[The Dopest]

everyone!

this is a lil contraption i tried and found it to work excellent in my setup, maybe it can help some of you out. you see i run a small recirculating dwc setup. it consists of two 5gl buckets[reserve,control] and nine 1gal buckets[1filter,8pots]. after doing some educated guessing and nute calculations i figure my system to have roughly 13.5gals recirculating at all times. when i first designed the system it[nutes] was running in the high 70's sometimes high 80's depending. i knew that wouldnt work, i tried individual dwc last year and fought ph, ppm, temps, root rot, everything you can name. this grow i was somewhat prepared, except for the inspection but thats another story. back to the cooler chiller. i had a couple of these 5 gallon home/office "coolers" lying around and figured if it'll keep that water cool it surely would help out in my situation some at least. so with a nutdriver and a blunt i set off to fix something that wasnt broken, heres how i did it.


this is your standard home/office water cooler.



this is the rear view, remove the two screws at the bottom


this is the top of the rear, remove the 6 screws shown here


this is the top view, grab the inside and twist it out!


here we have it out, it has only a tight gasket holding it.


remove this thingamajiggy


the next step is to remove these faucets, they unscrew a long way


back up top you can now pull out the water reservoir, lost the pic but its this thing


next you want to slide the compressor and all out carefully not to damage anything. place it next to your reserve or control bucket.


this is a few different angles of the inside of my control bucket. the white cup lookin thing is what does the cooling. i drew a line for the nute level, if it gets too low the that thing freezes up!





here is the temperature control. once you mod the chiller, let it run for a few hours checking temps often. you will need to adjust this. maybe even a couple times until you get it right, i did it took a couple days of me checkin it every 12hrs to set it and that was months back i have not touched it since!



after googling the mfr tag on the compressor i posted the specs where Stonewall was nice enough to translate into laymens for me. lol he said that according to the specs this model has a 1/12hp motor and will pull a maximum of 592 btus per hour. all that being foreign i googled the next nearest aquarium chiller, the 1/10hp. they average 1k btu and will pull 100gals down 10degree or 30gals down 30degree. now im not sure of this ones potential but i know for a fact that my system is over 10gals and it the first 12hrs dropped it almost 20degrees to 62.5! thats when i started adjusting. lol


any questions?

[BabyHughie]

I was wondering if you were ever gonna post this up Dopest. Great post, very indepth!

[R00KIE]

WOOT! Nice one dopest.....
Stoner ingenuity strikes again...
Now..... Just gotta get me a recirculating hydro rig...

TD..........That`s pretty ingenius and damn sharp of yas for usin shit you`ve got on hand instead of droppin buncha bucks for even a small chiller .........Do you have all that equipment in the room itself?......great info dewd.........PEACE.........DHF ...............

[Haps]

I like it! Very cool stuff, thanks for posting this, office cooler is now on my scav list for tonight, I see these in dumpsters every so often. Chilllllin babay!
H

Ahhhh!! Now, if I can get my buddy to come off of his water cooler.......

[stonewall]

Good work!

[The Dopest]

BH , it just took me a minute to get things together, i am a smoker ya know thanks for the props bro.

ROOKIE hey, the good thing about this chiller is it WILL work in single standing reserves. you dont have to have a recirculating system, i was showing how versatile it is. you see since its a drop in style you dont have to have a big expensive pump recirculting the nutes. if you have a single "tote" style dwc it will work fine with that too! this will work for ANY small to medium reserve/hydro system. thanks for stopping by buddy!

DEDHEDFRED hi, yup had to do something about the temps and i always use whats handy first, no sense in wasting money. this cooler was about 10yrs old, it has been inside, outside and in a storage, home and business during that time. i said what can i lose ya know? lol
yeah everything is in this one room. the room is about 4.5'x4.5'x8'h and has a central air duct feeding it from the nearest bedroom vent, i added a tee. there is a modded stanley fan for heat extraction and light cooling. the room runs about 80 average lights on. i am not sure what having this in there affected temps, never noticed a difference. the compressor is hot, dont get me wrong but i noticed no difference in the room overall. been lazy but i plan to add a lil 4" fan from walmart $5 to blow on the coils maybe help it run cooler and last a lil longer. thanks for stoppin in!



Haps hey,

thanks for posting this, office cooler is now on my scav list for tonight, I see these in dumpsters every so often. Chilllllin babay!

EXACTLY thats why i think this is so helpful. these are everywhere, once they get a lil mildew or plastic cracked people throw them out! that makes them cheap or even free sometimes! gl on your scavenger hunt.

Stoned2Death wassup, does he know you grow? if so then he has no choice. if not, then you may have to give him lol

stonewall, thanks bro! and thanks again for learnin me something:wink:

[Budweiser13]

Killer set up man thanks for the tutorial...........

Very kewl, very getto, I like it allot......

70s