Water Cooled Grow Rooms

Doer said:

Hah! Good one. I didn't know that, but at the last minute I changed my mind from 1/10 to 1/4 hp. Good thing. I have 1000 w Light.

Everything has to be insulated. I even have these foil, bubble wrap panels I use to keep radiate heat off surfaces, like the top of the chiller to shade it.

I've got it now so that everything illumiated except plants will refect and not absorb the heat. I have a water cooled light and that gets the 80% the actual heat. The glass is cool to the touch. But, 20% is IR and we don't want that to heat anything but air that is to be exhausted. So, with air cooled lights, 4000 w, you are still dumping more than 1/2 the heat into the room.

It is a bit of plumping job for water cooled lights.

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Bublonichronic said:

nice, i got 3 1k HPS, i guess a freezer has no chance of cooling them?

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Bublonichronic said:

if i wanted to make the modification to the freezers element, how much would that cost? and what would i need?

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phillipchristian said:

Sweet setup man. That would suck if 405 gallons flooded. You'd need a canoe. I used to get a little condensation on my older system too; it's nothing to worry about. Now we have a system with 2 different reservoirs running at different temps. We keep the water for the air handlers at 45 degrees and the water for the feeder manifolds at 60 degrees. The air handler lines are fed tight into the back of them trough the wall so i get no condensation from them in my room.

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phillipchristian said:

I read through that thread and there is so much mis information there. First - water cooling is significantly more efficient than air cooling. With an air conditioner you are passing air over the evaporator. Air has 1/20th the heat capacity (ability of something to absorb heat and maintain temperature) of water. Therefore your air conditioner has to work harder to cool 1 cubic foot of air then a chiller has to work to cool 1 cubic foot of water. With a chiller, water is passed over the evaporator. Water is able to transfer the residual heat to the evaporator and cool itslef much more efficiently. Second - the main problem is that people go online and see these Ice Boxes or other heat exchangers and think that they will remove all the heat from a room. If you mount an Ice Box with just a fan then it will act like an 8,000btu A/C. When you mount an Ice Box on a hood you are only taking the heat out of your hood. You still have to cool the room and the other equipment. Third - some of the post in that article are just flat out wrong and have wrong information. If you have an 8,000btu air conditioner and an Ice Box side by side an Ice Box will cool the room much more efficiently. Water passing through the coild is able to suck heat out of the air more efficiently then air passing through the evaporator coils on an A/C. Also, Greenspace says that A/C units are much better for medium to large ops when in reality the larger your op the more cost effective and efficient water cooling is. Mainly because the costs become more comparible with those of A/C units. Fourth - Water cooling is expensive and the technology is still being developed; but so is LED technology and plenty of guys are experimenting with that. There are very practical applications for using water cooled technology. In your example of an 8k room you would probably need 2 24,000btu A/C units to cool that room. If you vented your lights then maybe less but you'd be buying more inline fans. In my case we prefer to have absolutely no in/or out vents whatsoever. Not even our lighting. A lot of commercial growers are moving this direction. Called closed environment agriculture. With a chiller you are able to do this; completely seal your room and control all of the ambient temperatures in your space. Plus chillers give you an option of controlling your reservoir temps as well.

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bdt1981 said:

I have a 1 HP Eco plus and just got a window unit. Summer here is brutal. What kind of insulation would you recommend? It's a sun room add on surrounded in Windows that are now covered.

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phillipchristian said:

I read through that thread and there is so much mis information there. First - water cooling is significantly more efficient than air cooling. With an air conditioner you are passing air over the evaporator. Air has 1/20th the heat capacity (ability of something to absorb heat and maintain temperature) of water. Therefore your air conditioner has to work harder to cool 1 cubic foot of air then a chiller has to work to cool 1 cubic foot of water. With a chiller, water is passed over the evaporator. Water is able to transfer the residual heat to the evaporator and cool itslef much more efficiently. Second - the main problem is that people go online and see these Ice Boxes or other heat exchangers and think that they will remove all the heat from a room. If you mount an Ice Box with just a fan then it will act like an 8,000btu A/C. When you mount an Ice Box on a hood you are only taking the heat out of your hood. You still have to cool the room and the other equipment. Third - some of the post in that article are just flat out wrong and have wrong information. If you have an 8,000btu air conditioner and an Ice Box side by side an Ice Box will cool the room much more efficiently. Water passing through the coild is able to suck heat out of the air more efficiently then air passing through the evaporator coils on an A/C. Also, Greenspace says that A/C units are much better for medium to large ops when in reality the larger your op the more cost effective and efficient water cooling is. Mainly because the costs become more comparible with those of A/C units. Fourth - Water cooling is expensive and the technology is still being developed; but so is LED technology and plenty of guys are experimenting with that. There are very practical applications for using water cooled technology. In your example of an 8k room you would probably need 2 24,000btu A/C units to cool that room. If you vented your lights then maybe less but you'd be buying more inline fans. In my case we prefer to have absolutely no in/or out vents whatsoever. Not even our lighting. A lot of commercial growers are moving this direction. Called closed environment agriculture. With a chiller you are able to do this; completely seal your room and control all of the ambient temperatures in your space. Plus chillers give you an option of controlling your reservoir temps as well.

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phillipchristian said:

Hey groove, thanks for stopping by. Sounds like you are doing just fine with what you bought. Adding 2 Ice Boxes to your light probably wouldn't have dropped your temps that much at all. You have the air being pulled through them and exhausted outside so the Ice Box really wouldn't be an improvement over that. You'd just be pumping colder air out your exhaust. Really the Ice Box is meant for completely sealed rooms when use on a hood like that. In your situation this is what I would do. You really need to get a chiller reservoir; something 30 gallons would be perfect. You can make one yourself out of a drum. You just need there to be a fitting at the bottom with a valve to let water out. This way when you hook it up to your pump the pressure will force water into your pump. Try and use either reinforced rubber tubing or solid pvc if you do it yourself. That cheap tubing will not handle the suction from your pump. You need a good pump that has at least a 15ft lift on it. Like a Flotec 1/2hp one. They come with a 1.25" intake port, a 1" exhaust port, and three 1/2" auxillary exhaust ports. Check this thread out; I helped this guy set his system up. He is using that pump and it will give you an idea of what I am saying ( https://www.rollitup.org/general-marijuana-growing/513182-newb-grow-journal.html). Or a good mag drive pump will do it as well (1200gph+). Fill the reservoir with a 70/30 mix of water and propylene glycol. This stuff is cheap and easy to find at any hardware store. It's rv/marine antifreexe and costs a few bucks a gallon. Then just create a manifold out of pvc and pump that water through the manifold, through your equipment, and back to the reservoir in a return manifold. You can find manifold construction blue prints on the Hydro innovations website (http://www.hydroinnovations.com/support.php) under "manifold schematics." If not then you can get those cheap hydro pumps and use one for each piece of equipment. Not sure how they would hold up in the reservoir though if you add the antifreeze to it. But you wouldn't have to worry about putting a port on your reservoir or building a manifold. I would then just use the Ice Box as a spot chiller in the room and use cool coils that you can buy or make out of copper tubing to cool each of your reservoirs to 65 degrees. I know that's kind of long winded and may be confusing. Let me know if you need me to explain it better.

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Red1966 said:

Your first example doesn't make any sense. While cooling the water may be more efficient, you still have to transfer that cold to the air eventually. So you have the energy loss occurring from cooling the water PLUS the energy loss from cooling the air. Plus, the Ice Box doesn't appear to have any provision for condensation.

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Red1966 said:

Copper tubing in a reservoir is a really bad idea.

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phillipchristian said:

Hey Groove, glad it's coming together for you. For sure you don't want to use copper in a nutrient reservoir. It can fuck up your plants. They do sell aluminim and galvanized coils which work just fine. As for the thin rubber stuff I have never heard of anyone using it before. Test it out and see if it works. Just keep an eye on it for a while. Not sure of the drawbacks; maybe gotta watch that the pump doesn't pull it closed or that the plastic doesn't start to degrade. But I bet you could find rigid coiling at any HVAC or hardware store. I think you are better exhausting the lights like you are now. If you completely sealed the room you would need 2-3 more Ice Box, a bigger chiller or an a/c. The Ice Box will remove the heat from one 1000w bulb but you would still need to cool the room with another 1-2 of them. If you sealed it and just had 1 Ice Box as a spot a/c I am pretty sure the temps would get out of control. When I was using Ice Boxes still I had them on every hood and still had to have additional cooling in the room. In the future if you can get a bigger chiller and more Ice Box then I say go for it. Closed Environment is the easiest way to grow in my opinion. Good luck man. Let me know if you need anything.

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Red1966 said:

aluminim and galvanized coils are still a really bad idea. You keep saying things that are completely wrong. I suspect you don't grow at all.

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EmeraldPawn said:

To reduce my thermal signature of my grow lights exhaust I built this setup. I use a 10' long, 6" diameter PVC pipe with end caps. This reservoir is kept concealed outdoors under the porch and a themostatic switch turns on the inline pump which runs water through the lamp coolers. As the water leaves the grow room it passes through a autmotive heater core with a 12 fan drawing cold air through the fins and back into the big PVC pipe (reservoir) The area I live in gets cold in winter so I use a RV mix. One pipe/reservoir will contain 14 gallons of coolant. I have reduced the exhaust temperature so I am not getting the tell tale "Arctic Frost" build up on the exterior. One step ahead of FLIR as well as visual observation. Oh, for humidity if you need more I use a old ten gallon tote hook up one of those ultrasonic "Mister Fogger" for water gardens, works great when used with a timer. When mounting inside the tote make sure you watch the clearance of the small jet of water that rises up from the cermaic fogger unit. It is ultrasonic that breaks up the water molecules and at that certain distance it will burn a pin sizes hole in your plastic lid, and yes if you use your finger to find the sweet spot that burns too I know out of experience.

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phillipchristian said:

I'm pretty sure you can't. Different physics. Air conditioners pass air over the coils which in turn transfers the heat from the air to the refrigerant. Chillers pass water over the coils to transfer heat to the refrigerant. You'd have to gut the a/c and get new parts and an internal reservoir. The only part from the a/c you could use would be the fan and the diffuser.

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Warlock1369 said:

Oh all my fans are in the rooms. Not outside. It's a large area but need my kids from asking what is that as long as possible. Don't need my teens finding out I grow. I dont have them. They live with mom. My younger 2 know and help. But never have them at the same time. Well in the grow house anyways.

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Red1966 said:

All you have to do is carefully bend the evaporator down and put it in a insulated external reservoir. No new parts are needed but a pump and the tank. A/Cs cost a fraction of an equivalent chiller. $150.00 for 10,000 BTU A/C against $2700.00 or more for a chiller. A/Cs are sold everywhere, cheaply. Chillers require ordering and waiting for delivery, drilling holes in walls, etc.

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