Observe & Report
Well-Known Member
My old Veros are coming up on four years old now and much more efficient strips are available now so it is time to upgrade! My old build is water cooled and was expensive but I have grown four pounds of varying but increasing quality weed with it, so it's really paid off. If you want all the details, the original build thread is at http://rollitup.org/t/more-money-than-brains-a-water-cooled-cab-build.802108/ The new lights are looking to be Samsung Q strips.
The cab is a three chamber perpetual affair with 35L x 17W x 30H for flower and a pair of 17 x 17 x 21H chambers for moms + veg/clone. There are currently three old Vero 29's @ 1.9A in flower, a Vero 18 @ 1.7A in veg, and a Vero 18 @ 1A for the moms, all at 4000K. I'm using those 40mm square water blocks found on AliB, eBay, and everywhere else along with a little Eheim pump and a PC watercooling radiator housed in a small PC tower.
Issues I had with my old build in flower were burning buds that got too close to the emitters. Buds grow up and around the emitters and shade everything else, wasting light. The uneveness is really an issue in the mother chamber, where I have sixteen moms in solo cups. There also just isn't enough light in the mother chamber and seedlings all stretched too much.
The good thing about the old build is the water carries quite a bit of heat out of the cabinet and out of the closet it is hidden inside and into a much larger room. My temps have been perfect, a steady 76 degrees and only getting up to 80 in the middle of summer. I run the lights at night... I also like how the LES is about half an inch below the top of the chamber, maximizing my limited space. Everything is super quiet since I'm not relying on my ventilation fan as much to remove heat, only humidity (stays around 55-65% in flower.)
So I'm sticking with water cooling, the problem is now I need water blocks a foot long and ideally also sub-35-inchers that will fit the length of my flower chamber. The Chinese ones only go up to 160mm and the minimum orders for custom parts are pretty big, 50 pieces, but I only need eight long ones in flower and a dozen 1 footers total in the bottom. So it's DIY time.
I'm making water blocks out of 1"x0.5" aluminum rectangle tube. I'm sealing the ends off with pieces of 0.5" aluminum angle and attaching hose barbs to each end. I thought about soldering (pseudo-brazing with alumiweld rods) the pieces together, which is why I have some expensive aluminum barbs, but I thought it would get tricky to simultaneously solder a cap on the end and a barb on the side without setting up a complex fixture. So I'm experimenting with gluing the parts together using JB Weld steel reinforced epoxy. At first I tried some aluminum reinforced epoxy putty but it wasn't sticky enough and hardened too quickly.
Unassembled 1' water block.
Assembled with epoxy below. Once it fully hardens I'm going to drill through the block and any excess epoxy blocking the hole by using the barb as a guide.
You can see by using the angle as a cap there is now a tab on each end where I can drill a hole and just screw the assembly to the top of the cab.
I've got parts to build a few more and do some leak testing. If all goes well I'm going to order parts to make nine more 1' blocks and eight 34" ones to fit in my bloom room.
The cab is a three chamber perpetual affair with 35L x 17W x 30H for flower and a pair of 17 x 17 x 21H chambers for moms + veg/clone. There are currently three old Vero 29's @ 1.9A in flower, a Vero 18 @ 1.7A in veg, and a Vero 18 @ 1A for the moms, all at 4000K. I'm using those 40mm square water blocks found on AliB, eBay, and everywhere else along with a little Eheim pump and a PC watercooling radiator housed in a small PC tower.
Issues I had with my old build in flower were burning buds that got too close to the emitters. Buds grow up and around the emitters and shade everything else, wasting light. The uneveness is really an issue in the mother chamber, where I have sixteen moms in solo cups. There also just isn't enough light in the mother chamber and seedlings all stretched too much.
The good thing about the old build is the water carries quite a bit of heat out of the cabinet and out of the closet it is hidden inside and into a much larger room. My temps have been perfect, a steady 76 degrees and only getting up to 80 in the middle of summer. I run the lights at night... I also like how the LES is about half an inch below the top of the chamber, maximizing my limited space. Everything is super quiet since I'm not relying on my ventilation fan as much to remove heat, only humidity (stays around 55-65% in flower.)
So I'm sticking with water cooling, the problem is now I need water blocks a foot long and ideally also sub-35-inchers that will fit the length of my flower chamber. The Chinese ones only go up to 160mm and the minimum orders for custom parts are pretty big, 50 pieces, but I only need eight long ones in flower and a dozen 1 footers total in the bottom. So it's DIY time.
I'm making water blocks out of 1"x0.5" aluminum rectangle tube. I'm sealing the ends off with pieces of 0.5" aluminum angle and attaching hose barbs to each end. I thought about soldering (pseudo-brazing with alumiweld rods) the pieces together, which is why I have some expensive aluminum barbs, but I thought it would get tricky to simultaneously solder a cap on the end and a barb on the side without setting up a complex fixture. So I'm experimenting with gluing the parts together using JB Weld steel reinforced epoxy. At first I tried some aluminum reinforced epoxy putty but it wasn't sticky enough and hardened too quickly.
Unassembled 1' water block.
Assembled with epoxy below. Once it fully hardens I'm going to drill through the block and any excess epoxy blocking the hole by using the barb as a guide.
You can see by using the angle as a cap there is now a tab on each end where I can drill a hole and just screw the assembly to the top of the cab.
I've got parts to build a few more and do some leak testing. If all goes well I'm going to order parts to make nine more 1' blocks and eight 34" ones to fit in my bloom room.
