Made progress overall on the build-out:
- Buckets are in a tent, lights installed, instrumentation wired-up and running.
- Glycol chiller built, installed, tested.
- Controller software written and is in a first pass state. Software is capable of logging all of the sensors and controlling the light intensities and spectra. If things don’t work out, I can set-up a disco.
- Test runs of the system for the past month or so while progressively writing software.
- Dissolved oxygen tests have shown some interesting results. @anon32470837 has been helping to sift through some of the data, we’ve been going back and forth tuning with the results are forthcoming.
Some representative plots from the system during test:
Environmental (Red is in the tent, green is outside of the tent):
Solution:
Lights (1 of 4):
Things on the short term agenda:
- Need more power. I can’t run the lights full-bore on a 15-Amp circuit. Need to wire in something more substantial for safety.
- There are four primary LED lamps with exhaust ports. They are wired two to a series. The temperatures at the LED plate will easily exceed 140F for anything over about 1/2 intensity at the second LED lamp in the series (140F is my limit). Also, even though the heat from the lamps are being exhausted (sealed room), the radiant energy brings up the ambient temperature to about +10F over the exterior room temperature at 50% power. I need to interconnect an icebox to the lamp and chiller to ensure temperatures stay under control when it’s hot out. Or, something along those lines.
- Document the glycol chiller set-up and performance, per request.
edit: item 3 completed, here: