FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

An update:

Ordered the blower motor today - Its quite a bit more powerful than I need, but I figure I can down-regulate a lot easier than buying one too small. Its rated for 540 CFM free air. Should arrive in a week or so. $104 CDN Shipped.

Great!

Now you can start looking for wood and saw the pieces you need

Got to a decent start on the frame today, I managed to pick out some good pieces of wood before leaving work on Friday. I had to stop as I ran out of screws, so will continue this week sometime. Here's the progress so far:

Looking good!

If you want, you can make it airtight with a silicone kit as well.
I will when I'm gonna start on mine.

NZL wrote:If you want, you can make it airtight with a silicone kit as well.
I will when I'm gonna start on mine.

Yeah, I plan on sealing it all with silicone after I paint it just to make sure it is airtight.

The blower should be in today according to UPS!

I also made my hood airtight with silicone.
Also the working area.
I believe that it is necessary to do that just to be sure.

Since i build my flowhood i never had any contamination and i made in this time several hundres tubes and jars.
I also can leave plants/parts box without getting any contamination for a minimum of 20minutes(never tried more)


Jens

nepaholic wrote:I also made my hood airtight with silicone.
Also the working area.
I believe that it is necessary to do that just to be sure.

Since i build my flowhood i never had any contamination and i made in this time several hundres tubes and jars.
I also can leave plants/parts box without getting any contamination for a minimum of 20minutes(never tried more)


Jens

Nice! I'll have to run some controls too once I finish. I'm assuming you don't use PPM or any other antibiotic either right?

Yes you are right. i dont use any antibiotic

Before you're off to buy silicone, ask if the store has antifungal silicone. It exists and is often used by DIYs to make showers watertight.
I can only imagine that antifungal is a good property for an LFH as well

NZL wrote:Before you're off to buy silicone, ask if the store has antifungal silicone. It exists and is often used by DIYs to make showers watertight.
I can only imagine that antifungal is a good property for an LFH as well

Excellent idea, I will look for some of that for sure.

New update,

Got quite a bit done today-

After trying to paint the wood and having it look so bad since the quality of the wood isn't the greatest, I decided to go with shelf liner- it should work better as well as it will be easier to clean and work on.

Anyways, onto the pics:








Let me know what you think so far! Go easy, I don't work with wood all that much, more of a steel guy.

That looks like a great project!

And, onto the home stretch!

I added some pieces of wood, one across, and one on the back wall to fit the pre-filters the way I wanted them.




Then, wired in the fans- didn't end up doing anything fancy with it, just straight to a plug. I suppose I could have wired in a switch or added an outlet but decided to keep it simple (for now at least).



Then, the first pre-filter went into place, and then duct taped in. I was going to use silicone, but then figured if I did want to change them out, duct tape would be much easier to work with.



And the second pre-filter (exact same)



Then, I needed a way to control the air speed as these fans are wayyy too powerful for my hepa, and to achieve the correct air speed (~200cfm). So, I made a very very crude butterfly valve. Its just a wooden plank, screwed in from both sides near the top. I then welded a thin steel rod to the screw head to function as a lever. Its never fully closed due to the slight gaps it leaves, which is probably a good thing - I'm sure the motors do need some air to keep cool.



Here it is fully open. The extra pieces of wood are to keep it from splitting as you see...


In place....with the CP terrarium proudly on top of it all-


I learned from various mushroom growing sites that a crude test for correct air-speed is to be able to blow a lit flame to the side (90 degrees) without blowing it out.

Blower off:


Blower on:


Maybe still a bit too powerful, I'll recalibrate once the plexiglass is on and then set the valve to allow hopefully the ideal amount of air.

So, now all thats left is to get a piece of plexiglass for the top, cover up the exposed wood - likely with some cloth material stapled on. And to find a bigger base, its just sitting on a small drawer unit right now - not exactly the best thing.

So far so good!

As usual, comments are welcome!

Wow, nice job renesis! I can't wait to see some of your cultures that come out of it!