I was just thinking the same thing Monki... Went on craigslist and found mini-fridges going for around $40. Figure run the tubing around the inside of the fridge, and the beers will help keep it cooler so the fridge has to work less. Yeah, electric bill will go up a bit, but if you seal it well it should help. I think the trade off is better for those that dont have an ice machine already....
All the beers can do is work as a temp buffer. They do not actively cool. Getting the cooling elements from the fridge and putting it directly into the rez would work too just looks messy. Remember, the refrigerator is only a heat pump, chilling the interior and pumping the heat out to the outside so the fridge needs to be in a place that the surrounding air can vent to the outside. Cannot destroy the heat energy.
Jamahl
New Member
Here's my interior after sealing the hose into place and a couple coats of white plastic spraypaint to give it the "fridge look" lol
This is powered by a small pump I have for draining res's. Any small pump is good. The idea is to let the nutes flow through the chiller as slow as possible, accelerating cooling. a small aquarium powerhead would work fine. The only time in hydro where smaller is OK lol
The brilliance of this is that if set up at the same height as the Res, the fact that hot water is less dense than cold water will actually cause the whole system to circulate without a pump at all.....
You will want to test that theory before using in a grow. The flow may not be sufficient and pumps are very cheap.
Jamahl
New Member
Yes i get what your saying munki, and yes i would probably have a pump on it....just thought it was cool that it would actually work without one. I like things that are simple and have no moving parts. (you can do the same thing with solar panels and a indoor water tank to heat your house on sunny winter days if the solar panels are located downslope of the house.....no valves to shut off if its cold and no pump to make it work).
Then you will love the wick cloner.
Wick Cloner: simple, cheap and effective
No moving parts, highly effective, and very cheap to "operate".
Jamahl
New Member
o2much4me
Well-Known Member
Creative Idea
Purple Goose
New Member
Why not pick up a small dorm fridge at a yard sale big enough to hold one of those coolers drill holes in the top of fridge run tubing thru the plastic cooler fill with antifreeze and have escape tube running back to res instant water chiller.
crypiter
New Member
thanks for the idea. im gonna try this over the weekend.
I am starting to worry that there might be some affect of Cu lines running through a reservoir full of nutrients - would a transfer of Cu molecules happen over time and if so would it be in quantities minute enough to not be an issue?
I've been thinking off and on about the Fresca Sol light setup that WheeloFortune has. I believe he stated that his light reservoir & cooler has plenty of capacity. Maybe for those who need to cool their nutrient reservoir a liquid-cooled light setup might be the way to go in order to stone two birds with one kill.
I know that as the size of the cooling reservoir increases it is able to take more heat into itself before its temperature is increased to the point where a "chiller" is required. I wonder if there is a handy formula that you can plug in the numbers for reservoir size, ambient temperature, and heat rise over x amount of hours and be able to figure out how many hours it would take for the reservoir to to return to ambient - so you could figure out whether a given size would (a) be large enough to cool one's setup without a chiller and (b) if it would have time to return to ambient temperature during the "night" period.
If a person could be assured that they could cool both their light and their nutrient reservoir from one cooling reservoir without having to artificially cool it - and to do so consistently day after day - then it would be a quiet and efficient setup indeed.
I've been thinking off and on about the Fresca Sol light setup that WheeloFortune has. I believe he stated that his light reservoir & cooler has plenty of capacity. Maybe for those who need to cool their nutrient reservoir a liquid-cooled light setup might be the way to go in order to stone two birds with one kill.
I know that as the size of the cooling reservoir increases it is able to take more heat into itself before its temperature is increased to the point where a "chiller" is required. I wonder if there is a handy formula that you can plug in the numbers for reservoir size, ambient temperature, and heat rise over x amount of hours and be able to figure out how many hours it would take for the reservoir to to return to ambient - so you could figure out whether a given size would (a) be large enough to cool one's setup without a chiller and (b) if it would have time to return to ambient temperature during the "night" period.
If a person could be assured that they could cool both their light and their nutrient reservoir from one cooling reservoir without having to artificially cool it - and to do so consistently day after day - then it would be a quiet and efficient setup indeed.
You can bring down the temps in a cooling loop only as far as the ambient (surrounding) temperature unless using an active cooling tool like an air conditioner or refrigerator. However, we can use many things as heat sinks that can quickly absorb heat from a concentrated source and diffuse that waste heat to a larger heat well. Computer overclocking has put much thought into this subject so I encourage all interested to read what is out there in the internet about water cooling computers.
In my reading, I have seen some novel solutions to this common problem. In one, a person ran about 1 hundred feet of copper pipe in or on top of the concrete slab in their garage. Since that was in contact with the earth, the heat would dump into the slab and ground bringing the cooling loop close to that temp. Feel your garage floor as see how cool it feels even in the summer. Another solution I saw used in England was a large compressed gas canister was buried into the ground just outside this guy's house. Water is run into and out of that canister and the heat is dissipated into the earth. He stated the earth there was always in the mid 40s degrees F so that solution worked well.
So, look around your grow area including below you. The solution could be right in front of you.
Yeah, I sometimes forget that not everyone's house is sitting on a basement. Was assuming an ambient temperature somewhere in the 50s(F). Oops.
I'd have placed it in the ground instead of on top of it - and below the frost line.
Oh yeah, now I'm forgetting that not everyone's house is sitting in an area that has a Winter.
Come to think of it... Everyone DOES live in a house, right?
J/K lol.
Everyone's situation is different. Was working outside yesterday and a buddy called from across town wanting to know what I was doing since it was pouring down rain. I looked up to see sunshine. And that was only a few miles.
Speaking of work... Time to fly.
It would add to the cost but a coil of copper tubing would be far more efficient than the plastic tubing. I've been making beer for many years. "Wort Chillers" are expensive (60-$200) but are extremely efficient heat transfer units. They could easily be incorporated into this design.
You are most definitely correct on the efficiency improvements but that does increase the cost significantly and there are concerns the nutrients would possibly react to the copper tubing or leach copper from the tubing negatively affecting the nutrient availability or poisoning the plants with elevated copper levels.
There are more complicated water cooling setups that can help but then you might as well as buy a real water chiller.