help! please!!

crazed1011

Well-Known Member
so my single bucket systems res are at about 30 degrees Celsius and the room temp is about 30ish in the middle of the day. I thought the res needed to be cooler, what is a easy way of cooling the res?
 
this is brilliant lol how I didn't think of it is beyond me, they are tiny enough for it to not matter right now. but still want to find out how to fix this now.
 
A small fan on the lid of the bucket blowing down will cool the water significantly (but create more evaporation). Having a fan on a temperature controller will keep the water at a set temp most of the time. I use that method as a 'first line of defense' on my aquarium, second line is a chiller.

Frozen water bottles is the method I used to use on my aquarium when I didn't have a chiller and lived in a hot area, but I would think a frozen bottle touching the roots may cause more issues than it solves.. just guessing there.
 
I have only ever done hydro and can tell you that putting the bottles in the res will not harm the roots. Its about the easiest thing u can do for controlling res temps, no need to make more work for yourself.
 
Do NOT put the bottles outside the res. They will simply condensate, evaporate, and increase humidity.
Put 2L frozen bottles INSIDE the res, and you will have to do it every day, perhaps multiple times.

Also, a fan blowing over the res WILL cool the temps. HOWEVER, this is EVAPORATE COOLING, which means
water is now being removed from the res by PLANTS and even more by EVAPORATION. This means pH will DROP
as nutrient concentration in solution INCREASES. You will need to top off with fresh water, perhaps daily, to maintain
steady pH. (Highly dependent on the size of your res in gallons)

Best solution I've found: (And it's best in RDWC/UnderCurrent - Single buckets is pretty impossible to do EFFICIENTLY)
Get a Stainless Steel (NO COPPER, It can leach into solution and poison your plants!) WORT CHILLER, and a 1/10 - 1/4 HP chiller and run cool water through the metal WORT CHILLER coil and set that coil in your res. The steel cooled by the water will then cool your res/nutes.

If you are only doing INDIVIDUAL buckets, the frozen bottle is the best solution, which isnt really saying much since you're then tied to your garden.
Look on craigslist and I bet you can find an aquarium chiller at a decent price.
 
here's one setup to run an 8 inch ice box to cool a 1.5 kw room and a minigen co2 generator, it failed for some reason. guess a bigger chiller is in order.
 

Attachments

  • IMG_2384.jpg
    IMG_2384.jpg
    46.6 KB · Views: 10
  • IMG_2386.jpg
    IMG_2386.jpg
    47.1 KB · Views: 10
Gonna set it up as a ebb monster res. The main design I like for growing is plain and simple, a marine igloo with holes cut in it. Pretty fucking simple. I just installed the water pump and sprayers so I could run less nutrient solution.
 

Attachments

  • IMG_2201.jpg
    IMG_2201.jpg
    55.7 KB · Views: 9
  • cooler2.jpg
    cooler2.jpg
    74 KB · Views: 7
Back
Top