ambient temp in the room and the rest of the house is about 75-77 degrees. When I use my 600 with a cool tube the temps in the tent creep into the 90s. Sometimes the mid 90s. The room itself enters the low-mid 80s but does not break into the 90s. When I switch the digital ballast over to 400 mode and put the 400 mh bulb in there the temps inside of the tent never go over 86 (not sure of the temps outside the tent). I am using a nice 6" hydrofarm inline fan with 6" ducting. I've got the fan controller but it doesn't matter if I run it on low or on full speed, the heat still builds up in this tent. The ducting is ran to dump the hot air into the attic above, so its not like the heat is just venting outside of the tent and into the closet, and back into the tent, it really is like smoke-stack style getting that heat and dumping it out remotely. However, it is still too hot in the tent. I feel like I need to get rid of the tent if I'm gunna try to run this thing @ 600 mode. Of note, the ballast is remotely located (outside of the tent) so it is not feeding any additional heat. Does this sound normal? It seems to me that anybody who is trying to use a 600 or a 1000 in a tent is gunna have to have direct air conditioning for that room (I've got central A/C and the room is a closet with just one vent that might or might not really be actively blowing cool air into there - dependent on whether the central system is actively blowing).
I have a 2x4x6ft tall box with a 260 cfm fan exhausting the hot air/supplying fresh air and a 440cfm fan cooling the light. My box temps run about 12 degrees hotter than than the area outside the box. Your situation sounds normal to me. i would say you need to exhaust your air faster or cool the supply air. I can open the box doors and decrease the temp by about 5 deg up to a certain temp. i also have a portable evaporative cooler. With the doors open and the cooler filled with cold water and outside the box temps at about 82 I can maintain 80 deg temps. My humidity is around 20%, with the cooler its's around 30%.
If you have a spare room to grow in, I would say lose the tent. All tents do is trap heat. It is nearly impossible to run a 600w light in a tent without any a/c. If you just grow in your open room, there is much more surface area for the hot air to go. So either lose the tent or get a portable a/c. Moving more air isnt really going to do much for you.
Ya something definately doesn't sound right. I have a 400w cooltube w +200w of suplemental cfls in a 4x4x7 tent. My temp in my tent is 78-80f. Are you venting the hot air from the top of the tent? Also make sure you do have an oscillating fan in there moving air. One more thing, not sure if your growing soil or hydro but I have noticed keeping my res temps cool help my temp in the tent also.
Yah, I'm gunna keep a 400 (I've also got a standard 400 digital ballast and a second cool tube)in the tent and set the 600 (the 600/400 digital ballast) up somewhere else, in a larger room, with no tent, so that it has what it needs to exchange the heat efficiently. I've been running this thing with 5 baby slh's (18 gallon rubbermade bubble bucket with 4 net pots, one of them has 2 plants in it) and a dinafem roadrunner auto (5 gallon bubble bucket)and a dinafem haze auto (5 gallon bubble bucket). The growth rate has seemed slow to me, I assume its just that the plants were struggling with the higher temps. I'm just gunna back down to 400. Thanks for the opinions, keep em coming if you've got em people
I ran 1400w in the same size tent (1000w hps + 2 4ft/4bulb t5 units) and was able to control the heat by adding an active intake to the mix that draws air from a cooler source (outside at night). I have since ditched the t5s purely because they were not helping with yield but run the 1000w without issues using this method. Both intake and exhaust fans are 6"
where are you drafting the air from? another room threw the side flap? if your trying to use the flap this might be the problem... can you take some pictures of your setup? something does not sound right.... even take pictures of mundane things... if you have to put labels on them in paint or some other program and show which way the air is leaving.... any chance you can show the attic vent as well.... there has to be a blockage or your fan is burnt or something
where am i drafting air from? uhhh what's drafting air? do you mean where is my intake connected? I am not bringing in any air, except for what my exchaust for cool tube brings in on its own (through the mesh side vents that the tent has, and ultimately, from under the closet door when its shut or if the door is open then through the doorway that leads to the bathroom (this tent is in a walk in closet thats in the master bathroom). This is part of the problem. If I was taking air in from another room at a good rate it would be cooler in there. Also, the hole (its actually a 16 inch long sleave that has a bend in it) in the roof of the tent that I pass through is only 4 inches so I have to use a reducer before I run the 4" duct through that and on in to a hole in the ceiling where its dumping the hot air into the attic. full 6 inch exhaust would also cool the tent down a bit, maybe a degree or two. anyways, if I add an intake to the room right next to it and I lose the tent I think i can probably run the 400 and the 600 and maybe another 400 or 2x150 and add some more buckets. Probably gunna step up from the dwc to the rdwc. I've just got a bunch of clones and they are getting ready to root and I don't have the set up to accomodate this many plants. But I want it. So I'm just gunna do a major re-do of the whole room, and lose the tent. This way I can use 6 inch exhaust and truth be told my tent didn't have anywhere for me to connect the intake anyways. But I'm gunna add that also, since I'm adding more lights, and hopefully this thing is gunna be cool enough. BTW I'm gunna wait on ordering the lights and make sure its cool enough with what i've got before I add stuff. The fan is not burnt out. when I climb into the attic and I hold my hand over the end of the 4" duct thats exhausting in there, it is blowing very very fast and forcefully. Sorry for the odd angles in the pic, the tent is half the size of the room and its hard to get a good shot. Thanks for the input
Well from the pics it looks like your not venting any air from the tent. It looks like your just venting the cooltube and heat is able to build up.
in the pic i have a caption that says killer strong 6" fan is hidden behind this duct. It is in the tent, at the top. It blows air through the duct and through the tube and out the top of the tent and then through on in to the attic. It sucks in a lot of air from the tent and blows it through the cool tube and out the top of the vent. The heat is "building up" in the tent but if I truly wasn't venting anything out of the tent it would be in the tripple digits without a doubt
..... your captions are super tiny.. i have a huge screen and i had to squint to see them.. it was good info.. just took a while to see try this.... nice and simple and should work move your fan and carbon filter to the attic... and only one side of your cool tube should have ducting.... like this.............Cool tube----ducting threw to attic-----fan--------carbon filter you have so much ducting that its not allowing your grow space to cool..... if you try my method it wont' cost any money just a little time... if it does not work... go out a purchase a ac....
From what I understand airline fans are most efficent sucking air then pushing it. Try connecting it to your outline.
Both of you, great advice. The ducting is warmer than the air around it and the huge amount of it that i've got in taht tent is keeping it hot in there, you're right. I still think it would be too warm in there, but it would help the problem. I have torn down the tent and I'm gunna convert the space and use it much more efficiently and add more plants. I'll update when complete. I am in the middle of it now and just happened to sit down and think to check the thread.
Sounds like you are locked down, but I wanna toss in my 2 cents. I hear a fair amount of talk about tents getting hot. The concensus seems to be 2 fans. 1 fan venting air through air-cooled reflector, from outside, through lamp, to outside. 1 fan exhausting air from tent, and possibly, like the Dr. above, when running lots of watts a third as a forced air intake. Hopefully one can get by with passive intake. It doubles, at minimum, your upfront fan cost..but what are your girls lives worth?? Good luck and happy grow
I had the same problem. Now I hang my clothes in the tent and grow in the closet. I also run my lights at night when it's cooler. I don't have AC. I'm also vented to the attic.
I lost the tent. Now I'm trying to optimize cooling, without the tent. I added an intake from an adjacent bedroom. I think I would be cooling this thing more efficiently if I pointed my intake like I've got marked in the first picture, with the airflow directed between the bottom of my cooltubes and the tops of my plants. Do you guys agree? How can I accomplish this duct pointing manuever? I thought about duct taping one duct to the other one and doing it that way, but I'm concerned with vibration noise and also with the mount probably being less than solid and me not really being able to direct the flow the way I want. The intake is hooked up to the 6" hydrofarm fan, with the 6" connection through the ceiling. The intake then snakes around inside the attic over to an adjacent climate-controlled room. The exhaust runs through the cool tubes, to the Vortex 4" fan, and out through the ceiling. It dumps into the attic. I am going to hook up my carbon filter inside of the attic when these plants start to put on a little bud.
i was looking at your grow.... with both of those lights and both of those fans.... if you had used one fan just to cool the lights and not used the air from the tent and... used the other fan just to scrub the air... I bet your tent would have been cool it looks like you have a sweet about of stuff... just couldn't find out how to cool things down... if you have time... and some extra tubing and another hole to draft air threw your tent just for your light... i bet it would work... i liked your filter... looks pretty worn out.. bet it was restricting air flow