1 water chiller with multiple res'es?

[yamaha_1fan]

Soon I will be firing up all my lights and I know my room is going to get warmer, thus my reses getting warmer. I have two per table, with 3 tables. the two per table are linked so they act like one res.

Can I use one chiller and coill some some long tubing (letting the coil sit in the rez) and run it through each rez? Basically running cold water through each rez? I wonder if the chiller would make a dent in the water temp? its probably about 500 gallons in total that needs to be cooled

I dont want to mix the solutions in case one table is flushing while another is 4 weeks in flower. I need to find a way to use one chiller for all 3 tables or just buy 3 chillers which hits the wallet kind of hard now plus it pushes my electric capacity. Guess I could put the chillers on a timer so they only come on at lights out

 

[yamaha_1fan]

Any ideas on this?

How about running one chiller and bringing the water down to 65 or so, then moving the chiller to the next rez? Each rez is 200 gallons so they will stay stable for a while.

 

[HairlessCaveApe]

Hey Howdy Yamaha! I dont know if it'l work in your case but I run my chiller in such a way that if need be I can cool 2 seperate nutrients. Il describe what I got goin on in case it'l help you. -What I do is I circulate plane water threw my chiller and into a Coleman cooler. I chill the water in the cooler down to 56f. I run my nutes threw a 30' x 1/2" copper coil that is immerced in the fresh water in the cooler that the chiller keeps cool. This makes my fog come outta my nozzles at bout 66f. I run an aero system and I dont have alot of gpm requirements. I always figured that If I felt like it I could put another copper coil in my "chillin pool" but so far I havnt had occation to. If you wanted to you might be able to employ a simular tekneek to chill multiple rez's with one chiller. You mite do just as well or even better by doin what ya said bout coilen copper and sittin it in your rez's and pumpin chilled water threw that. I dont know wich tek would work good for you but shurly one or the othert would.

 

[JohnnyToke]

Is a chiller necessary on a flood & drain reservoir?

I know its needed on a dwc system if temps are above 70 where roots are always immersed in nutrient but thought I read it wasn't necessary on ebb systems since the roots spent very little time soaking. I read that on another forum from Lucas. I'll have to do some more reading to see what the temp threshold is for an ebb reservoir before requiring a chiller. I would think it would need to climb into the 80's.

are your reservoirs covered with a lid of some kind to keep light out?

JT

 

[yamaha_1fan]

No lids, but you can see how they sit under the table. The room is starting to get warm with lights on and summer time heat beating down. The A/C cant keep it cool enough and the room gets into the 80's, maybe low 90's. There really isnt much I can do about it w/o doing a bunch of work with ducting through the finished basement. Plus putting numerous holes into my brick siding is not high on the wish list

 

[rr14]

I'd try doing the cooler thing with coils going through it. I thought about ghetto rigging something similar without using a chiller; just dropping in frozen 2 liter bottles of water. With those 4 day cooler, this might work out okay. On your scale, you'd need a chiller though or use huge chunks of ice that'll take a while to melt.

 

[ShroomDr]

if you used a minifridge, you could pipe as many lines into as you want.

fuck buying a chiller, buy a minifridge for $150, and run pluming though the thing, just like you would a beer tap.


personally, i would put a bucket of water on the inside of the fridge, and coil the lines around the bucket.

 

[FirstTracks]

minifridges suck mad power when they are continuously cooling......

but I haven't tried it, and you (schroomdr) might have, so i'm not saying you're wrong........just not sure.

 

[ShroomDr]

i havent. but the cheapest chiller ive seen $380+.

frankly i know almost nothing about chillers (other than the pump is not included,WTF), but i do know a little about kegs, beerlines, ive owned a minifridge (it kept beer cold enough), and ive seen friends take warm kegs and run the tube in a Colman cooler. The beer was ice cold,;the length was probably 15-20ft, floating, in the cooler, in a salted down ice bath. The fridge will not get as cold, but imho (and theoretical) the concept should stand.

Plus, like i said, it would solve your multiple reservoir problem.

 

[HairlessCaveApe]

I tried the mini fridge thing and it really dont work. A chillers the only way to go. I even went so far as to take the fridge apart and dip the evaporator coils directly into the liquids I was chillen. That did the trick. You need a thermistatic switch for this tho cause it can chill your nutes too cold like this. It only ran bout 2 months like this too. When it did finaly go it discharged oil into my chillin pool. The coils musta ruptured. I got a chiller rite after this. By the way, I did this in the middle of the winter too so I dont know how it will do in the summer heat. I dont know anybody who had good results usin a dorm fridge in place of a chiller.

 

[yamaha_1fan]

Right now the family is on FULL ALERT, save all the water bottles, gatorade bottles, milk containers etc

 

[HairlessCaveApe]

Right now the family is on FULL ALERT, save all the water bottles, gatorade bottles, milk containers etc

Yea Buddy. Thats what ya gotta do. Fortitude and persistance will prevail!

 

[Whatever]

I don't have extensive experience with chillers but think your original idea will work if the chiller you buy is pretty big. I'd be very careful about using exposed copper tubing and it can seriously mess up your plants. Instead look at some like PEX from a place like www.pexsupply.com as that should work fine and probably easier to work with than copper. For a chiller one of the better ones I could find was from www.aqualogicinc.com and if you don't mind providing some general information they will help you properly size the chiller. They'd ask questions like what's the water volume, how much heat do you want to shed over what period of time, etc. With the PEX you could probably create a manifold and feed all the res's. That's a lot of water volume so guessing you'd need a big chiller for that one res to keep up. Oversize is always better cause it will cycle less for starters. If you start chilling your res's get something like 1" foamboard and insulate the sides to help buffer from the warm room.

A little crazy of an idea but if the solution your using never comes in contact with the nutes and you're running it through something like PEX you might want to consider something like food grade propylene glycol as it has much better thermal characteristics than just plain water.

With high res temps I won't hesitate to recommend some H202. That's what I'm familiar with. Go with 1-2 tablespoons per gallon of 3% like every 3-4 days. If you don't mind handling something potentially hazardous like 35% you can get it for like $30 per gallon...cause you'd need a lot...lol. I know there's products like Hydroguard but never used em. H202 would not be good with an organic nute based program, especially if you're focusing on beneficials, but is great for stuff like salts and it's hard to overdo the H202.

 

[Whatever]

Is a chiller necessary on a flood & drain reservoir?

I know its needed on a dwc system if temps are above 70 where roots are always immersed in nutrient but thought I read it wasn't necessary on ebb systems since the roots spent very little time soaking. I read that on another forum from Lucas. I'll have to do some more reading to see what the temp threshold is for an ebb reservoir before requiring a chiller. I would think it would need to climb into the 80's.

Yeah...I've heard and read that also. I chatted with one grower who regularly ran the res, in a multi flow bucket system with hydroton, in the low 80's. I dunno...I ran a res with rockwool slabs and had a heat issue in the summer early in the development of a room and had root issues with the res being in the higher 70s. Bigger problem was the the res was remote in the basement so stayed coolish but the slabs would heat up over the course of a cycle and toward the end were hitting low 80's. They'd shed that heat slowly during the dark cycle. Adding the chiller really helped and even with the chiller adding H202 kicked it up another notch.

I've talked to some people and have been told House & Gardens Roots Accelerator is one of the best root growth stimulators/protectors and great to use in situation such as this. I experimented with it but not in such an environment for the purpose of root protection. One friend said he saw a grow where the RA brought some badly root rotted plants in a DWC system back from the dead.

 

[Whatever]

After more research just gotta add pexsupply already may have the manifolds you'd probably need. With a little bit of Macgyvering you'd be ready to go toot sweet. If ya use some type of spacer between the coils in the res you can probably cut down on the total amount of tubing used and make the system more efficient...just need good fluid flow through the tubing...and a chiller that can handle the load to shed the heat. I'm guessing the further away from the chiller/chill res setup the warmer that nute res will be due to increased tubing length and lower line pressure. A way to overcome that is make sure the total length of tubing to each res is the same.

My experience is you can feed solution down to 65F and the plants will be fine...especially if the room temp is up there like you're dealing with. I've been told anything below 74F is fine so a wide margin to work with.

You'll finger it out.

 

[yamaha_1fan]

I checked out the pex site, seems pretty simple, a couple manifolds for supply and return, then a bunch of tubing. I think those plastic manifolds would be good, dont need the fancy red and blue one.

How much tubing would it take in each res though? Would that be an experimental thing? I think it would take alot.

 

[Whatever]

How much tubing would it take in each res though? Would that be an experimental thing? I think it would take alot.

Yes I think what you want to do is a bit experimental but should work. I don't know that it will take alot. Take a look at the titanium drop in coil models from Aqualogic. It's basically the same principle but the drop in coils are much colder than the what you can probably generate running cold fluid through the PEX. You can always start with too much tubing then start cutting back. Part of it will depend on how cold the fluid going into the tubing is, how hot the res is and how 'strong' the chiller is to beat back the heat coming back into the chiller res. Once the cooling fluid going through the PEX reaches the same temp as the res that's the amount of tubing you need in the res. What that is you'll need to figure out. Anything longer than that will just drop your line pressure and put unneeded stress on your pump. From what I understand the Danner magnetic drive pumps, Pondmaster brand, might be the best option here but not sure. You'll actually need 2 pumps...1 to recirculate the chiller res fluid through the chiller and another to pump the cold chiller res fluid through the PEX.

An infrared thermometer should help you guage the temp of the fluid by zapping the tubing at a particular point. That IR thermometer will also help you equalize air circulation in the flower space to make sure your bud temps are within an acceptable range but that's another story.

One thing to your advantage here is you're running Ebb & Flow so let's say 4 cycles per lights on at 30 minutes each. Should be enough time in between cycles to shed heat. I think my chiller ran for like 1 hour to drop the res temp out of like a 3.5 hour down time between feeding cycles so pretty much 2.5 hours in that 3.5 hour off cycle the chiller did not run. If you chill insulate the res's...it really helps!

Another option is to buy 5 small chillers, pumps, etc. at a cost of about $500+ per res but that's a guess...maybe more like $600? But it's almost August and maybe only 2 months to go with the heat issues. By the time you get the PEX system dialed in you probably won't need it anymore. Individual chillers will be up and running in an hour per res. I really don't think moving 1 around is a viable option...unless you have nothing better to do for pretty much 12 hours straight.

Regular use of H202 may be enough to get you through, Roots Accelerator may help in a different way, running higher temps in E & F type setups is supposedly OK but did not work for me with rockwool slabs but they suck anyway.

Just trying to share what little I know to help and hope it helps somehow, I don't know how others in your situation do it...good luck!

 

[Whatever]

I slept on it and can only relate my experience. I ran 4800 watts with 1 110 gal res which covered 8 3' x 3' trays and 1 1/4 hp chiller. I think in the long run to make life simpler you should look at combining some of those tables to run off the same res. At most I would go through half a res in about 3-4 days in full flower and was running 4 30 minute feed cycles through open spaghetti lines into rockwool slabs. Technically you could easily flower 9000 watts with 2 res's. 3 moms easily kicked out enough clones and could have probably gotten away with 2. I guess if your veg space is limited I can see how running the tables the way you are would work but I vegged the plants in the flower space for like 10 days. You could always split your flower room in half or something like that so you can veg one side while the other is flowering. Maybe run one side with 1 res and 1 strain and you could use like 2 res's on the other side for variety and also toss plants in that have already been vegged adequately in another room so it's constantly in flower.

You gotta simplify when running a large space but maybe you find your current setup is the best way to go?

Just some ideas.

 

[Whatever]

Me again...lol. I messed something up a bit. You will not need 2 pumps in the chiller res if you go the route with just 1 chiller. You'd want the one from Aqualogic with the drop in titanium coil and NOT a unit that requires a pump to recirculate the fluid to be chilled. The ones with the drop in coils are THE most efficient and effective and with no pump to recirculate you'll be adding less heat because pumps do generate heat...even the magnetic drive ones. If you go with the drop in coil unit you would only need 1 pump to circulate the chilled fluid through the PEX lines coiled up in the nute res's...if you decide to tackle that project.

Hope that makes sense.

 

[icdog]

Adding more ac is likely your easiest solution.
There is a fan idea around, the fan blows onto the water and cools, it evaporates the water and adds to humidity also which is a possible downside.