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Fan + water=cooling?

  • Thread starter kentosaurs
  • Start date
I heard somewhere in forums that if you spray your neps and give them wind/fan it would help to reduce the temps....Well i feel thats possible since at night nowadays its quite chilly when the wind blows after a rain or during....So has anyone try it??

Other than that, is there such thing as a battery operated fan which is strong enough to blow some of the neps??? They aren't quite big though..At night sometimes the air is quite still soooo i thought of this..

If you have tried it or at least know stuff about it please share with me..
 
You do get a little bit of cooling from evaporation, but a spray bottle and fan are not going to give you any noticeable drop in temps - certainly not enough to make it worth your trouble. Unless, perhaps, you lived in a desert area where the ambient humidity was extremely dry (<25% maybe.)
What you want is a swamp cooler, or an evaporative humidifier (not ultrasonic, not warm-mist.) An swamp cooler is basically a larger-than-usual evaporative humidifier that is built to take in warmer, dry air from the outside instead of recirculating inside air.
A swamp cooler would be preferable, since they're specialized to maximize the cooling effect, but both work in precisely the same way. Uncooled air is circulated through a porous or spongy wick that's saturated with water (preferably cool water, but not necessary.) Although the air isn't at a boiling temperature, it still exerts a pressure on liquid water to evaporate, which is proportionate to the surface area of the liquid water, the relative humidity of the air, and the difference in temperature between the water and air. The drier the input air the better - cooling stops altogether when the RH is 100% and is dramatically reduced close to 100%.
When liquid water becomes a gas, it takes some heat from the things around it to stop moving as a liquid and take to the air. Although much of this heat absorbed makes the evaporating water warmer, there's a part of the heat energy that literally turned it into a gas, which is stored inside it and doesn't add to the physical temperature. (When the vapor turns back into a liquid or solid, that energy is released.) So the air that comes out of the swamp cooler is really cooler than when it went in - it contains the same amount of energy, but some of it is bound up and unable to warm you. (Or your plants, as the case may be.)
A fan and spraying water does the same thing, but at such a small scale that you would almost never notice it (unless you want to set up a sprayer irrigation system that runs all the time, but most of the cooling from that would probably be convective, I believe, which is different.) A specially designed wick, even at a smaller size than the total surface area of your plants, can do a much better job at cooling.
~Joe
 
Here is my highland cooling setup (excuse the clean room!)
airduct.jpg


There is currently a 5" 65 CFM computer fan in the window mounted to a "duct collar" (flat piece of metal with a 5" hole in it) the collar is mounted to a flexible aluminum duct allowing the air from outside through the 4" flexible aluminum dryer vent duct to the plant shelf. Right now the window is only open a little bit. When the temps are too cold I shut the window and the air at the surface of the window is cold enough to bring the temps down.

At each taped area is a duct "T" which allows some of the cool air to empty out onto one of the three shelves where the plants grow. The top of the duct is an " L" which empties the last of the fresh air, also it get's the most fresh air so despite physics/thermal dynamics/whatever the top shelf is actually the coldest! lol

Currently I only have a few CPs in some covered tubs on shelf #2 the rest are succulents but when I switch the top two shelves over to HL plants next spring I will simply glue a 2" diameter hose into the output hole of an ultrasonic humidifier from the pharmacy and cut a hole in the air duct and place the humidifiers output hose into the duct so I'll have cool wet air blowing into the shelf. This is how I cooled & humidified my HL Neps when I grew them before. It's very easy to do this cooling project if you live where it gets cold enough.

People in the south can do the same but instead of pulling air from outside which could be too warm place a "wide vent" output on the rear end/window side of the PC fan and place the wide vent potion over the output of a 10,000 BTU window A/C unit. This costs a lot to run (I did this for HL Neps from mid June-mid Sept) but you'll get your cool temps.
 
At each taped area is a duct "T" which allows some of the cool air to empty out onto one of the three shelves where the plants grow. The top of the duct is an " L" which empties the last of the fresh air, also it get's the most fresh air so despite physics/thermal dynamics the top shelf is actually the coldest! lol

That's no "L" at the top -
you-lie-2-2.jpg

Your duct is obviously an "E"! Or is it an "Æ"?
Aha! I should've known; it's Phonecian:
64px-PhoenicianE-01.svg.png

~Joe
 
Here is my highland cooling setup (excuse the clean room!)
airduct.jpg


There is currently a 5" 65 CFM computer fan in the window mounted to a "duct collar" (flat piece of metal with a 5" hole in it) the collar is mounted to a flexible aluminum duct allowing the air from outside through the 4" flexible aluminum dryer vent duct to the plant shelf. Right now the window is only open a little bit. When the temps are too cold I shut the window and the air at the surface of the window is cold enough to bring the temps down.

At each taped area is a duct "T" which allows some of the cool air to empty out onto one of the three shelves where the plants grow. The top of the duct is an " L" which empties the last of the fresh air, also it get's the most fresh air so despite physics/thermal dynamics/whatever the top shelf is actually the coldest! lol

Currently I only have a few CPs in some covered tubs on shelf #2 the rest are succulents but when I switch the top two shelves over to HL plants next spring I will simply glue a 2" diameter hose into the output hole of an ultrasonic humidifier from the pharmacy and cut a hole in the air duct and place the humidifiers output hose into the duct so I'll have cool wet air blowing into the shelf. This is how I cooled & humidified my HL Neps when I grew them before. It's very easy to do this cooling project if you live where it gets cold enough.

People in the south can do the same but instead of pulling air from outside which could be too warm place a "wide vent" output on the rear end/window side of the PC fan and place the wide vent potion over the output of a 10,000 BTU window A/C unit. This costs a lot to run (I did this for HL Neps from mid June-mid Sept) but you'll get your cool temps.

:hail::hail::hail:
That's how I can get Highlanders! :-D You sir, just made my day.
 
Swords did another thread several years ago with a spiffy diagram of an AC/window intake, humidifier and ductwork. That method helped me out a lot until I figured out that household conditions in this part of the country are actually really good for highlanders. :p
~Joe
 
Joe, you keep your house 50*F at night!? Staying at your house would be like camping! lol

I'll try and whip up a new diagram for highlanders that should be more informative than my photo, I doubt I'll be able to find the old one.
 
So would 60F be low enough to grow one of these or would 50F be more ideal?
highlander.jpg
 
60*F seemed fine for most of my highlanders in summer. The N. aristolochioides was the one which I remember did not like July & August at all. Not pitchering those months and the oldest pitchers dying far sooner than they should. On the hottest nights I couldn't get down to 50*F even with the AC. But I always went for as cold as I could get so the plants were really acclimated to those temps, even down to 40*F on mid-winter nights. Had I started them with warmer temps perhaps they would have done fine with 60*F year round as long as there was ample air flow, humidity and daytime temps don't go over 85*F. However I have no experience growing them that warm for any length of time other than those few months in summer.

I really doubt Joe lives in a 50*F meat locker (or does he?!) so he must have some info on how warm they'll take if he can grow them in da house!
 
  • #10
Joe, you keep your house 50*F at night!? Staying at your house would be like camping! lol

I'll try and whip up a new diagram for highlanders that should be more informative than my photo, I doubt I'll be able to find the old one.

During the winter, unless I'm sick, I keep the heaters in my bedroom about as low as they can go without frost/condensation forming on the windows. During the day I'll usually turn them up a little bit to help lower the humidity and freshen the air (the windows are always cracked, but when it gets really cold I can't air the place out as much because the outdoor air is so saturated in these parts.) I'm not sure if it gets down to 50, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was there or lower occasionally. I keep my office around 68-70 (lowlanders in there,) and the common area of the house at about 60 (unless the woodstove is burning, then I can't get it much lower than 80,) and my bedroom is always significantly colder. Keeping my bedroom cold helps me to not wake up repeatedly during the night. I'll have to get a second high/low thermometer and monitor it this year.
I like the cold. When I was younger, I would walk to the schoolbus at like 6AM in shorts and a T-shirt, in Fall/Winter Portland weather - temps just a few degrees above freezing, nearly 100% humidity, and light rain. I would be so warm by the time I made it to the bus stop that I would have to take my backpack off just to get some extra air, and my scalp/palms/chest/shoulders would steam vigorously. (When I used to play Dance Dance Revolution with my friends in high school, they called it my "dance energy.") To this day, when I do enough exercise to begin raising my heart rate, my surface body temperature goes through the roof - the heat from my palms can be felt from several inches away. :D
~Joe
 
  • #11
Ah another hot blood. I'm like that too but since I live on the second floor I can turn off my heat and still have the condo be 65*F+ from the people downstairs unless I open a window and put a fan in it. I always have to have a fan going but rarely open the windows once it gets down to frost level. I'm always afraid the windows might crack, they're freakin expensive!
 
  • #12
Ooh, that is one thing I miss about my noisy old apartment. Third-story full-sun balcony, vaulted ceilings and an old lady downstairs that kept her place at 75 degrees year-round. Got kind of hard to take in the summer though - the vaulted ceilings were under the western side of the roof, and with our long summer days the place would just bake.
I think I kind of broke my tolerance for cold when working at a grocery store in high school. There was a walled-in concrete loading dock that would get to like 105 in the summer, and I would be unloading pallets of frozen and perishable food to the fridges and freezers, in a heavy knit cotton work shirt. My nerves seem permanently traumatized - ever since then, I sweat when I get cold.
~Joe
 
  • #13
That is my temp situation exactly! lol

15 foot vaulted roofs on the western side and a family with radiant floor heating downstairs.
 
  • #14
Radiant floor heating? Fancy. I wouldn't mind some of that for my house.
~Joe
 
  • #15
So would 60F be low enough to grow one of these or would 50F be more ideal?
highlander.jpg

Highlander, get it . . . Highlander . . . Aye McCloud :-))

I kinda liked the Kurgan myself:

acb3.jpg


Now back to our regular television program . . .

E
 
  • #16
I am planning to try and use my basement to keep highlanders. There is a small window I could attach a vent to and bring in cold air and let out warm air. Also the entire spot is made of stone that makes my feet numb in winter and fall. I wouldn't be surprised if I could get it into the 50's for most of the year. I only worry about July, June, and August when the temps seem to stay in the 70's at night. I was thinking a fogger and fan could help push the temps into the upper 60's. Any ideas how to cool it more? (without some complex array of tubes and fans? XD)
 
  • #17
A basement would be great, I live on the second story so getting cool temps is a chore!

I don't really know how you'd get cool temps by blowing warm air around in summer. If you turn on a fan in a hot room with no incoming cold air it doesn't really cool the air it just blows the air around and that helps evaporate the sweat off you, making you feel cooler but a thermostat will stay the same. For a basement setup, a window AC doesn't "have" to be in a window but make sure you have a tray under it for any dripping condensation.

The fan & duct is very easy to put together maybe $30 if you have to buy everything. If someone gives you an old PC fan you've already cut the cost by probly 1/2 and then that black tape I used (Gorilla Grip) is your most expensive purchase. Really, I implore people to get the Gorilla Grip duct tape for this duct project, it's the only stuff that never let's go even in high humidity. Silver tape works for a while but this stuff works "forever". Make sure it's where you want it when you smooth it down! lol

I don't have any exhaust setup in my shelf but I am going to cover it with insulation to help it retain the cold even more than just the plastic panda film covering it.
 
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