venting a dehumidifier

[hycheese]

oldjarhead100 after our previous conversation I have verified my suspicions, here is a blurb I found on single vent portables;

"Unlike a window air conditioner, all the mechanical parts of a portable air conditioner are sitting in the room you’re trying to cool. It’s also a reason for the less-than-capable cooling: The portable unit uses conditioned air from the room to cool the condenser and exhausts the hot air out an exhaust hose. That creates negative pressure, causing unconditioned warm air from surrounding rooms or outdoors to be drawn into the room you’re trying keep cool."


Being an oldster I was only familiar with dual vent portables (I owned 2 of them up to a few years ago) didn't know single vents existed until just recently. Now that I read up on them I can see why they don't come in the smaller 5kbtu model like a window unit, it's because they are inefficient and scavenge conditioned room air for condenser cooling to reduce the manufacturing costs and ease of installation.

Single vent portables seem to meet the needs for simplified residential cooling with practicality overtaking efficiency, in a small dynamic grow room where a portable is exhausting 30% or more of your newly conditioned air can be a challenge, especially while trying to maintain a balanced pressure and not draw in crap air from elsewhere.

 

[hycheese]

Now to throw a wrench into your gears, I bought this hot water AC unit about 10 years ago. It is designed to sit on top of your water heater with a long copper tube that feeds into the tank, it heats your water while it cools your room. I never got around to installing it and ultimately bought an instantaneous tank free water heater.

Anyways the other day I ripped it apart to see if I could redneck a cheap dehumidifier out of it, nope bought a $100 unit instead. When looking at the picture you can see the outside condenser coil has been replaced with about 20 feet of copper tubing that should be placed in a cool water source. This unit can make 135F water all while cooling your house.

 

[Toripony]

So, if I understand this right, the best way for this to work in my case would be to mount the AC into the wall of my grow room so it would use the garage air to cool the condenser, exhausting that out the window instead of the conditioned air in the grow room? In that case, by what you said in your next post below, this might actually be a better solution than the single-vent portable AC? Wow, this is all great information, Hycheese, thanks so much for the education! Now the only part that scares me is that last sentence about cutting out parts and drilling; sounds like something I could screw up, lol.

 

[hycheese]

Think of a water slinger as a baby seal playing in a kids pool, just slapping the water around until it splashes out... take a wire cutter of sorts and cut it off - you'll know what it is when you see it because it dips down into the bottom condensate pan. pay attention to centrifugal forces and keep the fan in balance or your bearings will suffer.

When the vent is only a few feet it is probably not a problem as the high discharge heat keeps it in the vapor stage but at 25 feet it will re-condense and grow molds and such.

If you drill a hole low enough so that the water level never hits the slinger then you are good to go without further modifications.

 

[oldjarhead100]

I have a space I can install a window unit ,I just cant get to it right now , I need to get this grow done first I think raising the head pressure is my best option right now or go back to watering every 3 days with no runoff and flushing every couple of weeks IDK