Suggestions for a Masdie setup?

[FairyInTheFlowers]

Originally Posted by Subrosa

There are units of both types that function that way, and also units that have probe which gets very cold and chills the water simply by being submerged in it.

Hmmm, it's an interesting idea, but I have a feeling keeping the air cooled and humid will be my biggest challenge, but the most rewarding. I would assume that there is a point where further cooling to the water being wicked to the pots begins to have no additional cooling effect. Although it would be further complicating things, if I were to get a cooling probe, I could connect the water reservoirs of both the plant tank and miniature AC unit, therefore removing the need for constantly icing the tank and AC unit. . . although I don't know how well it would be able to cool that volume of water. I'd probably have the plant tank be about 24" x 36", and the connected AC about 8" x 14". Considering I'd keep about 2" of standing water in both units, that's about 2,000 cubic inches of water if I did my math right. I'm not a rich kid, so I'm definitely trying to figure out the best and least expensive way I can get this up and running. I'm pretty sure Ecuagenera is coming to my city early next spring, so I need something cheap enough to leave me with money to still buy the plants to fill it!

[dethswatch]

I've tried that, here's what I found.

I dropped the "2 box" solution (1 cold box, 1 plant box) early on because it was hard to get everything insulated enough to stay cool enough when you piped the fluid over from cold to hot.

Even the pumps (that I was using) added heat since they aren't designed to insulate the heat from the motor from the fluid lines.

Also- since the pump speed wasn't adjustable (on the crap aquarium pumps I was using), getting the dwell time of the fluid high enough to cool it significantly before pumping to the hot side was difficult to control without a large reservoir.

You have the same problem with dwell time on the hot side- you want it to spend enough time there that, ideally, it reaches the temp of the interior of the box thus absorbing as much heat as it could.

So-- if I was to go down that path again, I'd buy a small freezer, put a reservoir in there as big as I could, probably use antifreeze (or higher viscosity low freezing point liquid, or if the pump doesn't like the viscosity, possibly something like alcohol?) and then look at CPU cooling pumps rather than aquarium pumps.

I also found a lot of aquarium pumps are "submersible" which means they -want- to be submerged because they leak all over the place.

You could buy an aquarium chiller, as suggested, but for my box of roughly 36x18x36, I don't think they'd cool enough unless I bought a very expensive one.