4 day bud dryer for $40.

PR, heat sources have to be controllable. It'd be hard to control the temp of the air from a ballast.

My bad, I thought the idea was constant heat.

no worries!

A bud dryer should provide a steady through-airflow, limited to 29C.

delta-9 THC begins to break down into non-psychoactives or less desirable psychoactive cannabinoids like cannabidiol (CBD) and cannabidinol (CNB) with exposure to heat above 29C.

Similar effect with exposure to light, so the dryer should be in a dark space if made from translucent materials, or simply be lightproof.

I'm looking wistfully at the baked beans tins in the recycling. We in Aus don't get the nice big coffee cans you get in the USA, so my creativity with a light bulb based heater is gonna be limited!

I DO have a 4 litre olive oil tin that I could mount a light socket in and a muffin fan on. *rubbing hands* I'll MacGuyver this yet.

You do however get large cans of tomatoes, artichiokes and tomato sauce. Restaurants need bulk cans to keep cost down. I guarantee you local pizza place is recycling those big cans.

There's a thought. Thanks.

So it looks like my light bulb idea wasn't a waste on bandwidth after all!

OK 100 watt incandescent light inside a coffee tin and hooked to a dimmer.

You adjust the dimmer to get the temperature you want.

Put one of those radio temperature gauges in the dryer and you should be set to go!

Al B. Fuct said:

Righto, mate- chlorophyll ignores green light.

THC in plant resin isn't so selective. Got to keep the beggars in the dark- from all visible light.

There's a million ways to make a low temp dryer, we should work out a very simple way to do it. My dryer works well, but as many have said, is more complex than it needs to be. You need a drill press and a threading tap set to make one like mine!

I like the light bulb in the coffee can idea. Might also take a tomato sauce can inside of a coffee can or some other clever thing to control the light while efficiently shifting the heat.

Let's work out a way to do the heater with more 'everyday' components- or plain old junk.

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Well i'll be a rat's ass,Howdy Al .

I wasnt sure if you ventured out into no mans land in the rest of the forum but im glad ya made it to see your orphaned child in develpment.

I wasnt sure if the green light was a big negative for drying but i thought i was safe,see what happend when you let kid's run loose !

Seriously though i would like to have a better soultion to the heat aspect of the dryers than just a light bulb,if you come up with something please let us know.

ACSCorp said:

So it looks like my light bulb idea wasn't a waste on bandwidth after all!

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No, not a waste at all. Heat's heat and incandescent light bulbs are cheap as chips.

OK 100 watt incandescent light inside a coffee tin and hooked to a dimmer.

Click to expand...

What's the biggest incandescent you can get as a supermarket? If you can get a 150, that'd be better yet. Whatever the biggest is that fits in an Edison screw (USA) or bayonet type lamp socket (as in Aus).

You adjust the dimmer to get the temperature you want.

Click to expand...

That's one way to do it, but the temp won't be regulated. The air temp through the dryer will be dependent upon the intake air temp. If you set your dimmer to get a 29C airstream when the intake air temp is 20C, you can expect the airstream temp to be 5C higher (34C) if the intake air jumps up to 25C.

Use a thermostat to switch the lamp on & off when temp hits 29C, let the fan/s run all the time.

Use a fan motor speed controller (MSC) to slow the fan/s down if they're too noisy. A bud dryer doesn't need to be a wind tunnel. MSCs are on the shelf next to dimmers in electrical at your local hdwe store. MSCs are NOT the same as a dimmer- a fan motor will NOT run on a dimmer!

Put one of those radio temperature gauges in the dryer and you should be set to go!

Click to expand...

...radio temperature gauge? Can't say I've seen one of those. My radio never seems to boil over, haven't needed one yet. Good to know they are around if it ever does.

I prefer an indoor/outdoor thermometer, with peak memory if possible. These will have a remotely mountable temp sensor for the outdoor reading. Put that sensor in the warm airstream.

The coffee tin is going to need some help moving its heat into the air stream. My first thought is to increase the surface area of the coffee can by adding some fins.



Fins could be made out of 1/4 diameter sections of another coffee can or two. The semicircular fins could be fixed to the coffee can with pop-rivets, The pop-rivet gun would be used from inside the coffee can so the fins can overlap.

Then it could be put inside a piece of metal duct tubing:



I happen to have a very clever can opener. Part of the can's rim bead remains on the lid when the lid comes off, so the it fits neatly back on the can if you want. A socket could be fitted to the coffee can lid by cutting a round hole in it.

Other ideas? Fire away.

panhead said:

Well i'll be a rat's ass,Howdy Al .

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I'm so glad you didn't say 'well, I'll be fucked!' I'm real sensitive about my name, you know, so thanks for not taking the piss.

I wasnt sure if you ventured out into no mans land in the rest of the forum but im glad ya made it to see your orphaned child in develpment.

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I don't, usually. I just happened to notice a cannon about to get loose, reckoned I otta say sumpin'. )

I wasnt sure if the green light was a big negative for drying but i thought i was safe,see what happend when you let kid's run loose !

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'fraid it is. You'd have been disappointed in potency. 'sokay, we'll fix it.

Seriously though i would like to have a better soultion to the heat aspect of the dryers than just a light bulb,if you come up with something please let us know.

Click to expand...

The thing is that low power heat sources are actually pretty hard to come by! Heating elements usually are hundreds to thousands of watts. We need around 100W for this job.

Incandescent light bulbs make shitloads of heat, run on mains AC voltage and are cheap and readily available. Downside is they emit light, which we know is bad for da budz.

I did do an alternative design which uses a soldering iron heating element. Could be 25-60-100W, whatever you can get. Soldering irons are not designed to heat air, so you need to increase their surface area. I reckoned that if you pinched a sheet of aluminum around a soldering iron, fixed it in place with nuts & bolts or pop rivets, then rolled it into a spiral and stuck it in a piece of duct, you'd have a pretty good air warmer that you could control easily with an incandescent light dimmer.

AlBFuct;

To increase the surface for the coffee tin by adding fins, how about we replace the coffee tin with a Class B Rain Cap such as the one shown in the attached image. Its aluminum so it will dissipate the heat evenly and quickly and the fins are already cut. They run about $8 at Menards if my memory serves me correctly.

Hey, that looks like it's got some potential! Menards is a bit of a commute for me, but someone in the USA will surely try out one of these vent pipe caps. Just got to work out how to keep all the light inside of it.

ACSCorp said:

AlBFuct;

To increase the surface for the coffee tin by adding fins, how about we replace the coffee tin with a Class B Rain Cap such as the one shown in the attached image. Its aluminum so it will dissipate the heat evenly and quickly and the fins are already cut. They run about $8 at Menards if my memory serves me correctly.

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I never thought of that,i like it !

I'm thinking if your input air could be funneled through a 6" inlet tube thats 6" long or so and then tapers or expands to cover all of the tubs inlet holes on the dryer tub, then why not use a heat lamp to warm the air? You could adjust the heat by the proximity of the heat lamp to the inlet as it's drawn inward. I love the dryer idea though and will try my idea when I'm ready to dry.. . . . . .. . . . . in 8 weeks or so.

thanks for the thread

Well AlB, your diagrams showed a coffee can with fins and a secondary can over the one with fins to hold the light so the rain cap would just replace the first can or...

The rain cap can be outside the dryer with a bulb wired inside it. A "S" shaped light trap using pvc or galvanized elbow joints (painted black inside) would attach it to the dryer.

On the opposite side of the dryer would be the exhaust fan. The negative air pressure would draw air through the fins of the rain cap and heating it and through the light trap into the tub and then exhausted out.

A thermal switch such as a ductstat thermostat (www.suncourt.com/DuctStat.html) or dimmer switch coulkd be used to regulate the temps.

Just an idea.

ACS, ah, OK! I see what you're doing. Sounds like a plan- and a pretty good one at that!

Thanks for that.

Al, coming from you that's quite a compliment! Thanks!

I have read many of your posts and learned a great deal from them so thank you!

No worries, ACS!

I think your rain cap idea would work pretty well and be very cheap to build. All it needs is a thermostat and you're good to go. Well spotted.

Guys you can also use a pc power cord for the inline fan as well no need for an extension cable.

A couple of dumb questions regarding the dryer. I've just completed mine, harvest time is still a few weeks away. Once the buds are cut is there a favorable rack to put the largest buds on say like largest on the bottom rack and popcorn buds on the top rack or does it really matter? Other question is has anybody put like an apple slice or orange peel in while the drying is taken place, to possibly add flavor to the bud? Finally, could not for the life of me find the $5 carbon filter diy thread, can someone post a link?

voltaire64 said:

A couple of dumb questions regarding the dryer. I've just completed mine, harvest time is still a few weeks away. Once the buds are cut is there a favorable rack to put the largest buds on say like largest on the bottom rack and popcorn buds on the top rack or does it really
matter?

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If there's effective cross ventilation of the dryer box, it won't really matter. Large buds will of course dry more slowly than popcorn, wherever they are located in the box, tho.

Other question is has anybody put like an apple slice or orange peel in while the drying is taken place, to possibly add flavor to the bud?

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Why would you do such a thing? Don't like the flavour of cannabis smoke? Properly grown & dried buds from good DNA are a perfumey, incense-like slice of heaven. No fruit slices required.

Al B. Fuct said:

If there's effective cross ventilation of the dryer box, it won't really matter. Large buds will of course dry more slowly than popcorn, wherever they are located in the box, tho.



Why would you do such a thing? Don't like the flavour of cannabis smoke? Properly grown & dried buds from good DNA are a perfumey, incense-like slice of heaven. No fruit slices required.

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Thanks Mr. Fuct, much appreciated.