cooling system

[swiatoniowski]

Hello,

Do you know any system, which can reduce temperature during night ? As yet I use simply ice, but I plan to built larger orchidarium and I wish to it be more automatic.
If there is any possibility to connect small fridge ?

Please, write something or tell me the link to such article.

Best regards,
Piotr

[keithrs]

I have seen people make orchidarium out of small wine coolers. Another option is a water chiller hooked to a CPU radiator and have a fan turn on/off at preset temps.

[swiatoniowski]

thanks for info, I will look at chillers. I am looking rather for something outside the orchidarium. Plants in winde fridger perhaps feel happy, but I wish to see them better.

[Discus]

I've been thinking of making a hybrid cooler by hooking up the radiator from a computer watercooling setup to an aquarium chiller. I think it would work well, but I don't have an orchidarium to test it with.

There are also companies that make quite large peltier (thermoelectric) coolers that could be effectively adapted to cooling a terrarium/orchidarium/paludarium. (for example PowerCool Series Air-to-Air Thermoelectric Assembly on Laird Technologies Some are available as "ruggedised" meant for external use, which would be better in this application IMO)

Neither option is particularly cheap though.

[swiatoniowski]

Thanks for reply. Here in Poland such chillers are extremply expensive, they started from about 400 USD. They are probably not enough popular to have good price.

[orchidsarefun]

if your orchids were in a sealed small room, I suppose you could leave the fridge door open and let it run until the room temp was reached.
I like the ice idea to get temps lower even if for a short time, probably work for me.

[Discus]

orchidsarefun: No, that won't work, because fridges put more heat into the room than they remove by leaving the door open. It might work if the back of the fridge (where the cooling radiator is) was outside of the room, but an air conditioner would be far better.

[NatalieS]

Originally Posted by Discus

orchidsarefun: No, that won't work, because fridges put more heat into the room than they remove by leaving the door open. It might work if the back of the fridge (where the cooling radiator is) was outside of the room, but an air conditioner would be far better.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's not usual for air conditioners to run at such low temps. Even the aircon unit I have in the server room at work won't run any lower than 16 C. I'm guessing Piotr needs the temps to run lower than that.

[31drew31]

Pulling the temperature gauge away from the cooling rad will allow the AC unit to achieve much lower temperatures, which is probably the best option for cooling a small/medium terrarium.

A small fridge could also work Im sure, just how long would it work for with it running so often.

[swiatoniowski]

Thanks to all of you for so many answers. I will try to check which otion would be the best for me.

Best regards,
Piotr