Still running mine as well and it’s been working perfectly.
When we had the serious cold snap this past few weeks it got down to 55F in the lung room with the heat from the grows not able to keep up with the cold seeping in. During all of this the reservoir never moved from 68F, even with wind chills outside reaching -30F.
Are/were you an ICmag reader in the past - or have you come across the thread there on making “diy ac boxes”?
I need a smart option for cooling in a room where I can’t put in something with an obvious evap coil/radiator on the outside.
Edit: I meant “condenser”, not “evap”.
Not really. But the general concept is straight forward and there is not really a ‘secret’ sauce to it.
You’ll have to have something somewhere to exchange the heat. It doesn’t have to be a traditional radiator but it needs to have sufficient surface area and/or temperature delta and/or air flow to move the heat away. Radiators have a whole lot of surface area and it is why you see them used.
What’s in the op is an aquarium cooler repurposed to chill a tank of glycol.
There are probably a bunch of ways to conceal it, e.g. in a box, but you’d still need a method to move that heat out of that box.
Well, this thread, and one or two others like it, were focused on detailing how one would “box in” the hot side (usually) of a window ac, and then supply that box with an inlet and outlet to supply air (from outside/elsewhere) and remove that air (along with the heat) to outside/elsewhere.
I was just wondering about maybe doing that with water cooling after remembering this thread.
Ok, cool.
Sure, you could do something like that. Keep in mind, the efficiency of cooling will be dependent on the temperature difference at the heat exchanger. If the surroundings of the heat exchange gets too hot, you will not get the cooling you want and any cooling you do get will be inefficient.
In this case, the chiller is outside of the room where the heat is exchange with the surroundings. If one were to add a vent hood to it to move that heat somewhere else that would work.
I’m looking for an option where the heat can be ducted out of the area, say out a window, rather than the cool air being ducted to the room. So that the condenser unit/hot side can be inside the area/room and heat can be removed.
It seems every different style of ac, though, has a condensing unit meant to be outside (for obvious reasons). None of them duct the hot air out. Some duct cool air into various room, from a central location in a house, for example.
The only ones that duct fresh ambient air to the condenser and then remove that air back outside, are “portable acs”, which in general – suck.
This is tough. This room is going to be in deep (hot) shit pretty soon if I can’t figure somethin’ out.
Don’t mean to mess up your thread.
Yes! There’s a market there, eh?
Units that have a hot exhaust port do exist but they also tend to be pricey. As you’ve noted usually portable AC units. Mostly intended for industrial type of use.
FYI, so I recall Teco had a hydroponics intent chiller that had a duct collar but at the time it was difficult to get in the US.
Based on your comment about ducting, I thought I’d look again.
Well, it turns out that they now sell just the duct collar as a part that I can use on the chiller in the OP.
This just fits on top of the unit which is where the exhaust fan is located.
In case you’re interested, TECO has some good products. Although, chillers. So, for A/C, you’d need to pump this through an Icebox either directly or via a Glycol reservoir. That would be a bit of work to piece everything together.
This is pretty cool. Definitely some super ingenuity my friend. AWESOME 
Thank you. I can’t claim the general concept. Glycol chillers are used a lot in brewing and such to do similar things.
They are quite efficient and hold a lot of thermal capacity. Which means, even when the ambient temperature is very hot and the lights are full power, such a set-up can keep the temperature within a degree or so of the set-point even under a transient load. Overkill for most situations but perfect for others.
About three years in, running like a champ. I’ve run the chiller 24/7 over that period whether I have something running in the tent or not. I figured the cheap pumps that are in the glycol reservoir would have given up the ghost by now. Still going strong.