DIY Chiller Alternative Method

[karimwassef]

DIY evaporative cooler



They use these to cool large pools at hotels. This one's made with a vent fan on top of a plastic trash can with bioballs for evaporative media.

Here's my inspiration:
http://www.glacierpoolcoolers.com

[karimwassef]

Water goes in from the red pipe & out of the blue. There's a 5 gallon bucket inside the trash can and the red pipe goes into that center bucket. The blue pipe is connected to the water between the center bucket and the wall of the trash can. There's an eggcrate box holding the bioballs.

There's a little pump in the center bucket that pushed water up to the 4 pipes with small holes drilled sideways so it "rains" on the bioballs.

The holes drilled into the sides of the trash can are intakes for air. The fan sucks air from the bucket and blows it up.

The yellow is an emergency overflow (requisite in everything I do).

I was fiddling around with the design of the water chambers (recirculating vs one shot flow)

It's cheap but totally untested DIY. I haven't had the time or the need yet. I find that my corals grow faster at 84F, so I stopped working on it.

[karimwassef]

Radiator fans (DC) can handle wet running. I have all the parts- maybe I'll do it just to see.

Anyone have any ideas on how to improve I before I do?

[Georb]

I use large heatsinks on my fuge with a coiled radiator drawing the heat off.. go buy a transmission cooler. Fill it with coolant and then electric pump and fan under 150 for the setup

Sent from my Pixel XL using Tapatalk

[karimwassef]

Heat sink cooling really works well if the temperature gradient is high ~ cooling 100F with 80F ... but if the gradient is small, it won't do much unless the water volume is small. That was my experience anyway. It works great cooling a small GPU chip runing 120 but I couldn't get much for my 660 gal system.