Grow room build round three: Full environment control and no compromises

[SmokeyMcFly]

Oh...caution Smokey...i know with my dehuey...if power goes out it defaults to a zero rh setting.....meaning it runs all the time.....

I actually want it to run all the he time if there’s power to it. That way my controller can control it differently for day and night settings. Some devices like these esp humidifiers are setup to do nothing after a power outage until you press some buttons to turn it back on so they can’t be used with controllers that work by turning an outlet on and off. Similar problem that you’re having when yours resets just the exact opposite, it’s always something trying to cobble all this different shiz together

 

[Duggan]

Oh..gotcha.... Got boys,...timer's goin off for supper...Cheers eh.

 

[Amy Gardner]

Is the emoji for praying to the 420 gods, at least in my head it is

Or the sativa high that’s so intense you feel like you’re floating...

Hey - does anyone remember who or where it was that someone posted a neat description of a clear sativa high sometime in the last few days? AT least, I read it in the last few days. Maybe here, maybe somewhere else - it was a birixer I’m pretty sure.. said something about how you can think you feel nothing for quite a while until you realise youre already down the rabbit hole and didn’t notice getting there - at least that was the general idea of it. I was wanting to quote it... but i cant find it. ANyone?

 

[Duggan]

..mornin Amy, Derbs, Neiko!

 

[SmokeyMcFly]

Or the sativa high that’s so intense you feel like you’re floating...

Is there any other way to pray to the 420 gods?

 

[Duggan]

Oh ya...good morning Smokey...

 

[SmokeyMcFly]

Oh ya...good morning Smokey...

Hey Duggan and everyone hope you had a weekend!

The new dehuy came tonight so we will see in the morning how good of a job it does compared to the old one.

My hermi face on fire knocked up my Malawi x pcks there are premy brown pistols all over the place so that won’t be getting ran again. Couple pics not sure if you will be able to see them but they’re there. The purple haze is stretching pretty good now glad I didn’t wait any longer to flip it...

Have a great week all

 

[Duggan]

You too Smokey....

 

[SmokeyMcFly]

So I think I have found part of the problem. The controller is still reading 47-52% rh in the main room and the humidifier got it down there in a hurry and the hasn’t been able to make anymore progress even though it’s still running nonstop. I looked at the reading on the dehuy itself and it’s only reading 33% which explains why it’s not pulling much more out at this point.

So it seems my sensors needs calibrated for rh... My other cheap sensor was reading much lower than the iponic also but I figured if I was gonna trust one of the two it would be the one that cost 30x more than the other, whoops

 

[Duggan]

Evenin Smokey, ...how's the new DeHuey workin ,..and wat about the different RH readings...that's maddening ....

 

[SmokeyMcFly]

Evenin Smokey, ...how's the new DeHuey workin ,..and wat about the different RH readings...that's maddening ....

Yea I was super annoyed when I realized what was going on. Every rh meter I have reads differently but it’s at least close to reality now that I subtracted 16% from it in the calibration settings. Pretty sure this is why my plants haven’t looked that great lately too.

The new one works great it lowered it faster than the old one did when the lights went off. The old one would probably work fine if I didn’t have the new one since it was just a sensor reading wrong making it seem like the old one couldn’t get the rh low enough when it really was.

I still need to tweak how it gets turned on and off. Currently the dehuy turns on the same time the exhaust turns on to dehumidify causing the dehuy to turn on for a few min sometimes when only the fans needed to kick on. I think I can set a delay on the dehuy activating in the iponic if not I’m just going to run the dehuy off my old controller and set it to kick on a couple percent above the exhaust turn on setting. The idea is I want it to try the exhaust fans only first and only if they can’t bring it down on their own turn on the dehuy until it can. This will keep the dehuy from cycling on and off all the time and still let it auto adjust to the needs of the tent. This would be really easy to setup if they made the humidity stages work the same as the temp ones but it’s different and dumb...

 

[Duggan]

Why not run them by time instead of always trying to reach 'set' points. For example have your exhaust coming on (I run mine 24/7) about 15 min's . before the Deheuey 'may ' be called on. Know wat i'm sayin. Give the fans time to bring down the RH before calling on the DHuey. Am i thinkin this out right....

 

[dr.h00k]

...while on the topic of reading discrepancies, Shed put up a post about using a salt test to test the accuracy of the lil' hygrometers we all use...simple and accurate...don't wanna search for that, so here is a link to a how to test...

...https://www.wikihow.com/Test-a-Hygrometer ...cheerz...h00k

 

[SmokeyMcFly]

Why not run them by time instead of always trying to reach 'set' points. For example have your exhaust coming on (I run mine 24/7) about 15 min's . before the Deheuey 'may ' be called on. Know wat i'm sayin. Give the fans time to bring down the RH before calling on the DHuey. Am i thinkin this out right....

Great question! That’s exactly what I’m trying to do but with setpoints instead of timers so it’s flexible to changing conditions and automatically adjusts itself without me needing to refigure out how long to run what all the time. Other than being able to keep my rh high enough in my old setup everything being dependent on everything else drove me crazy. Every time I wanted to adjust something I had to experiment to find out what the settings needed to change to outside of the tents to pull it off. Then by the time I had it figured out the weather would change or something and I was back to adjusting stuff. I didn’t title this thread very well what I really meant to say is full environment control I can set on each tent and pretty forgot knowing that it will work out what it needs to keep it where I told it to be.

I have a single Ac cooling the air both tents use that I can’t remotely adjust and doesn’t like to obey the setting on the thermostat cause it thinks it knows better and is being efficient so I like to run it colder than the tents need to cool them if the exhaust ran all the time. This gives me automatic backup cooling capacity already in the room and ready to use anytime one of the tents needs it for any reason preventing them from creeping above the set points and it lets me change tent settings within reason without worrying somethings gonna get out wack.

Since both tents need different temp and rh settings I’m using the exhaust fans to control both of these params and the exhaust alone will do the job as long as the parent room temp and rh are in a certain band.

The fans turn off the temp and rh goes up in that tent, fans turn on they both go down as far as the air coming in will allow while the fan is running.

This lets me have different settings on each tent for different times of the day for both rh and temp in a single room that is actually controllable and adjustable while only having a single ac, humidifier, dehumidifier for the whole room plus an exhaust fan per tent.

The problem comes when the parent room air gets to humid for the exhaust fan to bring the rh in the tent down to where I want it to be at which point I want the dehuy to kick in and drop the parent room air enough that the exhaust fan is able to bring the tent back into spec and shut off BUT I only want the dehuy to turn on when the exhaust fan can no longer keep the rh of a tent low enough on its own, not every time the controller kicks into dehuy mode. Most of the time the fan is all that’s needed so I don’t want the dehuy kicking on and off all day for nothing. Currently the exhaust fan and dehuy turns on every time the In tent rh gets to high which is the problem or at least less than ideal usage of a dehuy I’m trying to fix.

By this point you might be thinking Why not just keep the humidity controlled in the parent room with he dehuy to this magical happy range.
This would work based on dialing it In for today also but wouldn’t necessarily handle changing conditions inside the tent that change the optimal zone that the rh needs to stay in to keep inside the tent where I want it. Since I’m basing it on the reading inside the tent instead any changing demands of that tent will get handled automatically.

If I base it purely off time or the offset I need between the room and tent I can dial it in for today but what about a month from now or three or when I want to run different settings. Once this is setup right it should be a plug In the numbers you want in each tent and the controllers / equipment will make sure that’s what they’re at

The current setup now that it's calibrated would actually adjust based on needs and work fine but it’s harder on the dehuy and runs it more than is really necessary so I’m just trying to optimize how the equipment gets utilized at this point and let the exhaust fans do as much of the work as possible for both temp and rh control with the dehuy or humidifier only needing to kick on when absolutely necessary which will mean the exhaust fans have already failed to fix the problem on their own.

Remember I’m a software engineer by trade. I love this kinda shit We have a saying at work “more system auto!” And basically I’m on a quest for full system auto

The one static time based setting I am strongly thinking of doing is a timed override to force the dehuy on for 45 min or so starting right before lights out to give it a head start on dropping the rh in the parent room before the in tent spike happens at lights out but there is a diff period I can give different settings and apply them to the one hour lights out time and have it blend those different settings to move to nighttime settings more gradually which is probably a better way to handle the problem since it would be totally based on real needs instead of when and how long I think it needs to run for.

 

[SmokeyMcFly]

...while on the topic of reading discrepancies, Shed put up a post about using a salt test to test the accuracy of the lil' hygrometers we all use...simple and accurate...don't wanna search for that, so here is a link to a how to test...

...https://www.wikihow.com/Test-a-Hygrometer ...cheerz...h00k

Thanks bud I will def be looking into that! I ended up pulling the sensor as far out in the garage as I could and opened the door for a couple hours while it was nice and windy out and adjusted it till it was about 2% over what the weather channel had vegas listed for at the time since my area has more vegetation than most of the city. This happened to line up close to the reading on the new dehuy which made me fee a bit better about the whole thing. While it got me in the ballpark it’s certainly not a scientific calibration by any means and I have only done it to one of the sensors so far, well I adjusted both but only one was actually checked against the outside the other just got the same adjustment. considering what I have put into this room I would like to know I’m working off of correct readings at least

 

[SmokeyMcFly]

Found out the old controller doesn’t have a way to run a dehuy only a humidifier i used the second room of the iponic for now and am going to run the veg tent off the old one instead.

I connected the humidifier and dehumidifier to the other room and put its sensor in the flower tent along with the room 2 sensor that has been in there. This effectively gives me another set of humidity stages to work with and allows me to control the exhaust fan in humidify or dehumidify mode separately from the actual humidifier or dehumidifier (I’m going to email the company and try and talk them into duplicating the temp stage functionality to the humidity stages one of these days it would make this easy and possible with a single room worth of controls out of the two instead of needing to use both).

Anyway now the fans turn on at 60% to dehumidify at lights on and the dehumidifier turns on at 63% with a 6% deadband. This should keep the dehuy from running unless it really needs to and let it run long enough to not waste a bunch of power when jt turned off right away.

For humidifying duty the fan turns on at the same time the humidifier turns on which I have set to 49% to start humidifying. Since keeping the fan on slows down how fast the In tent humidity rises I have the fan itself set to cycle for 5min on and 5 min off to try and give the equipment running a chance to do its job without over doing it but that doesn’t seem to be working yet so I must have something wrong with that part still.

Night time fans kick on at 50% and the dehuy kicks on at 53%

I also setup the dehuy to turn on for thirty min, thirty min before lights out and the humidifier to turn on 20 min before lights on and run for 20 min so we will see tomorrow how that works out.

One more thing left to do to minimize the shock of switching to day and night is to split my lights into two banks so I can have half of them turn on and off thirty min before the other half.

How the new layout looks so far

 

[Duggan]

Ya...ok, read all that Smokey. Yes, your dilemma is clearly trying to maintain two separate climates inside a seperate 'parent' one. Very , very difficult Smoke...and i suspect it can't happen with the autonimitty you desire. If it was me (ha) i would try and get your parent room as close to the 'sweet' spot for both and hope that your 'in tent' fans can manage the rest of the adjusting...if needed. If your parent room is not close to those sweet spots your fighting a dead horse , as they say bud. try and get the parent room as close as you can so your tents are easier to manipulate.
I hope i'm seeing this right......cheers bud!

 

[SmokeyMcFly]

Ya...ok, read all that Smokey. Yes, your dilemma is clearly trying to maintain two separate climates inside a seperate 'parent' one. Very , very difficult Smoke...and i suspect it can't happen with the autonimitty you desire. If it was me (ha) i would try and get your parent room as close to the 'sweet' spot for both and hope that your 'in tent' fans can manage the rest of the adjusting...if needed. If your parent room is not close to those sweet spots your fighting a dead horse , as they say bud. try and get the parent room as close as you can so your tents are easier to manipulate.
I hope i'm seeing this right......cheers bud!

It’s working perfectly now check it out. The stage attached to the dehuy only had to run for a bit at lights out, first picture. After that the fan is able to keep it happy and the dehuy never needed to turn back on the rest of the period

Humidifier and dehumidifier stage
The big rh drop at the start of the chart is from when I calibrated the sensor which made the humidifier run all night. Now that it’s balanced back out I doubt it will need to run so much.

Fan only stage for humidity control

If the fans aren’t able to do the job on their own for any reason the dehuy or humidifier will run long enough automatically so the can again.

Just took a bit of thinking to figure out how to get it to do what I wanted it too with the fucntions it has.

The temp controls on the controller allows for like 6 temp stages where you can turn on or off whatever you want in each stage to progressively add more cooling as the temp needs increase. This does me no good but if the humidity stages were setup the same it would of allowed me to create this setup without needing to use both rooms worth of sensors / controls for a single tent. I’m hoping I can get them to add the feature since it’s already created for the temps it would be a pretty low cost modification that would give fantastic functionality to people trying to run a single room with two tents in it or even a single tent in a room where the temp and humidity equipment are in the room itself not the tent which is probably at least 90% of their target market so I don’t see why they wouldn’t add it.

I am now a happy camper and my room can dynamically adjust based on what’s going on in the actual tent readings instead of trying to guess the room to tent offsets when things change and I can just tell it what params I want it to have in the tent and it will figure out where the parent room params need to be and keep them there to make it happy without murdering my equipment and wasting electricity in the process because it’s constantly turning it on and off like it was

 

[SmokeyMcFly]

The veg tent is kind of along for the ride still but I can control the temps with its fan if I want to run it warmer than it already does which is around 75. Since it doesn’t have nearly as many lights it has been staying in a good veg range without needing to do anything just based on the colder more humid air in the room needed to keep the flower tent happy with 40w real elec draw per sqft.

 

[Derbybud]

Glad you got it figured out. Now you can get some rest and grow some trees. No more excuses. Get growing. Lol