A Forbidden Fruit

I have worked really hard trying to find someone using liquid cooled HID lights so that I could bring you this blog along with the images. I have not seen this on the the internet before so I think I have a web exclusive. I also I interviewed the gardener on her system that is discussed below along with the images.

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A few things the grower told me about the system is that it is imperfect as she has it set up. She invited me to come back into her room where in what is a closet no bigger than 5' x 4' she had set up two 600 watt lights. She grows in dirt (which she tells me keeps the humidity down). The first thing I noticed was that despite the water cooling she still air cooled the lights with a 6" vortex inline fan. I asked her about this and she said "in such close quarters you still need air cooling", but as she noted the fan was on a speed regulator which she had powered to 1/2 power, this reduced the noise to next to nothing and still removed air from the light bulbs.

The trade off here is that you loose some lumens in the water as it passes through. The other is that the water chiller puts out a lot of heat so you have to either put tht in another room or vent it out to the outside. You might say why bother then. Well the answer is a water chiller uses a lot less electricity than an air conditioner. Also the water chiller can be avoided all together if you have a large enough reservoir. In the later senario you would need a huge reservoir but the savings in air conditioning are incredible.

The room is very cramped so I can understand the water cooling and the air cooling which works two functions as she mentioned that "It removes hot air off the bulbs directly and removes stale oxygen rich air out of the room". One curious thing I also noted was there is no fan circulating in the small room which she said "I don't need one to blow the hot air off the tops of the plants because there is no scorching hot air but I am going to get one because it would help to circulate the air around the leaves to increase resperation." I noticed the temperature under the bulb was incredibly cool, I could even touch the glass, under any other circumstances you could never fit two 600 watt bulbs in there much less touch the glass of the hood for more than a few seconds.

One thing she did mention was that she probably could fit two 1,000 watt bulbs in her room but the cost would be too much and she would probably have to get CO2 to justify the added light. Last thing I noticed was she had a 30 gallon reservoir which held all the water for the system. I didn't take a picture of it because I forgot and besides it was only a plastic garbage can.

The system was impressive however according to her the yield as of yet is not very impressive. maybe only an ounce per plant. But she mentioned it probably had more to do with her fertilizer schedule and because it is a legal garden in California she has to grow only 6 plants that are taller as apposed to the sea of green method adopted by others to increase yields. She says she could probably squeeze out a pound using Hydro and more plants from the same space but she gets enough to treat her back problems from a spinal deformity aka Scoliosis.

I will return to this garden in the fall to check up on her progress and take more picture maybe even some video. Thanks to the grower. If anyone has any questions regarding this post some comments and I'll write back with more information regarding the system. Next time I will be visiting Oakland, California Oaksterdam here we come.