Terrarium Cooling

[mfreedman]

For my carnivorous plants I have a 48" x 18" x 18" terrarium located outside on my deck. The reason for locating it on my deck is to avoid the power requirements of lighting, as well as not having enough room inside my condo. I am using an ultrasonic fogger to control the humidity.

I am trying to cool the terrarium from about 90+degrees ambient, at times, to 75 degrees. I don't want to consider ice bottles, but instead was considering purchasing a small $159 air conditioner that would be located outside and vent the cool air into the terrarium via a hose. I do realize this is not a very efficient usage of energy. I have a couple of questions:

1) Has anyone tried to do this? There's just nothing on YouTube or any other websites that describe or demonstrate this.
2) Will the air conditioner be powerful enough to cool the terrarium?
3) What type of hose/vent/shroud would attach to the air conditioning unit that goes to the terrarium? (A simple hose would not fit on top of the vents of the air conditioner)

I have attached a link to the air conditioner I was considering.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

 

[bluemax]

Just my opinion, but I think you would find dealing with lights indoors to be less effort than trying to cool an outdoor terrarium. I grow numerous plants almost exclusively under led lights with little hassle. This is assuming you wouldn't have to cool the terra directly if it was indoors. There are numerous conversations about chilling terrariums here at TF if you do a search for 'chiller'.

 

[Fishkeeper]

I can't imagine any sort of air conditioner not being enough to cool that small of a space. Surely it would work, particularly if you can insulate at least a couple of the sides. That said, yeah, you're probably better off trying something indoors. There are LED grow lights that consume surprisingly little electricity, and might end up being a lot cheaper to run than the air conditioner.

From a different angle: what plants are they? A lot of carnivorous plants don't actually need a terrarium at all.

 

[mfreedman]

As I mentioned in my original posting I don't have enough room to put the terrarium inside the condo. It just isn't an option. I'm not too worried about the cost of running the a/c, as it will probably only be needed during a small portion of the day when the sun beats down on the terrarium. I also have some shade cloth that will help, but I really don't want to decrease the light levels, if possible.

I'm growing sundews, butterworts, flytraps, and nepenthes. While the first three don't require the humidity levels the nepenthes do, the nepenthes are responding quite well to the increased humidity levels of my fogging unit.

Thanks for the response.

 

[hcarlton]

Forget a terrarium and find plants that you can acclimate to just growing outside (which is probably most things anyway). The moment you have a power failure or the air conditioner accidentally switches settings you will cook everything.