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Terrarium Setup & Pics

  • #61
Thanks Rob! It certainly won't help the coolant get any cooler, but it will definitely dissipate heat faster, which in turn means that the system will hopefully have that much more heat-zapping potential once my room turns into an oven this summer!

A few more pics - I've added some neighbors (and, please excuse the crappy iPhone pics)
fb12d09a.jpg

I put a pothos plant on top of a takeout container lid on the reservoir of my cooler. It looks neat, and the pot will act as insulation! Temps in my terrarium currently mid-60s with an ambient temperature of 70-ish (cooling system only kicks in at night with these ambient temps). RH is steady above 80%.

Funny, I notice my humidifier works MUCH harder to keep the humidity up when it's set at 85% instead of 80%. At 85% I need to refill it every two days. I can easily go three or four days if I keep my Hygrotherm set to 80% RH.

You'll also notice a few more empty spaces in the terrarium! That's because I'm making room for a few new arrivals currently on their way :cool: most notably a N. ventricosa x hamata and a N. burbidgae x edwardsiana.

Some of the plants went here:
18c3a0c6.jpg

Once I add a humidifier to the area, this windowsill should actually become an acceptable spot to grow LL Neps.

The rest of the plants went here:
a1ffd76f.jpg

A good ol' tray of dews & pings
 
  • #62
Everything looks great Garroch! How is the cooler working for you?
 
  • #63
So far so good. Depending on how warm my room is at night my cooler seems to be able to drop my terrarium down to 55-62 degrees. I'm still nervous about the summer though. If I find my system struggling to keep things cooler than 68-70 degrees overnight I might have to bail and invest in an aquarium chiller.

I also ordered some insulation panels online, so I can insulate the side & back walls of my terrarium to help retain cool temperatures if need be. We'll see how that goes.

---------- Post added at 05:00 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:53 PM ----------

The thing that's bugging me right now is my new Ceph. I repotted it to separate it from a Sarr, but I believe I ended up stressing the hell out of it, and now it's mad at me. I really hope this guy pulls through. It'll be a looker once it reaches adulthood, I can tell.
 
  • #64
So far so good. Depending on how warm my room is at night my cooler seems to be able to drop my terrarium down to 55-62 degrees. I'm still nervous about the summer though. If I find my system struggling to keep things cooler than 68-70 degrees overnight I might have to bail and invest in an aquarium chiller.

I also ordered some insulation panels online, so I can insulate the side & back walls of my terrarium to help retain cool temperatures if need be. We'll see how that goes.

---------- Post added at 05:00 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:53 PM ----------

The thing that's bugging me right now is my new Ceph. I repotted it to separate it from a Sarr, but I believe I ended up stressing the hell out of it, and now it's mad at me. I really hope this guy pulls through. It'll be a looker once it reaches adulthood, I can tell.

If you need colder temperatures, why not bypass the thermostat on the cooler with an external one like I did. Then it will allow you to turn the temps way lower than the device would normally be allowed to go. Could save you 500-700 bucks for a chiller.
 
  • #65
If you need colder temperatures, why not bypass the thermostat on the cooler with an external one like I did. Then it will allow you to turn the temps way lower than the device would normally be allowed to go. Could save you 500-700 bucks for a chiller.

How would you bypass the thermometer? Also, can you take a look at the water cooler that I got? I am not sure what to do.
 
  • #66
@rob - actually yeah, never thought of that. That's the part of your step-by-step instructions that made my head spin. Thanks for pointing that out! How would you go about doing that?

My concern with this whole rig is that while the cooling liquid might be cold as hell, the radiator can't exchange the heat efficiently enough to keep temps 20-25 degrees below ambient in the summer. We'll just wait and see! But yeah, step one will be to bypass that thermostat, so I'd love to hear more about how you did it.

@heli - I looked at your cooler. Looks nice. Though I'm not sure what you're confused about now. Two of us wrote pretty detailed step-by-step instructions with pics ;) Anyway if you have specific questions I'd be happy to do my best to answer them, but seems to me that you've got what you need to get crackin' on building a cooler rig of your own.
 
  • #67
I guess I am confused where I put the pump and tubes. Is there anything else I need to remove or is what I am looking at the reservoir?

---------- Post added at 12:42 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:40 PM ----------

oh waiittt... is that small protrusion where I put the tube?
 
  • #68
Ah. Well since we established that you can't mount hose barbs in place of taps on the front of your unit (since your unit is a push-button dispenser without taps, fancypants), the tubing and such will run directly in and out of the top of your reservoir.

So - stick the pump in the reservoir, hook some tubing up to it, and connect the other end of the tubing to your rad.

From your rad, connect another piece of tubing and run that tube directly to the reservoir and leave it loose. The water returning from your rad will spill right back into the reservoir to get cooled down and sucked up again.

Now - you could do what I did and put some coils of copper tubing in the reservoir (be careful, if you bend copper tubing too much it'll just crimp, AND it's a pain in the *** to cut without a proper tubing cutter) and have the return line pump water through the coil before it empties into the reservoir. That'll help keep temperature distribution within the reservoir more even & alleviates the possibility that the warm water coming back from the rad will get sucked right back up by the pump before having a chance to cool back down. Make sense?
 
  • #69
Ok thanks, so the water cooler cools the water directly in the tank? Thanks for the help, im going to be ordering the rad and fan next.
 
  • #70
Yep! The walls of the reservoir are what the compressor works so hard to cool down. At that point the fluid inside the reservoir can't help but get cold too!

I just "modded" my windowsill setup... threw down some egg crate to elevate my Neps above any standing water. Gonna put them on the drip system I had set up on my old grow rack...cha ching. Threw my mini humidifier in there too. Should be a good spot for som LL Nep action. If anyone has any LL cuttings to spare.... you know who to call :cool:

DSC01411.jpg

Just a couple of ventratas there for now (or more specifically N. Deroose alata, if you believe they exist). They want neighbors!

DSC01412.jpg

Common as they are, I just love the shape of ventrata pitchers
 
  • #71
Awesome plants, and amazing terrarium! Makes me seriously regret getting rid of my old terrarium (had a tortoise in it, so no plants were ever in it :( )
 
  • #72
Ok, with some plier work I got it!
IMG_0081.jpg
 
  • #73
LOL wrong thread ;)

But nice work!
 
  • #74
now the steps you posted look a lot easier. :lol: To work now I guess
 
  • #75
@gill_za - earlier you had asked about the temps of the coolant at idle and under load. I just went out and got a thermometer.

Here's the deal: at idle, the fluid is a chilly 42F. After only 10 minutes of work, however, the fluid is up to 55 degrees. :censor:

If this thing can't keep up with the added load this summer I'm not gonna be in a good spot. Gonna bypass the stock thermostat to see if I can get this stuff a little colder....
 
  • #76
Mine seems to periodically turn off which I assume is when the water is at the desired temp, what your saying is make it so it wont turn off and keep cooling it further?
 
  • #77
@gill_za - earlier you had asked about the temps of the coolant at idle and under load. I just went out and got a thermometer.

Here's the deal: at idle, the fluid is a chilly 42F. After only 10 minutes of work, however, the fluid is up to 55 degrees. :censor:

If this thing can't keep up with the added load this summer I'm not gonna be in a good spot. Gonna bypass the stock thermostat to see if I can get this stuff a little colder....

Interesting. Is the temperature in the terrarium stable after 10 minutes?
 
  • #78
No, the temperature continues to fall. It goes down by a degree of so every 10 minutes.

My temperature drop just kicked in about 45 minutes ago. At this point, temps have fallen from 65 degrees this afternoon to 59 and will likely settle at 54. The fluid itself is reading about 53 degrees.
 
  • #79
@rob - actually yeah, never thought of that. That's the part of your step-by-step instructions that made my head spin. Thanks for pointing that out! How would you go about doing that?

It'll really depend on what type of controller your cooler uses.

Mine used this type:

$(KGrHqN,!k0E2EWLN4WpBNifysBkHw~~_35.JPG


There is a little switch on it, you can see it and when you push on it, the compressor turns on (I put a pic of it on my waklthrough, but I can get a better shot if you like with some more detail). So what I did was really simple. I pushed the switch up which turns the compressor on, and then I jammed a screw into the gap to hold the switch in that position.

Then I bought one of these:

tn2_large_a19aat-2c070809120350.jpg


It's a Johnson Controls Fridge Thermostat. Essentially you plug the plug from your cooler right into this baby, then place the probe into the water, set the dial on the controller to the temp you want and you're done.

I'll try and get some more pics of the bypass I did on the thermostat tonight.
 
  • #80
Ah the screw in the thermostat! I remember now. Makes sense.

So riddle me this - do you think it's worth it to invest another $50 in a thermostat to allow the coolant to get a few degrees cooler when the system reaches equilibrium with my terrarium within a matter of minutes anyway? I suppose there's no way to know unless I try, but I suspect the best thing to do here would be to try and increase the *rate* at which heat can be wicked away from my terrarium; not lowering the minimum temperature the system can achieve after several hours of idling...
 
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