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Fogger?
There is no problem for the plants if the humidity is very high, as long as
you've got lots of air movement, courtesy of fans in the room. Your drywall (I guess that's a misnomer for your conditions), is a whole different issue. I was not suggesting that a 2 gph unit was needed for you, merely that when selecting between the 0.5 liter and 1.5 liter unit, I'd go with the larger one and a humidistat, as it's easy to cut back on a device's output, but impossible to increase it beyond the design max. The whole scientific tome was merely to show that even 1.5 liters might not be as far out of the ballpark as it may seem. -- Ray Barkalow - First Rays Orchids - www.firstrays.com Plants, Supplies, Books, Artwork, and Lots of Free Info! .. . . . . . . . . . . "Doug Bolton" wrote in message ... On Sat, 31 Jan 2004 15:35:27 -0500, "Ray" wrote: Doug, There are many things to consider when working on boosting humidity. Unless the room is sealed off from the rest of the house, anything you do will be attempting to humidify the whole house. It's a regular room that's totally enclosed except for an interior door that gives access to the rest of the house. I haven't sealed the door. I did install a fan to vent excess humidity to the outside via clothes dryer ducting to a roof vent. The fan is controlled by a humidistat. When I water the humidity soars to 87-90% during the night and down to perhaps 75% during the day as the room heats to about 79°F. Night temp is about 64-68°F. Wish now I'd installed a quieter fan (it's next to my bedroom) with 110CFM instead of the noisy 50CFM one. Thought it'd draw too much humidity out. No way. It'd go all night if I let it after I water. And that's just to get it down to 80%. So that's a project I'm going to undertake this fall. The space under the door is where the fan draws air as it expels the room air. As the room dries off from the watering the humidity drops to perhaps 50% before the next watering. This is without an humidifier (or equivalent). I've found that adding an humidifier did even things out and prevented that sort of drop. As this isn't a greenhouse situation I do have to be aware of the effect of excess humidity on the gyprock (plasterboard?) walls. Already had to redo a part of the single windowsill because I wasn't bailing it enough when I first set this up. Now that's a daily chore. And there's no water source in there to hook a fogger to. I did have a look at the smallest JBird. Seems way in excess of what I need in winter though in summer I do keep the window open to cool the room down so it'd probably be suitable then. 2 gallons an hour seems too much. Think .5 might be more suitable. Is there such a thing? Doug If we assume that the room IS sealed off, and has an 8' ceiling, the volume of the room is 480 cubic feet. At 80°F, 100% RH occurs when there is about 250 ml of water in the air. If we assume your whole house is about 1600 square feet of floorspace, that's a volume of 12,800 cubic feet, meaning that the 100% RH level needs almost 6.6 liters of water! If we drop that back to 65% RH, it still means that there must be 4.3 liters of water in the air. Knowing full well that your house is not likely to be totally sealed, you've got to figure on moisture escaping to the outside, meaning that you have to keep adding it. (I sure wish there was a way to know what that rate was...) Anyway, you're better off with something with a large capacity, and connecting it to a humidistat, rather than getting something small and hoping it is enough. As an example, in a friend's greenhouse - about 2000 cubic feet and tight except for around the door - there is a 2 gph fogger, and in the really cold, dry days lately, it works full time to maintain 70% humidity. At 70°F, that volume only holds 0.2 gallons of water, so he's losing 10x that in an hour! By the way, I put a moisture-capacity calculator on my website if you want to play around: http://www.firstrays.com/moistcalc.htm |
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