Stealthy Garage Water Cooled Flower Chamber

[riverrat]

thumbs up to you man...

great job... very stealth...

have you pushed out any product from this spot yet ? how often can you leave this unattended?

Expect first harvest in 6 weeks. And I'm still dialing in the cooling. If I'm not here to open the chamber when the lights come on, the temps quickly get too high. The cooling system should come online tonight, I got the pump I need today and I'm hooking it all up now. Taking a dinner break at the moment.

RR

 

[Purple_trees]

Diggin this man.. Very James Bond. Impressed. I love seein ideas like this

 

[DonChron]

crazy cooler system ,an AC evaporator coil?!??! Who woulda thought!!
you obviously know what you're doin...looks like a nice yield to come..props

 

[riverrat]

Ok, water cooling system is up and running, here are some more pics.


Heat exchanger installed in chamber.



Freezer filled with water and pump running.


Here is a screen shot showing the cooling trend. I turned on the pump at the peak of the graph,at 77.5F and within 10 min the temp has dropped to 73.0F

The 59.4 VT temp in this shot is actually the water temp in the freezer at the moment.

Looks like it gonna work great!

RR

 

[happyherb]

bloody hell exellent !!!.....saw the title and thought phhhhhhft!!!...stealth....thats what the always say.....always glad to be proved wrong ....well done .HH. =]-~

 

[greengorillaz]

making the best of your available resources. Absolutely incredible!

 

[riverrat]

Well after running the cooling system for a few hours last night, I have learned a couple of things. First, I easily can keep my grow chamber temps under control with this system, however the submersible pump I bought has got to go back to the store and swap it with an inline pump . The motor on the submersible pump puts out too much heat. Between the heat from the pump and the heat being removed from the chamber, it’s more than the freezer can handle. The freezer water temps went up all night and not down. I think once I get the pump out of the freezer and the software setup to run the pump only when necessary, instead of full time, that should clear up these issues. I’ll keep everyone posted on how it’s going.


RR

 

[swampdank]

Whoa!

I am loving this idea! It's cool that you have the computer to monitor and control everything. Be sure to keep us updated on how things go. I am bookmarking this thread.

Kudos RR, very interesting indeed.

 

[rasputen]

Beautiful rr !!
Question....you grow pot and watch Fox News????

I only watch the Foxes On Fox!

RR

Sorry riverrat,
It's a beautiful stealth design and I didn't mean to politick yer thread.

peace

 

[_Dude]

Beautiful rr !!
Question....you grow pot and watch Fox News????

Does not compute.

Sweet cab! Especially the -5F salt water (hope it don't corrode your stuff).

Hehe, I grow and I think FOX is a bunch of pinkos.

I'm curious, there are water-cooled hoods on the market, right? Anyone tried them? I assume they cost an arm and a leg.

 

[_Dude]

Well after running the cooling system for a few hours last night, I have learned a couple of things. First, I easily can keep my grow chamber temps under control with this system, however the submersible pump I bought has got to go back to the store and swap it with an inline pump . The motor on the submersible pump puts out too much heat. Between the heat from the pump and the heat being removed from the chamber, it’s more than the freezer can handle. The freezer water temps went up all night and not down. I think once I get the pump out of the freezer and the software setup to run the pump only when necessary, instead of full time, that should clear up these issues. I’ll keep everyone posted on how it’s going.


RR

Did you consider using the submersible externally? If you're talking about a pond pump type thing, you can easily make it external.

Just pointing that out, sounds like you're a way bigger gearhead than me so you probably know this already. Just mentioning it because you might want to compare suitability of pumps in question for continuous use.

 

[riverrat]

No way to adapt this pump to external, it had to go back to the store. I have to wait till next payday to get the pump I want (rents due). I did try using a smaller rez type pump (2 actually) and happy to report the system works great using those pumps. It will control chamber temps to within a half a degree of what I have set. I’ll upload some screen shots of the temp graph in a bit showing how the coolant pump cycles on and off. The freezer water temps stabilized at about 46F and slowly started to fall last night so even with the 2 little submersible pumps running and the cooling lines longer than necessary and non- insulated at the moment, the freezer is able to keep up with the cooling demand. I am quite happy with the results.


RR

 

[riverrat]

Here is a screen shot showing the the flower chamber temps over a few hours. Green lines are where the coolant pump came on and the red line is when the pump went off. As you can see the system works quite well. I'm going to add a heat exchanger in my Veg chamber next.

RR

 

[riverrat]

For those of you who have been following this thread, I’ve decided to scrap the water cooling system and go with a conventional window A/C. Not because the system did not work, it actually worked quite well, but I was unable to keep my humidity in check with the system. The fans just don’t pull enough air through the heat exchanger and the exchanger was not cold enough to condense much moisture. My goal is a completely sealed grow chamber that I can control temp and humidity very tightly.

Adding a dehumidifier to the garage has worked to keep my humidity under 60% but the thing runs all the time, puts out warm air and my temps get out of hand if I don’t run the cooling system full blast, which puts a strain on the freezer. My garage is not insulated or heated or cooled and trying to control humidity in the whole garage is a costly and fruitless exercise. What I need is a closed system to dry and cool the air circulating through the filters and grow chamber. So here is a sketch-up image of what I’m going to build.





It marries a dehumidifier and a window AC unit together to dry and cool the air which will circulate through 6 inch insulated ducting through the grow chamber and filters. The whole unit will go up in the attic as far from the garage as I can reasonably get it. I may have to add a inline fan to help move air through the system. I have all the parts except a dehumidifier with the intake on the back and exhaust on the front, but I am picking up a suitable used unit this weekend. I post some pics of the unit as I get it together.
I do still think the small freezer cool water heat exchanger idea is a good one and would work in say a closet grow where you can’t install a regular A/C .

RR

 

[ScrubNinja]

Tidy work dude, well done. You had me at the statistics printout.

I understand you have (or had) the freezer cooling the water for you but how does that actually translate to cooling your temps? Do you pump it through special hoods or whats the deal? I know you scrapped it and all but I was wondering about the general way it works. Rock on.

 

[riverrat]

I pump the cold water through a recycled auto A/C evaporator coil which is mounted in the grow chamber. It has a fan mounted on it that blows air through it thereby cooling the air in the chamber. The previous post explain it pretty well. The system is very effective and controls temp quite well.

RR

 

[minds_I]

Hello all,

Riverrat, love the idea and I am not hating but I think the salt would have corroded the aluminum core.

Also, I believe the compressor of the freezer would have burned up sone then later (could be wrong but it was deigned to remove small amounts of termal energy over a long perod of time (that is there was more internal energy being added then can be removed...that is why your temps kept climbing.).

I have considered a similar design except the cooling fluid was water from the reservoir of a large swamp cooler, int he dead of summer here when it was over 110*F outside I measured the cooler water temp at 65*F.

Just a thought.

minds_I

PS. Good to hear your growtronix system is up and running.

 

[DiscoBiscuit]

Dudes, this is a grow thread! Take Faux Noos to the Toker's Den.

lol, nice grow chamber and plants riverrat!

 

[Snagglepuss]

Awesome thread Riverrat ,threads like yours are what make icmag great.....

 

[riverrat]

Hello all,

Riverrat, love the idea and I am not hating but I think the salt would have corroded the aluminum core.

Also, I believe the compressor of the freezer would have burned up sone then later (could be wrong but it was deigned to remove small amounts of termal energy over a long perod of time (that is there was more internal energy being added then can be removed...that is why your temps kept climbing.).

I have considered a similar design except the cooling fluid was water from the reservoir of a large swamp cooler, int he dead of summer here when it was over 110*F outside I measured the cooler water temp at 65*F.

Just a thought.

minds_I

PS. Good to hear your growtronix system is up and running.

According to Google research salt water is not corrosive to aluminum. It will however encourage electrolysis between dissimilar metals. I never got around to adding salt to get the water temp down to 0 or so, cooling was effective even with the freezer water temps as high as 55 F. I kept the water temp right above freezing at 34F and for a 12 hour lights on period, the temp would rise about 20F in the freezer. (About 50 gal of water in the freezer I think) Depending on how cold it was in the garage, it would take the freezer about 4 hours to recover after lights out, so total freezer run per day was about 8 hours. I think if I were allow the water in the freezer to freeze into a block and pump coolant through a copper coil encased in the ice, the compressor would not run as much but I don’t really know. I’m going to keep the system online until I get the air based system installed and tinker with it and see how efficient I can get it.

RR