cheap and EFFECTIVE DIY water chiller

squirt1961

squirt1961

Well-Known Member
ttystikk said:
I run my RDWC water in the low to mid sixties. Aeration to keep the anaerobic bacteria and mold at bay is the reason for me.
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What type of chiller are you using expensive store bought or a homemade unit? And as far as grow quality does the colder water in res. help all that much I'm not being sarcastic just trying to learn all I can to be that much better as a grower. I'm sure every little thing helps.
 
ttystikk

ttystikk

Well-Known Member
squirt1961 said:
What type of chiller are you using expensive store bought or a homemade unit? And as far as grow quality does the colder water in res. help all that much I'm not being sarcastic just trying to learn all I can to be that much better as a grower. I'm sure every little thing helps.
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RDWC water temps are a crap shoot. Don't chill it and roll the dice... chill it and those dice are loaded in your favor. What happens when it craps out is a lot of dead roots... which doesn't help in the yield department!

I'm not necessarily the best example. I just spent several thousand dollars on a full-on dual circuit heat pump that will heat my home, chill my entire op, warm my hot water, provide garage and hot tub heating... and wipe my ass, lol

Before I got the heat pump, I used chillers for the same job.
 
squirt1961

squirt1961

Well-Known Member
ttystikk said:
RDWC water temps are a crap shoot. Don't chill it and roll the dice... chill it and those dice are loaded in your favor. What happens when it craps out is a lot of dead roots... which doesn't help in the yield department!

I'm not necessarily the best example. I just spent several thousand dollars on a full-on dual circuit heat pump that will heat my home, chill my entire op, warm my hot water, provide garage and hot tub heating... and wipe my ass, lol

Before I got the heat pump, I used chillers for the same job.
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That's cool as long as its effective. If I was able to still work I'd probably do the same I'm actually in my hot tub right now lol.
I guess my question is answered even 4 ° makes a difference I've never had a root rot problem yet ( knock on wood). But I can see where it would help. So I guess this is my next project in the grow room.going to thrift stores today to look for used dehumidifier., mini fridge, or mini wine cooler. At night my water temps are always in the mid- high 60s and 72 when lights on. I have bucket sitting on milk crate to make water / nute changes easier I'm sure if I kept it on concrete floor it would stay cooler and just lift up during weekly res change. Thanks for helping me come to right desicion ttystikk. I'm gonna get right on it. Now I guess next question is the coil of hose in each bucket probably needs to be stainless steel so it won't react to nutes. Or would plastic garden hose work fine. I'm using Technaflora recipe for success plus great white good bacteria for root health I also just started adding a capful of bleach per gallon of water/ nutes to help sanitize I noticed a huge growth spurt as soon as I started adding the bleach. I also noticed my drippers don't have as much salt residue buildup since bleach added. I was having to clean them at least once a week I'll continue to clean weekly anyway but definitely alot less salt residue present now. It's just those plastic rings that drip using forced air in line to create a vacuum they work fine thoygh
 
squirt1961

squirt1961

Well-Known Member
ttystikk said:
Didn't see the parentage, but I stay away from straight indicas- especially those described as 'short' because I grow vertical and I'm not going to wait six months for the damned things to grow up!
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It's around 80-20 I think northern lights crossed with blueberry. Very effective for pain, nausea, and relaxation without couchlock.it grows very similar to northern lights with a nice berry aroma and taste. Gets you pretty high as well. LOL.
 
ttystikk

ttystikk

Well-Known Member
squirt1961 said:
That's cool as long as its effective. If I was able to still work I'd probably do the same I'm actually in my hot tub right now lol.
I guess my question is answered even 4 ° makes a difference I've never had a root rot problem yet ( knock on wood). But I can see where it would help. So I guess this is my next project in the grow room.going to thrift stores today to look for used dehumidifier., mini fridge, or mini wine cooler. At night my water temps are always in the mid- high 60s and 72 when lights on. I have bucket sitting on milk crate to make water / nute changes easier I'm sure if I kept it on concrete floor it would stay cooler and just lift up during weekly res change. Thanks for helping me come to right desicion ttystikk. I'm gonna get right on it. Now I guess next question is the coil of hose in each bucket probably needs to be stainless steel so it won't react to nutes. Or would plastic garden hose work fine. I'm using Technaflora recipe for success plus great white good bacteria for root health I also just started adding a capful of bleach per gallon of water/ nutes to help sanitize I noticed a huge growth spurt as soon as I started adding the bleach. I also noticed my drippers don't have as much salt residue buildup since bleach added. I was having to clean them at least once a week I'll continue to clean weekly anyway but definitely alot less salt residue present now. It's just those plastic rings that drip using forced air in line to create a vacuum they work fine thoygh
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If your reservoir is open on top, set up a fan to blow air across the water surface. This will aerate, but more importantly it will also cool the water. You might even get the four degrees (F!) you're looking for.
 
squirt1961

squirt1961

Well-Known Member
ttystikk said:
If your reservoir is open on top, set up a fan to blow air across the water surface. This will aerate, but more importantly it will also cool the water. You might even get the four degrees (F!) you're looking for.
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It's got a ten inch net pot on top full of hydroton over 4" rockwool cube. I've got 3 fans running on them constantly.
Only reason I'm looking at 68° is that from everything I've read it says that this is ideal water temp with an air or room temp in low to mid 70's. If I'm wrong about temps I stand corrected.
 
ttystikk

ttystikk

Well-Known Member
squirt1961 said:
It's got a ten inch net pot on top full of hydroton over 4" rockwool cube. I've got 3 fans running on them constantly.
Only reason I'm looking at 68° is that from everything I've read it says that this is ideal water temp with an air or room temp in low to mid 70's. If I'm wrong about temps I stand corrected.
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I like them five degrees cooler than that, myself.

The blowing air across the water's surface idea was to see if it would help keep temps down.

It works; due to this effect, sometimes the tubs under my ebb n food table in veg are colder than my temp controlled RDWC!
 
squirt1961

squirt1961

Well-Known Member
ttystikk said:
I like them five degrees cooler than that, myself.

The blowing air across the water's surface idea was to see if it would help keep temps down.

It works; due to this effect, sometimes the tubs under my ebb n food table in veg are colder than my temp controlled RDWC!
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Cool be nice if I could figure a way to channel the cold air into buckets but still keep them closed to control algae
 
legallyflying

legallyflying

Well-Known Member
Well are blie dream tested at 26% thc and 2% cbd.... but you know how test results go.
Will be a couple weeks till the GG gets tested. It's THE strangest plant I have seen though. Kind of grows like train wreck.. but jesus fucking christ is it COVERED in trichs.

Blue dream is a ridiculous grower. Absolutely off the chain fast. Like stupid fast.

I'm going to start a thread "wow" wall of weed. I have three BD that are too large to put in our cages. Going to put them in a row, run fencing 2 feet apart the length of the room. Two 1k vert reflectors on each side and two over head. I'm trying to hit 10 lbs on 3 blue dreams :)
 
legallyflying

legallyflying

Well-Known Member
Sorry off topic on that post...

Like tystk said 68 at a minimum!! We have defiantly had much better results and way way way less problems with water at 64-65.

More to the point though... that plant does not exactly look healthy... you have a decent ph pen aND ppm meter? .
 
squirt1961

squirt1961

Well-Known Member
legallyflying said:
Sorry off topic on that post...

Like tystk said 68 at a minimum!! We have defiantly had much better results and way way way less problems with water at 64-65.

More to the point though... that plant does not exactly look healthy... you have a decent ph pen aND ppm meter? .
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OK thanks again guys and if your talking to me legallyflying yes I have a good ph pen and tds meter my ph has been fluctuating between 5-7 and 6-4 I try to keep around 5.7-5.9 the plant is actually bouncing back from a mag def. It was stunted for a while but now doing much better. Growing at a rate of an inch a day now and drinking about half gallon a day. I'm keeping my eyes on her though. This pic is from today. I noticed tiny red spots so I moved led light away from canopy from 12" to 16-18". I don't think it's spider mites I looked with 30x lope don't see anything moving. Had this problem with another plant before and it was led too close to canopy but I'll be keeping eyes open thanks again guys working to lower my water temps now
 

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AZChillen

New Member
legallyflying said:
Thought I would share this as I finally got around to giving it a try and man of man, it is the fucking bomb! Similar units have been described so I didn't invent it but thought I would post it up as it really does work well and only cost me around $150.

You basically use a dehumidifier and a cooling coil for making beer (wort chiller).
A dehumidifier works like an air con, using the phase change of liquid to gas and back again to get rid of heat. A dehumidifier works by passing air through a very cold radiator. The water in the air condenses and drips into a bucket.

So what do is take the shell of your dehumidifier. There are two radiators in there, one for cooling and one that gets hot to dissipate the collected heat.

I had a 40 pint dehu that I used but I'm sure you could use a smaller unit as it was soo effective. So what I did was take the shell of the dehumidifier off and GENTLY bend the cold radiator into a medium sized cooler. Then I filled the cooler with water and placed a stainless steel wort chilller coil in the cooler. You can find them on e-bay. You could probably use plastic pipe instead of the wort chiller but it won't be near as effective. This is what I'm talking about..http://www.amazon.com/Super-Efficient-Stainless-Steel-Chiller/dp/B004D4QPQW

Then I have a SMALL pump and plastic tubing that pumps water from my rez, through the wort chiller, and back again.

So my 50 gallon rez was at 73 degrees. The water in the cooler was at 67. I turned the dehu on and crossed my fingers. I came back an hour and half later and my rez was at 61!!! There was actually a block of ice around the radiator in the cooler. That is a 12 degree drop in one hour!! The ice stayed around for several hours, I actually had to shut the pump off as the cooler water was in the 50's and I didn't want my rez and colder. About 7 hours later my rez was up to 70 so I turned the dehu on for 30 minutes and the rez dropped down to 65 within the hour. SO at this point I'm going to put the dehu on a timer to turn on for about 30 minutes every 3-4 hours and call it good. That is not a whole lot of power to cool 50 gallons. I'm pretty fucking stoked as chillers are very expensive and typically have to be run all the time.

In order to avoid posting pictures I did a web search and found a cool website that explains exactly what I did.

http://www.jonolavsakvarium.com/eng_diy/chiller/chiller.html

Cheers!
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Bringing this up from the dead.. although I had an idea of what if running a car radiator or even Small AC radiator, pulling through with a DC pump, and using a box fan behind it, with just plain water in the radiator.. hooked to a stainless steel wort chiller dipped into the res bucket. Seems like it would work
 
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