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Post by vraev on May 26, 2016 0:59:16 GMT -5
Fantastic grow room Apo. Looking great.
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Post by Apoplast on May 26, 2016 12:19:08 GMT -5
Thanks Kdawg and Vraev!
Merci Shogg! - It's been setup for a while so I have numbers. When I first moved in the plants, i was having trouble with it being colder than I wanted and far too humid. I was running about 12C at night and 14C in the day. The LED lights don't give off much waste heat, so there was little day/night variation. I was thinking I was going to have to put in some halogen shop lights a heaters (that produce 20% waste light). Seemed like a fairly low fire risk heating option. I was also running 89-99% humidity, getting condensation everywhere, and growing some impressive mildew.
But then my lovely continental climate kicked in, and summer arrived. Despite being in a basement and below soil level, suddenly in a matter of days the temperature shot up to 17-18C! Now, I needed to use my A/C which I'd been unable to test, as it only goes down to 16C. The A/C cooled the storage are outside of the grow room, a space between the grow room and the "outside". This should keep the room surrounded by cool air. I then pump in the cool air from the storage area to cool the room. Unfortunately, I can't seem to get the grow room temperature down do that same as the storage area that surrounds it. Ugh!
So right now, the room goes between 20C in the day and about 17C at night. The tight time temp is not much warmer than I want, but I still fear it will stress my plants as the 16C minimum is sort of at the upper end of tolerance for night time temperatures for some of these species (from what I understand). The humidity is now down though, to about 68-85%, and thus the mildew growth has stopped. So humidity is good, but I'm still troubleshooting temperatures.
What to folks who grow Helis and highland Neps typically get their nights down to in the summer. Is 17C going to kill them over time?
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Post by briar on Jun 17, 2016 12:22:16 GMT -5
fwiw my helis, quelchii, macrophylla and villosa rarely see temps as good as yours
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Post by Apoplast on Jun 18, 2016 12:04:54 GMT -5
Hi briar - That's reassuring, thanks! My A/C unit is having a bit of trouble these days, and I'm up to about 18C at night right now. I think it needs some maintenance, but around here all the A/C repair places except Sears tell me that portable A/C units are "disposable"! I refuse to believe a $500 dual exhaust A/C unit is "disposable". My suspicion is that either they don't want to deal with it, or that they think I am talking about a window unit. Sears want 2 weeks to fix it. Not sure what I'm going to do. The joys of figuring out a new system.
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