Grow Room Cooling Solutions: How to Keep a Grow Tent Cool? 2021 Updated
What are grow tents made out of?
Most indoor grow tent kits are made out of similar materials. They are constructed with a heavy-duty, thick canvas on the outside. Usually, this is polyester or nylon but it can also be Oxford cloth or a similar material. The outer fabric is connected by a bond to the reflective inner layer. This layer is usually made out of biaxially-oriented polyethylene terephthalate.
A good grow tent doesn’t necessarily have to be made out of these specific materials, but you do need to make sure the materials it is constructed with are safe for growing marijuana. You also need to make sure that the outer layer is durable and strong, while the interior provides reflectively and resistance to moisture and damage, too. The reflective material on the inside should have double stitching to ensure a long lasting effect.
What to Look For in a Good Grow Tent
Plant grow tents are the best solution for anyone who is into indoor gardening. You are keeping away the unpleasant smells and your flowers are growing in the proper climate. Plant growing tents are still an investment and you should carefully pick out yours. Here is a list of things you should look for in your best grow tents:
Location and Inside Space of Grow Tents
Even though plant grow tents can be set up easily, you might feel frustrated if you are constantly moving them from one room to the other. The room of the grow tent should have access to water and power. All of the electrical cords should have easy access to the tent and support your desired gadgets. Because of the potential spillage, you shouldn’t keep it on your hardwood floors or carpets, even if it comes with a floor tray. Storage space of the grow tent is equally important.
Lightning Capabilities of Grow Tents
Of course, your flowers need light to blossom. When you pick out your best grow tent, you will need to choose which grow light to install inside. Also, if the more lamps you add, the higher temperature is created in the tent. The tent might not be able to cool down the temperature created by lamps and your plants could potentially die. One lamp will probably be enough for both small and medium tents.
Materials, Design, and Flexibility of Grow Tent
Always check the materials your indoor grow tent is made of. Inside materials that are constantly exposed to lightning and high temperatures, could wear away easily. Also, there are grow tents with adjustable height. You can change the height of the grow tent whenever you feel like adding new hangers and plants.
If you plan on constantly adding new accessories, choose an indoor grow tent with a flexible design that will keep up with your needs.
Extras
Some of your plants will probably be hung on hangers. Make sure that your grow tents have metal bars that will support the weight of all hangers with plants. You should also have enough room for an overhead tank or different channels. Once you know all of the extras you plan on using (tanks, lamps, timers…), you will easily decide which grow tent to purchase.
What Turns a Grow Tent Hot?
Before learning to cool it down, we need to know what’s the culprits behind the sudden heat buildup in a grow room. In this section, we’re going to call each of the possible reasons by their names. Let’s see-
If the ventilation goes wrong, this traps the heat produced in the tent within the tent. The obvious consequence? Yeah, its heat trapped in the tent itself and raising the temperature.
Too much hot surroundings might be a possible reason why the tent HVAC system isn’t making it up to the par. The hotter it’s out there, the more work the cooling system has to do. Otherwise, the temp and heat will go way up.
In case you have too many sources of heat within the grow tent territory and not enough cooling agents to neutralize them, then that’s another possible reason.
A lack of proper insulation around the tent exterior can be another possible reason that we would like to address. And that’s quite likely to happen in summer climate zones.
How do I know that my grow tent is hot?
The simplest way to tell whether your grow tent is too hot is to use a high-quality thermometer and hydrometer.
Although you could get a sense for your grow tent’s temp by walking inside every day, the only way to accurately gauge temp and humidity is to monitor levels on these devices.
Beyond using a thermometer and hydrometer, there are a few other warning signs your grow room is getting too hot.
For instance, if you notice your cannabis plant’s leaves curving upwards, then you should think about reducing your grow tent’s heat levels.
Other warning signs of excessive heat include a “rotting” smell, dry soil, bud burn, and a slower-than-average flowering period.
Plants are like children. They respond best to a consistent environment. What constitutes the best growroom environment can vary from plant variety to plant variety, but will often conform to a temperature range of between 70 and 80°F for aerial growth, and around 66°F for root growth.
When plants become overheated, they begin to show signs of stress. Heat stress can result in spindly young plants and mature plants that fail to flower or fruit properly. Excessive heat also makes plants more susceptible to disease. Beat the heat with these 9 proven strategies to keep things cool in your growroom.
How to Cool a Grow Tent?
1. Air Conditioners
Air conditioners are the classic way to keep temperatures cool. These are a good option if you have a grow room or a large grow tent where you can set up a portable air conditioner inside the tent or set up an AC outside which would help cool the grow tent overall.
2. Using Proper Air Circulation
The use of air circulation is very important in a grow tent. When done right, it is the best and one of the most cost effective means of ensuring that your grow tent remains protected from heat. When it comes to answering the question of how to cool a grow tent, you must make sure your air circulation is up to the mark. The heat generated by the grow light inside the tent tends to accumulate in one point but once you switch on the inline fans, it gets circulated and eventually moved out of the tent via the meshed openings on the bottom.
3. Using LED Grow Lights
When it comes to growing indoors, grow lights are of prime importance. CFL lights, Metal Halides, HID grow lights operate at very high temperatures. Replacing all your lighting with LED grow lights such as full spectrum LED grow light can have a significant difference on your growth operations. This is because these grow lights tend to emit much lesser amounts of heat when you compare them with other older lighting systems. In fact, the latest version of many quantum board led grow light such as 240W quantum board grow light are now‘fanless’ because of the very low amount of heat that they emit.
4. Insulating Your Room
What happens in a insulated room is that once the temperatures are lowered, the room retains the temperature and doesn’t really get heated up so quickly, thereby keeping the temperatures controlled for a longer period of time than a regular grow tent would.
5. Air-Cooled and Water-Cooled Lighting Systems
In case you’re not using LED grow lights, the best way to ensure your tent’s temperatures remaining cool is by using air-cooled and water-cooled lighting systems. Basically here, with the help of Inline Duct Fan, the hot air from your fans moves outside the grow tent. In water-cooled systems, a water pump and a series of pipes is used to circulate chilled water around the grow light which keeps its temperatures low.
6. Move Underground
Growing in a basement is actually quite a sane idea for growers who wish to reduce the temperatures. This is partly because of insulation as the lower you go the cooler it becomes. The soil around the room provides a great insulating layer and makes sure the room remains cooler compared to the temperatures on the ground.
7.Using Carbon Dioxide
Carbon Dioxide has multiple benefits. First off, plants need Carbon Dioxide to grow properly because it is an essential element for them, secondly, it also helps keep the temperatures a little lower. Growers who make use of hot and bright lights might want to prefer pairing up a source of Carbon Dioxide in order to cool grow tents because CO2 helps keep temperatures lower even in these situations. However, using this is quite tricky and we advice only experienced growers to make use of Carbon Dioxide because you need to know the exact setting that you want in this because moving the PPM levels too high or too low could be bad for your plants as well as you!
8.Setting Timers
Setting effective timers will help create this cycle of warm and cool hours which will ensure that the hot temperature doesn’t last for a long time and plants get enough time to cool down. You can also do this manually by setting alarms on your phone in case your grow light or growing setup does not support timers.
9. Use Lights During the Night Hours
Another interesting fix to lowering the temperatures. While in the daytime, the temperature outside is hot, using grow lights could make it even hotter and hence you could instead have the lights function at night while your plant rests during the hottest hours of the day. By this you’re making sure that you’re not adding on to the naturally present heat.
Conclusion:
we hope that this article has helped you answer the question of ‘how to cool a grow tent?’ we have provided multiple options, but there’s one thing that you need to know — while all of these seem like standalone solutions, they work the best when you use multiple of these techniques at the same time. Cooling your grow tents is very important for growers because not only does it save their plants from getting damaged due to overheating, it can also prevent any potential fire-related hazards as well! We hope this helps. Happy Growing!
