Well, I must admit that since I am not actually performing an experiment I don't feel bad changing my set up and variables to actually help the plants grow with what ideas and knowledge is already out there. Right now I would find it hard not to change my set up given some of the data that is already available in other experiments, posts, blogs, and reviews and why reinvent the wheel just for the sake of reinventing the wheel. So I am excited to say that I have added some aluminum foil and rethought the placement of the temperature detector to give a better representation of the temperature of the seed area. The nice thing is that I can still see the temperature outside of the enclosure which allows me the luxury of comparing how much the foil is changing the interior temperature. The result is a raise in temperature and light for sure.

Day 4 foil added

So here is what adding the aluminum foil now looks like around my Aerogarden. I am currently holding it up with 4 pieces of double-sided tape that are approximately 1.5 inchs long for a total of 6 inches used. Much cheaper than Aerogarden's version which actually is slitted to help release the heat (which for me is not what I want to do as the ideal temperature is 77). The following temperatures have been observed today:

  • 10:07 am just added and light on       Inside: 73 and rising        Outside: 69        Delta: +4
  • 10:23 am                            light on        Inside: 80                           Outside: 67        Delta: +13
  • 10:29 am                            light on        Inside: 77                            Outside: 69       Delta: +8
  • 11:06 am                            light on        Inside: 77-79                      Outside: 69        Delta: +8-10
  • 5:03 pm                              light off        Inside: 73                           Outside: 68        Delta: +5
  • 7:10 pm                              light off        Inside: 70                           Outside: 68        Delta: +2
  • 8:20 pm                              light off        Inside: 70                           Outside: 69        Delta: +1

day4tempdiff

My light is set to turn on at 11:05 pm and turn off at 4:05 pm so it seems that in the germination phase with the pump not running much with the light on the temperature is raised to a much nicer 78 to 80 degrees with a change of roughly 12 degrees and with the light off after 1 hour of it being off the difference is 5 degrees and it slowly goes back to ambient over the off cycle. This is a much better fix than raising the room temperature which at this time of the year in winter would be much more costly