|
Post by Apoplast on May 14, 2015 21:32:35 GMT -5
So, it occurred to me that between highland tropical species and those from Mediterranean climates, there are a surprising number of CPs (as well as orchids, and cloud forest plants, etc.) that are likely to need cooling while they grow in the cool to cold temperate conditions of most of the participants on this forum. So, why not have a place where people can share the ways they cool their plants to get better growth from the most complex to the most straightforward? That's what this thread is for! Just to be clear, I am not talking about needing to keep your sarrs and VFT's from freezing during their winter dormancy. Now, if you live in Brazil and need to cool your plants to get them into winter dormancy, that counts! Or if you specifically cool a place below your home's winter temperature to ensure a good winter rest, share that too. But, I'd love to hear how people keep their helies cool, or highland neps, or winter growing dews, or Orchidoides utrics. How do you get these plants to grow indoors when they need cooler temps that our homes typically accommodate? Let's share some details! I'll start it off. I cool two spaces. One for highland species, and the other for winter growing plants from Mediterranean climates. For my highland room (and it is a room; a spare bedroom in fact, which is far too small to function as a bedroom), I use a 12,000 BTU dual exhaust A/C unit. The A/C unit doesn't have a timer, so to get a day/night temperature difference I use a plug in thermostat. The upsides of this are that is is easy to use and setup in the summer, and the thermostat powers the A/C on and off automatically, the dual exhaust is fairly energy efficient and pumps the water out (unless it gets too humid then you need to drain it which is a pain). The down sides are that the A/C can only be programmed to go down to 16C which is not as low as I'd like, the A/C drops the humidity sort of low at night, and the expense to get it in the first place. For my winter growers, I cool with outside air. It's gets plenty cold here in the winter, so I drilled a hole in my house and set up a couple of inline centrifugal fans, sort of like this one. These fans are controlled by the same thermostat, which can be programmed down to 5C, necessary for these plants to excel. I also have the lights and day.night temperature cycle offset, so I am cooling with night air when the lights are on so it is more efficient. In the summer, I let the room cook. Keeps the plants dormant that need to be. In this case, it is a seasonal cooling. The plus side is that it is energy efficient as anything, because I created a super insulated room under my basement stairs. The down side is that I am in a very continental climate, which is variable to say the least. So in the transitions seasons it is a gamble. Hot spring, and my plants' growth is cut short. Cool spring, like this one, extends their season, but I run the risk of not getting them dry and in dormancy properly, where they will succumb to rot. What about everyone else? I know Avery has a chest freezer I'd like to hear more about. Drew (if he is still around) uses winter air to cool. If I remember correctly, Varun has been playing with thermoelectric cooling. What's working? What's not? I'd love to learn from peoples' successes and well... Experiments. Thanks for reading this, and I hope to hear about your cool plants.
|
|
|
Post by vraev on May 15, 2015 13:00:33 GMT -5
Sorry... I don't use any active cooling myself. I just used to use outdoor air to cool the tank. But now i just grow my plants in the basement. As of now, no separate cooling.
|
|
|
Post by Apoplast on May 15, 2015 21:47:20 GMT -5
Hi Varun - Oh sorry! I guess when I think of good DIY tech, I think of you. --- So, in a conversation with Avery on another thread I mentioned a cooling system used to cool large conservatories. Well, it is called and air washer, and it is used in the textile industry. Don't confuse it with the "air washer humidifiers" for home use. These things are monsters! But I believe they could, if one wanted to invest in such technology, be used on a home conservatory scale. Right now the best example of one being used in a large conservatory is at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens exhibit High Elevation House. They grow some pretty amazing stuff there, including a sea of helies, all under the Georgia sun in the summer! The system cools the entire structure to 13 at night and keeps the temperature below 25 during the day. In Hotlanta. In the summer. It's amazing! The system works a little like a evaporation cooler but with chilled water. This means that air is returned humid, and cooled (and yes, as the name implies cleaned) to the room. It's much more energy efficient than A/C and it also has the bonus of not drying the air. It's near perfect for cooling a plant grow space. Part of the efficiency comes from the evaporation of the water, but in Georgia summer it's pretty humid, so there is little of that. The real efficiency comes from the chilled water. Water has a really high specific heat. Follow me here. That means that it take a lot of energy to change the temperature of water, and thus it hold a lot of heat too. This is why a radiator system will always be more energy efficient than and HVAC - sorry HVAC lovers. But that's good news for systems like air washers. They use this property to their advantage. As the air, whose temperature is easily changed, moves through the mist of cold water, whose temperature is not easily moved, lots of air can cool with little water. This is the sore of system I dream of for a home conservatory someday. Yes, up front cost would be really high. But operating costs, especially if you can link it to geothermal, thus allowing for a liquid to liquid process chiller, would be far lower. You could grow some astonishing plants, and for lot a lot in operating costs. Plus I wonder how it might be combined with thermoelectric cooling... Regardless, that is air washing. Probably the premium means by which to grow cool loving plants. It's rather an institutional solution, and not for small scale. So, what else are people doing out there? Maiden, you've got some great cool plants. What do you use? Avery, I'd still love to get the specifics on your radiator system - partly because I want to emulate it! What size and cooling capacity freezer? What type of pump? What sort of thermostat? What's the total volume of cooling fluid? Is the system open, i.e. does it drain into the tank when off, or is it closed, i.e. does the fluid stay in the tubes? Just curious.
|
|
|
Post by Avery on May 18, 2015 20:45:21 GMT -5
Apoplast- very interesting cooling system. It sounds similar to something A. Wistuba uses in his greenhouse. That one had a name, but I can't seem to remember it, or find where I read it, either... My system is pretty straight-forward. In the bottom of an apartment sized deep-freezer (around 3.5' long by 1.5' wide), there is a plastic container filled with around 20-25 gallons of a water/anti-freeze mix. The freezer is on its warmest setting. The frozen bottles of water are there to help maintain thermal inertia: This liquid is pumped through vinyl tubing until it gets to the terrarium where it switches to copper tubing (the radiator). On its way out of the terrarium the line switches back to vinyl. The vinyl tubing is open on both ends that are sitting in the reservoir of anti-freeze. This means that while both ends of the vinyl tubing are in the reservoir of anti-freeze, it will be a "closed" system and I won't have to prime the pump. If one of the hoses is removed from the reservoir of anti-freeze, air will enter the line and I'd have to prime the pump. There is always liquid sitting in the lines. The pump is an Eheim 1048 Universal Hobby Pump. Very quiet and capable for what I'm doing. The Thermostat is a TMP-DNe Day/Night Temperature controller. Works well. You obviously need to calibrate it with separate thermometers in the actual terrarium. It is the pump (not the freezer) that is plugged into the thermostat... This is to show the positions of fans on the radiator. The aluminum screen is to act as a sort of radiator fin to help disperse the cooling effects of the copper tubing. If I redid this project I would try to track down finned copper tubing to increase efficiency. I recently did some landscaping... Nepenthes jamban:
|
|
|
Post by lloyd on May 19, 2015 6:27:10 GMT -5
Has anybody tried CPU heat sinks?
|
|
|
Post by WillyCKH on May 19, 2015 9:48:10 GMT -5
Wow! Very nice systems you have there, Avery and Apoplast! I especially admire Avery's Terrarium - DIY yet amazingly neat (which is something I need to learn from). lloyd: I use CPU heat sinks to cool some of my higher power LEDs, they work well but would not bring the temperature lower than the nominal room temperature. Seeing the nice cooling systems inspire me to build something similar in the future... Maybe when I collect some plants that require cooler temperature!
|
|
|
Post by vraev on May 19, 2015 11:46:51 GMT -5
Has anybody tried CPU heat sinks? I have been considering making a peltier device with CPU heatsinks create a cold gust of wind for the plants. It seems relatively simple and efficient (somewhat) for a smallish setup. This is because the cheapest chiller I can find is atleast $500 CDN. It's still something I am considering, but I do have my old AC unit from my apartment days which I used to cool my huge tanks. I am still dilly dallying in between those two options.
|
|
|
Post by vraev on May 19, 2015 11:54:05 GMT -5
Fantastic system Avery. Thanks for sharing. I was considering doing something like that too. but my tank is too full and too small to fit those things along with plants, so i might resort to my old AC for cooling. The only problem is I will have to vent back the hot air into the same basement room/rather than outside...so only time will tell if this is effective in any way. Have to try and see. Also need a humidifier before i can start though.
|
|
|
Post by Maiden on May 19, 2015 15:24:49 GMT -5
My plants are very cool, thanks for asking
|
|
|
Post by Apoplast on May 20, 2015 20:08:38 GMT -5
Thanks Avery and Willy!
Avery - Fantastic setup! Simply beautiful plants, growth and build! From your post I feel like I need to up my game on two fronts. The first is my posts are definitely going to need more pictures! The second, is the quality of my DIY. I'm on that with the A/C a bit. I'll have to follow up with a post with photos when it's done in a few weeks. I may also rip off your chest freezer trick. It's elegant. It's simple. And, I'll bet it is very effective! Thanks so much for sharing the details!
Varun - If you do some DIY thermoelectric, please let us know hoe it goes.
Maiden - Your plants have never looked so... Robust and relaxed.
|
|
|
Post by Apoplast on Sept 21, 2015 15:36:26 GMT -5
I finally have my nascent highland terrarium setup running in a way I am happy with. I've been using a dual exhaust AC unit for a few years in various setups. When i loved it to a room I wanted to dedicate to growing highland plants, I wasn't happy with how it was venting through the window. So, I decided to do something a bit more elegant than stuff Styrofoam boards into the window around the vents. This is what I came up with: Essentially, I just cut a piece of 1/8" polycarbonate to fit the screen frame, and then cut holes into it for the vents and the screws that hold it into place. When you look at it close up, I think it's pretty elegant and the vents sort of look like they are floating in an open window. This is all for the highland tank I am setting up. I'm not as fast at working on my growing apparatus as some folks around here are - nor does my final product look as professional. But I enjoy it and it seems to work. The plants in the tank seem to like the control over the climate. The water is cleaned by a fluidized sand bed filter, so the algae doesn't build up too much. It's pretty small but seems effective. The water then returns back to the tank and so there is constant circulation. Of course, evaporation still causes mineral build up to occur. So, TDS is checked and water changes are done. Hopefully soon I'll be able to update with an auto-watering system I've been planning. Thanks for looking!
|
|
|
Post by troutddicted on Sept 21, 2015 17:57:55 GMT -5
LOL I'm with Maiden. Like Maidens plants, mine are cool as succotash!
|
|
|
Post by Justintime on Sept 22, 2015 18:14:29 GMT -5
Came across the awhile ago I don't know why I never booked marked it. Currently moving so I have new opportunity to remake my makeshift system. Avery try looking at almumunum pipeing as a alternative to copper (depending on price)
|
|
|
Post by lloyd on Sept 22, 2015 19:29:48 GMT -5
Aluminum leaches and is toxic to some plants.
|
|
|
Post by Justintime on Sept 22, 2015 20:10:08 GMT -5
Aluminum leaches and is toxic to some plants. Wow I'll scrap my idea for an aluminum system! Mhmm well Now I'm back to the drawing board. Thanks Lloyd you saved plants and money from going to waist!
|
|