I've been going through about one normal sized bottle of propane per week. (the size that you see used with grills etc.) This seems extremely high and I'd like to know a few people's thoughts on my setup. I will first say that I do have a sealed room, with an A/C that is constantly running. Since it's in the basement I have vented the A/C along with both of my lights in the room using a single vortex fan that goes up the chimney, it works quite well. (basically I put a box around the outside of the A/C where the heat comes out, then ran ducting from the lights through that box so that the heat from the A/C also gets carried out. So far I have had no problems maintaining a day/night temperature of 82F/70F with the A/C always on a given setting. I'll also note that the room is roughly 10x10x7, and there's 8 slighty-too-large plants at this given time. Should I be going through this much CO2?
Are you running the right PPM? Are you venting your lights and AC closed loop or is it open to your grow space? Basically, you'd want to pull air from outside your grow room through your lights and out of the grow room again. I'm sure you realize that sucking air out of your room in anyway is detrimental to keeping the right co2 levels.
1500pmm.. I wasn't sure if the A/C blowing inwards would combat the hot air that I'm sucking out the back of it. The air is coming through outside the sealed room through the fans, then out, without being sucked directly out of the room. The only way the air in the room could be sucked out is through the back of the A/C... If this is the case, I will find a better way to cool down the rest of the basement.
yeah, i was just reading about that. believe it or not, i've never heard of anyone using that before, lol!!!
what are your btus from the heater? i can answer if you can answer before i leave the site in the next half hour or so. i am about to shut down. i will do what i can to walk you through it so you can get your answer. take your btus and times by 1.18. then divide by 1000. take that number and plug it into the link at the cfh slot. you want to add in 1200 ppm to the room every four hours the lights are on. shutting off anything that sucks the air out for thirty min. if you are using a cap co2 burner or a clone of it... each burner i think puts out 8k btu. so it would be (8000*1.18)/1000=9.44 i would run for 6 minutes three times a night. with one 8k burner. your tank should last 190.2 days. http://www.hydroponics.net/learn/co2_calculator.asp
needa is really good at getting this down to exact numbers i have a room about that size except 10x10x10 and i run 1100 ppm and the tank lasts about 4.5 months and i exhaust out around 800 cfm with a ac unit.