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Highland chamber thought...

Ok; I was sitting around thinking of waus to cool down a highland chamber for proper nighttime temp, when all of a sudden one of my neighbours came out carrying a refridgerator.

This gor me thinking; If I was to install a glass window in the ref door, and installed a timer and a nighttime thermostat linked to the cooling elements, and a daytime thermostat linked to some terrarium heaters, along with lighting, that just might work...
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I could even custom-fit a tray through the roof to set a cobra in for root-cooling
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Stupid, but i still had to post
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/Quensel
 
Something similar has been done with chest style freezers and replacing the flip up lid with transparent material etc etc.

You could do something with a fridge but there are a couple things to work out..
1. You would need lighting at several points within the unit because of the height. Having the lights inside the unit might cause problems with heat so you may need a daytime thermostat to turn the unit on during the day. I don't think a heater as you mentioned would be needed at all.
2. Refridgerators forcabley pull humidity out of the air. You will need some sort of method to replace it because of the forced dry cold air issue. An ultrasonic humidifier hooked to a humidistat would work but you would have to figure out how to plumb it. Ideally the air entering the grow area would be rehumidified prior to contacting the plants. Swords could tell you more as basically your cooling a grow chamber with an external AC unit. (Chest freezers don't have this problem because they are sealed and there is no air exchange between the freezer compartment and the cooling unit.)

Tony
 
instead of using a thermostat you could use a DUAL stage Ranco controller. Those are very acturate and cheap to boot. I have a single stage one and a dual stage Ranco controller and they habe never failed me in the three years I've been using them. Oh yea and guess what? They're water proof/weather proof !
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Where can I get those thingies then? Here in sweden, I never see ANY of the stuff available in the states... plus I can't really order from the U.S cos of the 110/220v issue
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hey another thingies person! (inside joke for Tony) Um with the 110/220V generally you can ask the company to wire a device for 220v for a small or no extra fee.
 
Things like thermostats and humidistats can be bought from greenhouse supply stores and sometimes the do it yourself / construction supply stores The ones from the DIY places may not be waterproof but I simply wired them to the apropriate power cords and covered them in waterproof aquarium silicone after it dried it was ready to go and been doing fine for 2 years now.

I'm sure there are Swedish orchid growing societies. Try finding their webpage and see if they have any links to Swedish orchid growing nurseries, or even links to other swedish orchid growing hobbists websites. If they show their greenhouse in the pics then they will have the climate control equiptment. They should be kind enough to direct you to where they buy their equiptment, especially if they think you might come back and buy some orchids!
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Here is a quickie description of my highland setup in a similar recent post:
This would be a cool highland chamber!
 
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