First of all, there is a glass top in the terrariums, and this gets dusty real fast. This of course shades the lights. A friend popped around and had an answer - just buy more lights! I'll leave it to you to guess if this friend is male or female :).
I think I should have ordered boxes with removable top glass for easier maintenance. At the night humidity condenses to the top and when lights are on, glass gets warm and water evaporates, leaving little markings behind. So I will have to clean underside too. This could be annoying in the years to come.
Second thing. There is already algae under the bottom glass AND on top of the tiles plants are sitting on.
I was kind of hoping things would have been clean and nice for a little longer.
Third. I do not know if all this aerial roots thing is all good.
Carmona is shoving yet another growing habit:
Leaf size is somewhere between what it was under fluorescents and under metal halides. Of cource, metal halide lamp was 70W, and now this has 5 * 5W cree spots (slightly under driven).
Pity, the problems you listed are annoying:(
VastaaPoistaSeveral things came to my mind, just thinking out loud:
1. Dust on the top glass in the light bulbs area. You have fans blowing air around. If there are walls around that area and fans are the only air entrance/exit the filters to the fan which sucks the air in might reduce the dust perhaps even substantially. The cloth filters (to cut out) are pretty cheap and they would last for a long time. Filters are easy but making all that walls around might be annoying, I understand :(
2. Algae. I guess they come when the water drops leak down and can't evaporate. What if the humidity would be kept around 90% ? Then perhaps also aerial roots wouldn't be so intensive. In my shelf I have humidity much lower than in your case (60-80%) and I don't have any water droplets nor algae gathering. It would be probably nicer to have it slightly higher though. I think then also your markings on the top glass would not appear.
Perhaps these don't make sense as then the whole idea of very high humidity enclosure is not what it is but maybe experiment would give the best answer.
Slaven
Thank you Slaven for commenting. Filtering air would certainly help, but I would have to partially rebuild whole system. Fans I use are very quiet, and also not too powerful. Could just buy more of those I guess, two to suck in and two to blow out. Small dust particles would go through, I suppose, but that could help.
VastaaPoistaAlgae is definitely related to 100% humidity. Current plan is to test it for a year, because I want to see how it affects on growth patterns, trunk thickening, leaf size and internode length, pests, mold, etc. I have been happy with 80% humidity in my previous setups. I could also open boxes for an hour every dry, to let things dry out.
Every DAY that is :)
VastaaPoista