I have a drinking fountain, I need a chiller to dump cold nutes in a rdwc. If a hook a pump up to the water supply pumping from res to drinking fountain. Have a line coming out of drinking fountain going to 4 or 5 buckets with a 1 gph dripper on each. I figure run about 10 min every couple hours. The fountain will keep about 1 gal of nutes chilled at a time. Just something i've been pondering on. I Would like a little feed back on this before I devote this drinkin fountain to my room.
This is a cool idea.:thumbs-up: How did you come to possess a drinking fountain? This is interesting to me. opcorn-2:
I got 2, one is still in the box. I got them off a job I was on. They were temporary just for the workers. As we got the floors done we pulled out like 20 of them. The one I want to use never got plugged in. so I figure it should chill a gallon of water about every 20 min.
Insulating buckets Does anybody do this? If i'm gonna have chilled water seems like I would need to insulate the buckets or tubs the plants are in as well as the lines coming from the chiller.
Yep. Anything and everything you can do to keep the heat out of your nutes is a good thing. Oh and on the fountain chiller.... That will def help. Don't know how effective it will be as each garden is different but will absolutely have some positive impact. Now remember physics when thinking about your chiller. Energy does not dissappear. The heat in your nutes will come out of the chiller along with additional heat generated by the mechanical operation of the chiller itself. So remember this when you position your chiller. If you put your chiller inside the garden you will be adding heat to the atmosphere. Which will matriculate itself back into your nutes. So locating the chiller outside the garden is the only effective way of utilizing it. That tank inside the fountain will have a temp sensor that will tell the compressor when to cycle on and off. More than likely that setpoint will never be attained and the compressor will run continuously. This is not a bad thing. Just pointing out what I see is a likely outcome. I would hook it up like this: Pump in resy-> inlet on chilled water holding tank->outlet on chilled water holding tank back to resy. That's pretty obvious. Quite certain I'm not shedding any new light on things. But figured you'd like someone to concur with your conclusions. Retiree
Sounds very resourceful. Only thing that pops in my mind is how to control the temp. Not knowing anything about either hydro or the workings of a chiller, I would only assume that your temps have to be regulated. Would this be possible with this type of machine? ie temp control in the form of an on/off switch/controller? I hope you get that set up and working. I love seeing jimmy rigged shit that actually works :thumbs-up: GTWT :XXhippylove:
