the heat goes out the exhaust tube does that also mean the smell will leake out the grow box as well??

im guessing it will because its using the air inside the growbox as intake? i know i see some portables have carbon scrubbers built in for spores and mold, i dont know how well they have them set up tho

yessirl, the smell will get pulled out of the grow area AND ur CO2 is goin bye bey in a hurry also.

my 10,000 BTU portable did this (soleus)
BUZZ!

 

[Guest]

Thats the idea behind using a dual hose unit,you can pull your intake from another room saving your co2

 

[Guest]

this is a great thread especial since its getting hot again

rep to all those who dropped knowledge

seriously i was stressin about the heat cause even at night its 85+, thank u all

 

[BubblinCrude]

small window unit, large enough rubbermaid container to hold the unit w/some space all around. You'll need to attach an exhaust fan to the back of the container to extract the heat coming from the unit, and exhausted somewhere. That's the basics. Compliments of HEADS magazine, Ghetto Tech section.
Tried it. Does work. Just needs tweaking.
Hope this helps.

:

Thanks for this tip. I remembered reading the same idea a few years ago, but couldn't remember the details. Sounds like a reasonable way to save $$ over a portable a/c.