Hey, progress! Let's start with cutting holes in my house:
Here's one of the inside ports to the outside world. This one doesn't have the fan installed; the fan has that white frame and those neat metal rings to allow you to remove it, clean it, maintain it, and in my case, wire it up in the first place. You can also replace the fan in the enclosure in either direction, so you can chance which way the air flows if you need to.
This particular duct has to take a quick detour around the trolley track/light rail and then it jogs up to the ceiling and travels the length of the room to its termination point right atop Bertha. Here you can see the end of it, which is actually the input -- hopefully this duct will suck the hottest air right off the lights and dump it outside.
Since Bertha's room is more or less sealed off from the rest of the house, there must be two holes in my house in order for a massive pressure differential not to build up. Here's the view of both holes from the inside:
...and from the outside:
So I did some wiring and now we have this, a pair of wired fans pushing in opposite directions, connected to a regular power plug by way of a speed controller. The controller is just a potentiometer; it allows adjusting the speed from 100% to about 30% and complete shut-off.
The plug plugs into a humidistat/thermostat combination, which you can just barely see sitting atop the other tank here:
Eventually I will mount these boxes on the wall and clean up the wiring a bit, but for now... it works! The fans are also pretty quiet... lots of air noise, but it's very manageable. No vibration, no resonance against the walls, and with the room sealed up you have to work to hear them running in the living room. Perfect.
I also got the electrical tether for the light rail finished up. I only need two cords to drive the halides, but I knew I'll at least have a moon light up there on the lights, and I decided to go ahead and wire in a fourth cord for future expansion. So I bundled all the cords up:
...color-coded them with some zip ties so I could debug quickly if needed:
...and rigged them up to the extra trolley track:
Now, when the light rail is pushed over Bertha in the normal position, the little hooks on the track gather up the cord so it doesn't dangle all over the place and make a mess/hazard:
Hey, progress!
Ben
? Just kidding but I couldn't resist.
