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Highland chamber with an A/C

Hi all,

I'm think about building a highland nepenthes grow chamber but wanted to run the design by you all. A highland chamber seems necessary in central Florida.

I was think about building an insulated plywood box with dimensions someway around 5' long, 2-3' wide, and 3-4' high. I wanted to mount a small 5000 BTU window air conditioning unit to the side to provide the cooling. It will obviously have lights and a humidifier. I thought I could give it sliding glass doors in the front.

Will the A/C be able to cool down the chamber to atleast 60 F degrees if the ambient air is 75 F degrees (average summer night temperature)?

Please give suggestions. Any help will be great.

Chris
 
I think that should do it. swords has a setup somewhat like this - there's an article about it on his webpage here. I was going to do something along the same lines, but I didn't have the money this season, so I just put my highland terrarium next to a really cold window instead.
Best luck,
~Joe
 
Only concern I can think of is that A/C remove humidity from the air.
Not sure how others have handled that before.
Kirk
Fitchburg, Mass
 
There have been many ideas like this around. I have seen some using freezers. Some using ACs. One of the freezer methods seemed to do great. He was growing Masdivalias ( orchids) that are cool growers and humidity lovers. They seemed to do fine. His case looked outstanding. If you have humidity problems just add a humidifyer. Also make sure you set it up with a thermastat that way the AC is not running constantly and it should work fine.
 
If you put a pipe and inject it with humidified air coming from the A/C then it will work. Otherwise you will cause dessication. Basically fabricate a duct to the front of the A/C and then somewhere make it so the humidified air is blown in front of the A/C.
 
A long while back, Swords (He ain't posted in a long while) made a couple posts with pics and a description of his A/C-Humidifier-Grow chamber set up. Do a search and you should be able to find one of them.
 
^ That's what I linked to. It's an A/C with an ultrasonic humidifier to moisten the air, blown into a terrarium. If you use the A/C on external air, it won't dessicate it too much because it's not being recycled, and the humidifier makes sure it's moist enough even for picky species. It's everything you could hope for. From swords' site - nepentheshouse.com
~Joe
 
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