Advice needed on a couple thoughts involving DWC and home made chillers

[Bill091784]

Hi I'm considering getting into hydroponic gardening. I've wanted to get into this sort of gardening for a while. I've looked into different set ups and the one I want to try is DWC. I was hoping to get an opinion on how deep my reservoir should be. I initially want to experiment using the bath tub in my 5th wheel RV. It's 12" × 20" × 45" I also want to bypass my 5th wheels water pump from my plumbing system and use it to run a Venturi injector to oxygenate the bath tub. I want to spend as little money as possible on my first set up. I don't want to use an air pump and stones either. I also wanted to get an opinion on making a home made chiller using a 7 cu ft chest freezer. A local store has one for $90 I was thinking I could drill an inlet and an outlet hole and attach a bulkhead I think they're called to each hole and use a roll of pex tubing as a coil inside the chest freezer to cool the water and if that works replace the apex tubing with a coil of stainless steel tubing. I believe stainless steel would be better for cooling and would be safe for the plants as well. Thanks for any opinions you'd like to give

 

[Alienpus]

If by reservoir you mean the actual system where roots are, you have plenty of room at 12" deep

A venturi would work but requires an elevated flow rate, more power and can be noisy, why don't you want an air-stone?

I guess your freezer setup would work but not be very efficient, the air itself inside the freezer is an insulator and pex does not transfer heat very well. A tub of chilled water in the freezer with copper coils would be efficient.

 

[latewood]

I have heARD OF OTHERS IN THE PAST DRILLING AND INSTALLING BULKHEAD FITTINGS INTO A FRIG, OR CHILLER...
()sory about caps)

You need to have good oxygen; I also have no idea why you would want a more complicated set-up.
I have to advise you; Ifr you go cheap, amnd grow cheap; Your yield will reflect exactly what you put into it. Wish you luck, and hope to see some piks of the operATION, WHEN YOU GET GOING. PeaCE

sOPRY, LEGAlly blind and new latop caps s giving me a fit!

 

[hydrodoc]

Hello Bill,
I have not yet built it, but I just got a stainless steel wort cooler/ I already have several copper coolers. The copper coils will go into a 15 gal vessel (i used it for boiling wort) filled with water. Inside of the copper coils (inner diameter of the coil) goes a small copper coil from a salvaged water cooler. Tubing and a circulating pump will circulate a closed loop of chilled water between the copper wort coils in the chiller and the stainless cooler in the reservoir. Right now I trickle water through the stainless steel coil with the outflow going down a drain- the root temp. is easy to keep around 68 F.

 

[hydrodoc]

I'll take a picture of it tomorrow. They are asleep.

 

[FatBeaverBuds]

This is my DIY Peltier chiller.

It does work very well for my setup. I run a two 5-gallon bucket rdwc system that holds 6 gallons of nutes. I was having res temps hit 80 even with insulated buckets. This chiller drops my res temps to 65 degrees and holds it there no problem. I had my tent temps reach 100F just recently due to a friggen blazing hot day...almost killed my grow but my res temps were still 65F.

The chiller uses two 136 watt Peltiers. Each is sandwiched between a water cooling block and a big ass cpu heatsink with a 120mm fan. The power supply is a 12v 30a unit with adjustible voltage to set max watt draw. It pulls 200 wall watts as read on my killawatt. It is dead nuts silent...

I did end up putting a submergible pump inside my reservoir, ran a line to the chiller then from the chiller to the grow bucket. pump runs 24/7 but the Peltiers are controlled by a digital thermostat with a temp sensor in the grow bucket.

The chiller it's self cost about $95 bucks to build. Not including the plumbing, pump and insulation. If you want to know any specifics hit me up and check out my journal so you can see some other pics of it in action.

 

[madscientist9]

Just make sure to use stainless and not copper tubing I bought wort chillers and run one chiller in res and my other two res are cooled with the wort chillers and I have been able to maintain 60 degrees with an abient temp of 78 fairly easily. But I digress do not use the cooper as this will lead to PROBLEMS.

 

[roby3356]

@FatBeaverBuds
Could you send me/post a parts list and directions to build your water chiller? I'm interested in building one and think yours might be exactly what I need.