DIY water cooled dehumidifier

working on a diy water cooled dehumidifier to run off the 10,000 gallon cistern directly below my grow....I am a auto mechanic not an engineer so......Thoughts, comments, questions, suggestions concerns?

some info:

started off life as a royal sovereign 45 pint dehumidifier

Dehumidifier compressor/capacitor Plugged into a png-030 humidity controller with a dead band of 5%(prevent short cycling)....png-030 humidity controller plugged into inkbird 308 thermostat with temp sensor attached to the evaporator to run the defrost cycle when needed( inkbird 308 has an adjustable compressor time delay to prevent short cycling with the defrost cycle)....then the inkbird Thermostat plugs into the wall receptacle

PNG 030 has memory so it restores its previous settings whenever power is taken away then reapplied to it from the inkbird 308 thermostat(defrost cycle)

the fan is a 10”ac infinity Axial fan that is on a speed controller so I can dial in the air flow across the coils.

plan to drywall(green board) the rooms this spring

pump is a pond master Model 36 feeding a 1/2hp penguin window unit chiller which feeds a long 1” pvc manifold with 4 separate 1/2” ports(2 - 8” hydro innovations ice boxes/6” ac infinity s6’s faand 2 water cooled dehumifiers) then back to the 10,000 gallon cistern directly below the grow...return manifold is 1 1/4” pvc with 4 corresponding 1/2” ports...I’m thinking I’ll get around 800 gph of flow when it’s all said and done but do have a gph meter to install to verify flow rate

in the winter the window chiller is removed from the garage window and ran inside the garage to use the reject heat to heat the garage

Pipes are insulated And proper drainage in place to combat certain dew point complications.

this grow also has a separate water cooling loop for the summer time that runs through aluminum waterblocks w/ HLG qb96 led’s attached to them(dew point permitting) but that’s a whole separate conversation

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How do you intend to run the water over the condenser coil without it getting all over the evaporator coil (where the condensate is pulled) as they are stacked against each other as in many dehu's.

First thought location or at least weather/climate
I'm easily confused but here i am

Should have been more clear with my description....The chilled water runs through the heat exchanger that is after the condenser....so the air goes evaporator——condenser——chilled water heat exchanger——fan(pulling through the 3 separate coils)

Southern Michigan climate

crosby87 said:

Should have been more clear with my description....The chilled water runs through the heat exchanger that is after the condenser....so the air goes evaporator——condenser——chilled water heat exchanger——fan(pulling through the 3 separate coils)

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Do you plan to measure the inlet and outlet temperature to determine how much heat is being pulled by the water cooler?

white plastic, panda its called is really reflective and easy to clean, 6 mill. Unless you plan on painting walls, polly is cheaper. 90-95% reflective

crosby87 said:

Southern Michigan climate

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Same climate, great lakes are a b, pm is rampant around here

Renfro said:

Do you plan to measure the inlet and outlet temperature to determine how much heat is being pulled by the water cooler?

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I wasn’t but this is a good suggestion...I have a gang of those lacrosse gateway mobile alert wireless temp sensors that have a dry probe that would be perfect

Southernontariogrower said:

white plastic, panda its called is really reflective and easy to clean, 6 mill. Unless you plan on painting walls, polly is cheaper. 90-95% reflective

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I have panda film up already....i like it too but it’s kinda beat from trying to get gorilla tape off here and there is a lot of electricity and water in there. All the electric is gfci protected but I still want the fire protection of drywall....

Southernontariogrower said:

Same climate, great lakes are a b, pm is rampant around here

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pm, budrot and white Web like mold towards the center of big buds has been an ongoing battle....Im hoping this chilled water loop going to the ice boxes and the dehumidifiers plus the separate somewhat chilled water loop going to the led’s allows me to slow my ventilation fans way down, run the dehu more(lower rh), run bottled co2 and still keep my temps in check

Hey, just happened across this thread, it doesn't seem like there are too many of us running DIY HVAC experiments, so I wanted to see how it was going a couple years on. I'm working on something similar. That is extremely fortunate to have that large cistern. What sort of temps was the water coming from the cistern? I just saw a video on Linus Tech Tips where he was cooling a basement server room the same way, they were planning on using his swimming pool and had plumbed in heat exchangers when it was being built, but abandoned the idea for some reason or another. I built a sort of AC/dehu with 12 x 15 water to air exchanger with a 12" fan and 2 Hayden transmission coolers to use on the outlets of my Quest dehu. My source of cold is just a small reservoir in an unconditioned area of my house for Maine winters and most likely a small freezer chest for summer. Thats great you've got the HLG Elite96, I got a bunch of those while they were clearing them out, the rest of my lights are the QB288 V1 that they were unloading for $30. The 96's are great because the V1 have no red diodes, I started out running them at 200w and they should have been probably 2-3ft higher than the 288s, so I ended up connecting 2 per 200w driver. I took them out of the room for a bit to experiment with a more blue spectrum and yield dropped significantly without any discernable increase in quality.

Well after a couple years these unit’s performed flawlessly. These dehu’s could run all day with little to no increase in temps of the tent. I wound up using a 1.5hp eco plus chiller that fit the bill perfectly. I ran my liquid cooled qb96s and dehu as hard as I wanted in the dead of summer….2 6” ice boxes in each tent was sufficient to control temps since there was very little heat load from everything being liquid cooled. I didn’t run a sealed room but I could have. Recently took all of it out of service as my kids are getting older but the whole experiment was a huge success