Bong! Bong! Bong! --56K Warning!

[Naja002]

I don't have any 12v psu in my out building and have never wanted to set one up out there when 120v is just so much easier to work with....So, after looking around, I decided to give these Walmart clip-on fans a try. They work very well. High is 13w each and low is only 8w. They work so well that I had a misting issue that I fixed with the goofy elbows at the top of the bongs.


Now it's easy to see that the fans do not fit nice and neatly into the PVC fitting. I pondered for several days on how to make a fan "shroud" that would funnel all of the air into the PVC intake. Tossed around many ideas. In the end I found these cheap plastic bowls at Walmart:


I grabbed a fan off the shelf and took it out of the box to check the fit and....viola! Perfect!


I drilled the large hole through the bottom of the bowl and it fit perfectly with the opening of the PVC intake. Problem is: It didn't work worth a flip. The only thing that I can gather is that instead on funneling the air--it just creates a lot of turbulence inside the bowl. Performance was greatly decreased with the bowls v. without. So, I decided to leave well enough alone and rock-n-roll with it shroud free. But I did need a way to secure the fans:


So I drilled a triad of holes and secured the fans with zip ties.

[Naja002]

So, now that that's out of the way, let's take a gander inside the res:






Mega Prefilter for the pump. It has the course filter with the finer blue filter wrapped around that:



Next--cuz I'm lazy--is the float valve for auto refill. There's simply zero possibily that I will keep up with evaporation, so, uh, yeah:

The water supply line can be seen in the pix above also. Yeah, finally got around to running a 1/2" pvc water line into my out-building.




Finally, just a general view into the res:

The pump is connected to a bulk head fitting--which luckily was long enough to reach all the way through the cooler. Water pumps through the bulkhead and heads to the PCs:

[Naja002]

What a mess, huh? After going through the PCs the water returns and comes back up through the floor. It's then sent into the dual car rads and comes out to the bong coolers.


As stated earlier, I had a misting issue where the airflow was carrying small droplets of water out the top. Over time this was getting everything below wet--including the 120v fans. My fix was simply these goofy elbows--Hey, it works!



The 4" to 2" fittings on the tops are really not necessary. I picked those up "just in case", but they do increase the air velocity and help push that cooler air up toward the top of the out-building--hopefully helping to keep things a wee bit cooler out there. It's been rainy, cloudy, etc, so it will be a while before I can tell much. Anyway, the double elbows definitely fixed the misting issue.


In order to get the elbows over the cooling system supply line....I had to whip out the jig saw:





The blue filter padding helps keep condensation from dripping out and down the side.


Finally, the water enters the Bongs via 2 shower heads that I found at walmart for $2.88 each...plus tax, of course.

[Naja002]

Here's an idea of the effect:

Building temps--high up and lower toward the floor:




Res Temps:


As I said earlier, I've been running this for a couple of weeks...the cooler is what's new today. The temps get much better, but it's been cloudy and rainy with high humidity. Not sure why the 1 thermometer reads 62%--maybe that's accurate...maybe not--I don't know. What I do know is that everything has been very wet around here for a while now. I figure that when it dries up and the sun comes out--things will improve. I've seen 12F below ambient a number of times before this constant raininess. 12F would mean low 80's F (High 20's C) during the heat of the summer. We'll see what happens!


Cost:

Cooler $26
4" PVC and fittings ~$83
Misc PVC $20 or less
Shower heads $6
Clip-on fans $20