My pleurothallis blooming

[denvervet]

You are lucky to have a cool house, its so HOT in Denver it would have to be underground!!

[NIVENJ]

Originally Posted by Tindomul

Can you give us info on your home made cool house please.

so i have had the opportunity to have a walkabout in these huge, self controlled shade houses, that commercial growers use.. those tunnels are pretty amazing....

so thinking about it, i thought that maybe i can use that same principle in something much smaller and more cost effective......

fiddled around with a few ideas in my head and started doing some sketches, thinking and taking into acount on how those big tunnels operate...

(concealed chamber with a wet wall on the one side,and on the other a few fans pulling air though the wet wall, cooling the air down.)

So, this is what i came up with. ( purely for educational purposes)

i just made a small structure , that will fit in my available space, ( just out of some timber) then i covered it with (plastic infused shade cloth) to cover the top, and halfway down the back side of the structure.......

for my wet wall effect, I constructed a casing out of some mesh wire to form a basket (to fit snug inside the covered structure)and layered plain shade cloth inside, i also took a piece of plastic pipe and drilled small holes along the bottom of it, and sealed one end, on the other end i attached a soft flexible pipe...... assembled everything together and secured everything....i had taken an old windowsill flower pot and sealed it with a waterproof sealer to hold the water..... i used a old small fishpond water fountain pump, to pump water through the pipe into the shade cloth.....from above, as to create a dripping effect down and through the shade cloth...

at this point i had the casing and wet wall with water tank , so all i now had to sort out was airflow......

to achieve this, i had taken a normal indoor 3 speed desk fan..... mounted it inside the covered structure on the one side and then placed my wet wall in front of the fan...... connected everything together, filled the water well and applied some electrical current.....

holding thumbs..............

it worked like a charm...... cooled the air inside by about 4 or so degrees and raised the humidity by a few......

so, instead of sucking the air through the wet wall, i was blowing it through...... , gave me roughly the same effect.......

been using it for about 6 or so months now and the plants seem to enjoy it too..... getting flowers and many new growths..... my small collection of masdies seem to really enjoy the atmosphere, as they are growing like weeds, but no flowers yet.....

iv'e a pic or two that i'm adding to give you an idea of what the structure looks like

Would like to know what you all think?

i'm crazy !!!!!

[denvervet]

Not sure where you are but here in colorado we can't use conventional a/c, no humidity. So we use swamp coolers, they cool down water and disburse the water into the air, cooled, with a fan. Cheap to run and they are not expensive. Sometimes they can get too cold! They work wonderful!

[NIVENJ]

denveret.... Located in East - london South africa.... weather patterns pretty decent with mostly warm ish weather, even in winter, humidity averages on the 40 - 50% in general on any given day... iv'e done some research on different cooling systems and swamp coolers... as well...... looking to build a bigger and better cool house in the next year.......

[denvervet]

NIVENJ.........Thanks for correcting me! Sorry. Most people think that Denver Colorado is cold in Winter but actually we are in the desert. It can get cold here but usually its not that bad. I think we only had about 9 inches of snow the entire last Winter. Some Winters you can hang your clothes out to dry in February. The Rocky Mountains however have tons of snow and I can even see snow on them today, just a little. We have mild weather most of the year, the humidity can range from 14% to 65% but that is rare to be that high. We don't get much rain and I wish we did. This Summer has been VERY HOT, not sure why but I will be glad when it goes away! Swamp coolers really do cool the air, they are amazing. It cannot be too hard to make one, there really isn't anything to them but a pump, water and something for the water to run through on the sides of the cooler and a fan.....maybe you can find how to make one on line if they dont sell them in S.A. My new project is to turn a 120 gallon fish tank into a home for my 2 turtles and have shelves in it for mini orchids which like high light and high humidity........lotta work! Thinking about design now. Best of luck to you.