No thanks. I still have my old lights in the crawl space, but they're way to big for what I've got going on.
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No thanks. I still have my old lights in the crawl space, but they're way to big for what I've got going on.
Copy. He probably threw them all out by now anyway.
So things are going good. As predicted, I have to address the humidity problem. The windows and sliding glass door of the "shed" are continuously covered with dew and the wood frames of those windows and doors are moist to wet. This will lead to problems so I need focus on that now.
The shed is insulated pretty well. The options I've thought of so far are:
Vent: put a bathroom type fan in a window on a timer and just vent the room for 5 minutes every hour or whatever it takes.
Advantages: it's fairly easy and would use little electricity. Just get the fan, mount it on plywood to cover the opening, insulate with foam board and that's it.
Disadvantages: the loss of heat and material cost (wood, foam board, etc.) plus effort.
Dehumidifier: just dehumidify the room. Maybe pour the water from the dehumidifier back into the fish tank (doesn't dehumidifier water get pretty skanked up though with bacteria and shit?).
Advantages: it's plug and play. No cutting wood, buying material, etc.
Disadvantages: cost (kinda high) and.more electrical use.
I'd love to hear any other ideas.
Hmmm, definitely a problem. A dehumidifier could certainly help retain your water level, but I'd have similar concerns about cost. Not sure about drain line water quality. I wonder how much covering the bottom tanks would help. Probably not enough.
I'm leaning toward a direct vent to the outside. Replenishing water to the main tank is pretty easy. Just drag the hose over and fill it up. I'd just have to see how bad the heat loss will be.
I do plan on wrapping the main water tank with insulation, so that will help keep some heat in there.
FYI...I modified the wicking beds drainage. I wasn't getting quite enough actual wicking, so after a ton more research, I found that just having a standpipe is good for this kind of setup. Think of a bell siphon with just the standpipe and media excluder, just no siphon. It just continuously drains slowly. Other wicking setups use the horizontal drain pipe.
So I went from this:
Attachment 73504
To this:
Attachment 73505
It seems to be wicking much better now. I planted a ton of seeds in there the other night. We'll see what, if anything, germinates and grows.
The completed wicking bed:
Attachment 73506
The water is introduced to the system the same way as the other bed? Are you expecting the soil to become increasingly more dry the further you get from the source pipe? Or, is the wicking action slow enough for the water to reach all the corners before it drains?
Yes, but the water trickles in slower than the ebb and flow bed. It gradually wicks through the whole bed. It took a few days, but seems pretty uniformly moist now. The standpipe is dry fit, so you can adjust the height if necessary. If the top of the soil is soaked, just cut an inch off the standpipe. Too dry, put a longer one in.
ETA: in the wicking bed, the water fills from the bottom up, unlike the ebb and flow where it pours in from the top.
I'm very interested in what results you get out of this. I'm under the impression that the reason you can grow food in water only like with the clay pellets, is that there are periods of water, and periods of no water. Kind of like forced breathing for the plants. I'm curious to see how the plants deal with constantly being wet. My guess is that certain plants will grow better in wicking bed than other plants.
The idea is to have the upper part of the soil perfectly moist for growing, instead of wet. Down below in the rock and lower soil it's saturated of course. This is where adjusting the stand pipe comes in - move it up or down until you get it perfectly balanced. This is all a fun experiment for me. We'll see how it all works out.