I needed to find a way to keep my water temps down in my reservoirs I had 2 55 gal res and a aroponics mother plants all being air cooled and has bin working perfectly at keeping constant water temperature
1 Like
Sounds interesting. Any photos that you can share?
Firstly, insulate your nute tank. This will make the amount of energy you need to add or remove less. This makes your job easier.
At the core, this is a problem of moving energy from where it is (your nutes) to where you want it (not your nutes). This is either done passively or actively. Passive would be to have something cold around your nutes so the heat just flows out of them into the surrounding mass. Active would be more akin to using a chiller directly on your nutes.
The ultimate budget cooler I can think of would be to blow air over the top of your nutes. The evaporation will reduce the temperature through the swamp cooler effect. You can get aquarium clip on blocks of fans designed to cool aquariums for about £10.
More effective but more work and cost (and less discrete) would be to get some old hose, curl it round in your bath, then fill the bath with water that is either cold or hot depending on whether you need to heat or chill your water. Run your nutes through the hose, it will heat or chill your water. If you keep the tap on and let the bathwater overflow out to the drain it will take the heat with it and be replaced with cooler water.
More effective but more costly would be to buy a tank for the purpose (which could be insulated) and use stainless steel piping (which will increase heat flow from the nutes). You could fix it to your mains pipes and have it run to your bath overflow.
More effective but more expensive would be to make some device to actively remove heat from your heat exchanger so you don’t have to have the hot or cold tap running. If you go down this route google ‘duty cycle’ when looking at your active heat removing device.
At this stage, you are not far from the cost and usability of just buying a nute chiller but whatever you can build will not be nearly as reliable or effective.
And so the next thing which works better and is more expensive is buying a chiller. I just looked and they can be got for about £70 so you should only be spending a portion of that so it is worth having something less effective and efficient.
You have not said, what is your budget?
2 Likes
A really cheap and effective method would be to order a couple peltier chips. A couple of am3 heatsinks and a 12v driver. Probably do it for around £10 if you play it smart
And you could have them kick on/off at set temps with a sonoff th16. Also cheap.
Already job done. Just remove the small fan. It’s that sides heatsink that cools
1 Like
What is your budget?
Currently we are guessing on how long your piece of string is…
I just got this I’m just waiting on the rest of the parts to make it work power suply and rad with fans the hot side is cooled with water supposed to be better than a heat sink and fan I mean what I’m doing is working perfectly fine but wont to make somthing that works I’m going to try a few different ways like putting the cold side directly in the water with a temperature controler or use it as is and have it blowing cold air on a lager rad
2 Likes
That’s the way to do it mate. You may have to drain your res. Cut a hole in the side and stick it through sealing with marine grade silicon. (That would be my method with a peltier cooler. I imagine similar to a heater you will get better results cooling from the bottom) a sonoff th16 is a temperature controller btw or humidity. Or both if you use a scene to switch another model
1 Like
I’ve been thinking about getting a $120 bar fridge of eBay and simply ripping out the compressor, controller and cold plate.
The thing about the small bar fridge/freezers is they simply use a cold plate where the freezer box is and let the cold air sink to keep the fridge at cool. So it would be reasonably straight forward to disassembl one and just place the cold plate in a res with a theromostat. Stuffed if I am paying $700 for a water chiller!
I’ve thought about using a peltier or two as a dehumidifier though… Only issue is they are really inefficient. Oh well can’t have it all I guess 