I put some prefilters in my tent intake and it gave me an idea.

TerrapinBlazin

TerrapinBlazin

Well-Known Member
I’ve been having a lot of trouble with dog hair getting sucked into my tent and stuck to my colas. I’ve also been having a lot of trouble with heat and low humidity in my brutal New Mexico summer. I put these prefilters in the intake ports of my tent and it made me think I could take this a step further and use it as evaporative cooling. So really all I would need is the right media and a way to rig up some water reservoir and a regulator to drip it into the media.

Cooling the room would cost a fortune. I have a central evap cooler but it doesn’t cool my grow room worth a fuck. However I’m thinking there’s a way to rig up something to cool my flowering tent for pretty much free.

Has anyone ever attempted anything like this? All I would have to do is replace the filter media in the pic with a synthetic swamp cooler pad and feed water into it.
16B635EF-B90E-49E4-BF4A-1E645A260A08.jpeg
 
TerrapinBlazin

TerrapinBlazin

Well-Known Member
I have 3, and two of them are horrible shedders. I brush them weekly and between me and my girlfriend we vacuum the house almost daily. I think this will keep the dog hair out just fine, but if I could use this setup to cool my bud tent without running another AC in there that would be choice.
 
Kassiopeija

Kassiopeija

Well-Known Member
well if you clock up the air-ins like this Im not seeing how you could possibly create enough airstream to get the heat out...?
 
TerrapinBlazin

TerrapinBlazin

Well-Known Member
Shamblychumb said:
Blow his/her fur out with an air hose. Its shedding season. Have to do it with my huskies
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I got all the dog hair out. It won’t be a problem anymore.


Kassiopeija said:
well if you clock up the air-ins like this Im not seeing how you could possibly create enough airstream to get the heat out...?
Click to expand...
I don’t know what part of the world you live in but I live in a dry desert climate. A common form of cooling out here is called evaporative or swamp cooling. A swamp cooler is basically a big blower inside a box. The bottom of the box is a reservoir with water and a pump, and the sides are made of a filter media that absorbs water. When the hot air passes through the moist media, the air gets cooled.

Now in regards to my tent, I have a pretty powerful exhaust on it — a 6 inch inline fan with an intake filter that blows out through a carbon filter. So the air is pulled in through the ports on the bottom of the tent (which have the same prefilter as the fan), up through the canopy, lights, and then out the fan and filter.

So maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned the dog hair issue but I felt it was relevant because it inspired my idea about cooling the tent. They make a synthetic filter media for swamp coolers that’s pretty similar to the stuff I have in there, except it’s more absorbent and antimicrobial.

My thinking is that the synthetic swamp cooler pad will not only keep the dog hair out, but keep enough water in the intake that the air will get cooled as it’s pulled into the tent and maybe slightly increase the humidity. My exhaust fan is more than powerful enough to suck plenty of air through the cooler pad, so all I have to figure out is how to get the water into the pad at the right rate so that it evaporates but doesn’t completely dry out or come out so fast that it makes a mess.

I think this would work but it’s also only a real issue for me for about 3 months out of the year. I also can’t run another AC on these shitty 15 amp circuits in my grow room. If I could rig up some simple, tidy evaporative cooling for my flower tent, like with just a couple reservoirs hanging off the side and some tubes and ball valves that would be the shit. Sorry if this idea is kinda out there. Got this interesting combination of kratom, xanax, and dispensary distillate in my head and it’s got me thinking about some funky ideas.
 
Kassiopeija

Kassiopeija

Well-Known Member
TerrapinBlazin said:
I don’t know what part of the world you live in but I live in a dry desert climate. A common form of cooling out here is called evaporative or swamp cooling. A swamp cooler is basically a big blower inside a box. The bottom of the box is a reservoir with water and a pump, and the sides are made of a filter media that absorbs water. When the hot air passes through the moist media, the air gets cooled.
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auha ok I understand, you seem to deal exactly with the opposite problems than what's up here in central EU. By running the air through the water sould also your air dryness a bit, sounds good to me in this case. Yes in this case it wouldn't make much difference as your ambient air seems to be hot already...

Well, simply test it out? How would one calculate? It may fluctuate from temperature variance... you could build something underneath that picks up the drain, or further evaporates it...
 
TerrapinBlazin

TerrapinBlazin

Well-Known Member
Yeah it’s something I’d like to figure out. I’ve got a huge VPD in my tent during the summer months (37% humidity and just shy of 90f inside the tent with the lights on) and this could solve the issue completely by lowering temps and increasing humidity. I can’t run an AC in there without running an extension cord across my house, plus I don’t want to pay for it, so if this fixes everything without pulling any extra current or running up my electric bill it’s a total win.
 
Renfro

Renfro

Well-Known Member
TerrapinBlazin said:
I got all the dog hair out. It won’t be a problem anymore.




I don’t know what part of the world you live in but I live in a dry desert climate. A common form of cooling out here is called evaporative or swamp cooling. A swamp cooler is basically a big blower inside a box. The bottom of the box is a reservoir with water and a pump, and the sides are made of a filter media that absorbs water. When the hot air passes through the moist media, the air gets cooled.

Now in regards to my tent, I have a pretty powerful exhaust on it — a 6 inch inline fan with an intake filter that blows out through a carbon filter. So the air is pulled in through the ports on the bottom of the tent (which have the same prefilter as the fan), up through the canopy, lights, and then out the fan and filter.

So maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned the dog hair issue but I felt it was relevant because it inspired my idea about cooling the tent. They make a synthetic filter media for swamp coolers that’s pretty similar to the stuff I have in there, except it’s more absorbent and antimicrobial.

My thinking is that the synthetic swamp cooler pad will not only keep the dog hair out, but keep enough water in the intake that the air will get cooled as it’s pulled into the tent and maybe slightly increase the humidity. My exhaust fan is more than powerful enough to suck plenty of air through the cooler pad, so all I have to figure out is how to get the water into the pad at the right rate so that it evaporates but doesn’t completely dry out or come out so fast that it makes a mess.

I think this would work but it’s also only a real issue for me for about 3 months out of the year. I also can’t run another AC on these shitty 15 amp circuits in my grow room. If I could rig up some simple, tidy evaporative cooling for my flower tent, like with just a couple reservoirs hanging off the side and some tubes and ball valves that would be the shit. Sorry if this idea is kinda out there. Got this interesting combination of kratom, xanax, and dispensary distillate in my head and it’s got me thinking about some funky ideas.
Click to expand...
With evaporative cooling (as a humidifier) the only real risk is water getting where it shouldn't be. If you can build a good setup that recirculates the water over the "pad" capturing it all with perhaps a float valve to keep it topped off then it can be a very effective means of bumping up RH% provided you aren't exhausting. There in lies the issue, since you have to exhaust the tent for cooling you can't achieve a bump of more than a few % RH.
 
TerrapinBlazin

TerrapinBlazin

Well-Known Member
Yeah that explains my situation pretty well. All I’m really hoping for is a lower VPD on my leaves during the summer months, so I don’t don’t think I’ll have to raise the humidity that much if the process makes the interior of the tent 10 degrees cooler. Maybe running a humidifier in the room will help a bit, but once the heat drops off and the monsoons come in another couple months it should help keep the water from getting ripped out of my leaves.
 
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