[I am posting this here as HC pulls the traffic and HH just does not seem to have a lot of traffic these days]

I am thinking about building and using an automatic mister in my ig cage and have a few questions.

Nozzles:
I will probably only use one nozzle and a very fine fogger type at that.

I can easily build an electronic timer controller to provide the pattern I want and possibly include a humidistat control to it. This can easily drive a relay so I would like to use an electric pump rather than a pump-pressurized tank.

1)
While this is a misting system it is also the same idea as evaporative cooling. Does anyone using a misting system find it to excessively cool the cage? I am use a cage with solid walls, door, and top.

2)
How do I spec out the pump. I have found that the nozzle can operate as low as 20 psi but water pumps don't work in psi and, frankly, water can't be pressurized. When I move off the misting system pages and into a water pump specific site I can read the pumps in terms of GPH and head height. The misting sites obviously offer pumps for the systems but all of them I have seen are much larger than I would need (20 nozzles rather than 1) and more than I would like to spend at this time.

Does anyone have experience with this?
thanks

__________________
~ Mark

Mark,
The systems on the market aren't too much money for what they do. There are a few people working on some Do-It-Yourself systems but haven't produced any articles. The systems on the market will make the fogger obselete as the mist the heads produce is very very fine, you can almost not see the water droplets leaving them, it is a very fine mist, I don't know the rating or measurement but the ones offered on mistking produce some of the finest mist.

I don't know about the pumps as I think I've been lead in the same directions as you. The pumps are pretty standard from my understanding, they are high pressure pumps because the lines have to be pressurized to produce the mist. I've seen just pumps on ebay for around 30$, they are hooked up through bulkheads, I don't know how much head pressure they can withstand but it seems that they can reach the far ends of a large enclosure easily.

I believe the two pumps are similar but due to their different intentions a pump rated for a misting system is going to be needed. I don't think they offer smaller ones currently, like I said hopefully a Do-It-Yourself article will produce some insight to a better alternative than the misting pumps. For one nozzle check out the rainmaker jr setup, I think vivariumconcepts.com has them. Mistking.com is another good site to poke around.

I don't know if I helped or not but have researched Do-It-Yourself misting systems and settled on a pneumatic system for one.

As a side, evaporative cooling definately lowers cage temps. Even if the water only evaporates to stay in the tank it is the act of evaporating that cools the surface, my tank with moving water easily stays 5 degrees cooler than my ones without, and the one with moving water has 10X as many watts of light above it. I haven't yet used a misting system but can only imagine that results of a waterfall would be similar to that of a fine fog.

Mark, check out this thread from dendroboard:
http://dendroboard.com/phpBB2/viewto...762&highlight=

He explains how the pumps we commonly use are high rate low pressure, you need a low rate high pressure pump.

Let me know how it turns out if you decide to try it.