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Old November 5, 2017   #74
murihikukid
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Join Date: Feb 2016
Location: Invercargill New Zealand
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Quote:
Originally Posted by amideutch View Post
Ask away Ron.

Ami
Hi..First its so good to hear from you.....Now last season I asked why I could not grow seedlings like the growers and i was told its because of the "cold treatment" but later i got mixed up between Hardening off and cold treatment ..anyway I was searching Google one day i came across a web page of a UK company that makes growth chambers...I can get the website later if interested and i thought "Hell I could make something like that" ....So with the help of an electrical friend I made up a chamber that is just an old stainless steel freezer with rails in it for seed trays to sit on and two radiators with two computer fans on each to blow the cold air through and around and under my trays ...

...a lower/raise lid with 10 x 150cm LED tubes and 6 fancy computer fans (3 at each end ..2 red and 1 blue) with 33 Led's in each.....this was to blow air over the seedlings when the lid was lowered ... this enables me to give as many hours of light daily as required..
My electrical friend was busy making up a cooling unit with a submercible water pump...the idea being to pump cool /cold water from the reservoir in the cooling unit through water tubes into the radiators in the "growth Chamber " and back out to the reservoir in a continuous flow...to cool the air in the growth chamber...
Well we got it going but I soon realised we were not going to reach our objective of nearly 10 degrees so I had an old fridge freezer and I first put the reservoir in the fridge compartment then the Thermostat failed so the reservoir next went into the freezer compartment and I put it under control of an electronic Thermostat (STC-1000) with the probe in the air with the growth chamber and things were looking good until just 12 hours after the trays of my seedlings (with underneath watering) were put in the chamber...the lid with the lights were lowered to as close to the top of my seedlings as I could ..all fans were on ...the thermostat on the freezer was set to switch it off when the air in the chamber reached 10.2 degrees and come on again @ 10.8 degrees... and we were nearly there and something happened... I saw the temperature rising and initially i thought it was the lights creating problems which they were but it soon became evident that the freezer had completely failed....So I let everything carry on for a few hours but the temperature kept rising and i switched off the lights ,raised the lid....kept the fans going ...and thats basicly where I am at now.....

However not to give up.. I have two freezers and I have learnt more in the last 12 hours about refrigeration than in 74 years of life.....I now know that as far as i can tell both compressors are OK...The start Relay on one is OK but I think the transformer feeding the power has failed while on the other I think it is the start relay so hopefully both can be fixed reasonably quickly and cheaply while I am also now looking for another freezer for backup just in case to get the water temperature right down to off set the heat coming from the LEDs....and hoping that my seeds won't mind the hiccup??

Now people think I am crazy but I don't think so....All I am trying to do is grow my seedlings in an artificial climate..giving them the temperature and daily light pattern that experts say they should have....Down here in the a**se of the world weather patterns can be all over the place.....and although I have an excellent greenhouse I think that ensuring the seedlings are grown properly is the secret to healthy plants later on......Within three to four weeks all should be out in my greenhouse ...
I have some photos but its 2.23am here and its cold.. so I better get some sleep ...Regards Ron
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