Cultivation

How to Cool a Grow Tent: Best Tips and Tools

February 18, 2020

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When it comes to growing marijuana indoors, there are a number of things that need to be taken care of and ensuring that your grow tent remains cool is one of them. Ensuring that the grow tent is properly cooled is something that you as a grower really need to take care of and in this article, we will give you the best tips and tools on how to cool a grow tent.

Grow tents are an essential element for anyone who plans on growing marijuana indoors. They provide you with a contained environment where you can test out various things while also ensuring that your grow lights are used to their maximum possible potential. Given that all the light is reflected on to the plants inside a grow tent, they also ensure that the plants grow better and provide higher yields. Grow tents also help hiding your plants from public sight and also help contain the smell if you use a carbon filter with them. There are a number of other benefits of grow tents, such as keeping pests and insects away, etc. However, keeping the tents cool is one thing that you really need to take care of!

Over the course of this article, we shall take a closer look at why grow tents heat up, why do you need to keep them cool, and then how to keep grow tents cool – the best tips and tools to ensure your tent doesn’t heat up. We hope that this article helps you gain a better insight on cooling your grow tent.

Why Do Grow Tents Heat Up?

Grow tents can heat up due to many reasons. However, the most common reason is that the grow lights are overheating. Lights emit heat – and different kinds of grow lights emit different levels of heat. While LED lights emit the least heat, using an old-fashioned form of lighting such as a High-Pressure Sodium light will produce more heat. These are the biggest reasons as to why your grow tents tend to heat up. There are some grow lights which do not have a proper cooling mechanism and end up accumulating a lot of heat.

If your grow tent does not have a proper ventilation system or a good inline duct fan, there’s a chance that your grow tent will heat up. Other than grow lights, some people also tend to use heaters in their grow rooms which can also impact the temperature of the grow tent. While plants do need a little bit of warmth, excessive heat is never good for them! Let us now take a closer look at why you need to keep the grow tents cool and why is excessive heat bad for your plants:

Why Do You Need to Keep Grow Tents Cool?

You need to keep your grow tents cool because having an excess amount of heat building up in your tents will be detrimental to the growth of your plants. If your grow lights are heating up too much, it could result in the top of your plants starting to burn off, or it could also result in more dangerous consequences including your grow lights either getting damaged due to this excess heat, or sometimes even catching fire. While fire-related incidents have greatly reduced over the past few years, there’s still a risk of that if there’s no proper cooling mechanism. In addition to that, if your grow tent is heating up too much, it would also result in a slower and stunted growth for your plants and they would need more water as well. While a moderate amount of heat is good for the plants, too much of it is bad.

How to Cool a Grow Tent? Tips and Tools to Keep Grow Tents Cool

Here are the top tips and tools using which you can keep your grow tents cool:

1. Using Inline and Exhaust Fans

Using inline and exhaust fans are one of the best solutions to ensure that the grow tent does not heat up so much. These fans make sure that while fresh air is pushed into the tent, the air that is inside is pushed out as well. This combination ensures two things – there is a constant flow of fresh air inside the grow tent, which is very important for the growth of the marijuana plants, as well as that the hot air keeps moving out. The exhaust ensures that all the air that is accumulating inside the grow tent is circulated out of the tent and making sure there’s no hot air that remains inside. A well-set combination of inline and exhaust fans can result in the best possible scenario for the growth of your plants where the air is just perfect levels of warm but not so hot that it causes any damage!

2. Using Air Conditioning

Air conditioning is the simplest means to ensure that temperatures remain low. If you have a small growing setup, one small Air Conditioner should be good enough but if you have a growing setup which is too big, you would perhaps require an industrial grade cooling solution and a bigger air conditioner, perhaps one with big pipes running all over your grow room. However, Air Conditioners ensure that temperatures remain low and are the easiest way out for growers who want to avoid overheating of their grow tent. The one drawback that using air conditioning has is that the cost of electricity needed to run them tends to be too high, especially if you are growing on a large-scale.

3. 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!

4. Ensuring Your Grow Lights Have Proper Fans

When you are buying grow lights, check if your grow lights have a proper cooling mechanism! Having a grow light with multiple fans in it is always better. In the past, there wasn’t really much of a provision for this. However, nowadays you find most grow lights coming with fans – with usually more than one fan in them. These fans ensure that any hot air that gets accumulated in the light is moved out of the system thereby making sure that your light as well as your tent remains cool. Usually, the higher the wattage of your grow light, the more number of fans it needs to keep cool. There are some grow lights which even come with like 4 to 5 fans.

5. Ensuring Your Grow Lights Have Heat Vents

Heat vents are very important for a grow light because they allow for heat to come out of the light’s mainframe. Since hot air tends to be lighter and rises upwards, these heat vents are usually placed in such a way that the air comes out of the grow light and is then dissipated outside with the use of the grow tent’s fans. Making sure that your grow light has a proper heat vent arrangement is always good. Don’t go for a grow light which has a very compact body with no heat outlets! That would mean heat can build up inside the light and cause damage to the parts of the light. Instead, go for a grow light which has vents on all sides!

6. Ventilation on the Glass Panels

Having ventilation on glass panels is important for growers because it allows another opening for the heat to escape. Most LED grow lights come with glass panels on the front side, that provide an opening for the heat to exit. Having ventilation on glass panels is good for extending the life of your LED as well because the lesser the heat the better the chances of the lights not having their lifespan cut short due to heat-related damage.

7. Using Water Cooled Lighting Systems

Now this is something we rarely see! But water-cooled lighting systems are great for keeping a grow tent cool. This is because grow lights are one of the biggest sources of heat inside a grow tent and using water-cooled lighting systems ensure that the temperature of these grow lights remains under control. These have also been found to be better at cooling the temperature of the grow lights when compared to air-cooled grow light systems.

8. Using A Clip-On Fan

A clip-on fan is one of the best grow tent accessories that you can purchase and it has multiple benefits. First off, these are lightweight devices which can be clipped on to the grow tent’s bars. These fans ensure that the heat is dissipated well, but also provide another major help to your plants: they ensure that there is a steady breeze inside the grow tent which is critical for a plant as breeze helps lower the temperatures as well as it helps the stem and the branches grow stronger! A clip-on fan costs just a few bucks but adds great value to your overall growth. They also keep small insects and pests away. This is a good investment for cooling as well as for ensuring a better growth and survival of plants.

9. Ensuring Proper Ventilation

Ensuring that your grow tent is well ventilated is another great way of answering the question of how to cool a grow tent. This means not just the inlets and exhausts but also regular vents which are usually covered by a layer of mesh that makes sure that while air passes in the insects and pests are kept out. These ventilation windows are of great help when it comes to dissipating the heat, especially when combined with inlet fans, exhaust fans and clip-on fans.

10. Using Light at Night-Time

Now, this is a simple lifehack. Temperatures during night time usually tend to be cooler than what they are during the day time. Hence, using grow lights at night will be a better option for growers because it will ensure that the outside temperatures are lower and hence will not pile on to the existing atmospheric heat. Given that when you grow indoors, you have a better control over environmental factors, reversing the day-night cycle could be an effective way of keeping the overall temperatures down.

11. Setting Timers

Now, this is something that needs to be perfected over time – but once you understand exactly how you want to use your timers for grow lights, you will be able to provide a significant reduction in temperatures. It is essential to know that plants need not only hours of light but also hours of being in the dark. However, 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.

12. Good Circulation Inside the Grow Room

While the grow tent needs to have a good air circulation, another way as to how to cool a grow tent is to keep the grow room in itself cool. Using a proper system of exhaust in the grow room is a good solution to keep the grow room cool. If the grow room is cool, the tents will also be quite cool. However, you need to ensure that your grow tents have a good carbon filter, otherwise, the smell of weed will be all over your neighborhood!

13. Using LED Lights

Using LED lights is one of the best ways to reduce heat generation. LED lights are known to produce a much significant amount of heat compared to older and traditional ballast-based systems of lighting. While they do produce some amount of heat but that is very less compared to the likes of the traditional HPS or MH lamps. LED lights provide a higher wattage while drawing lesser power from the power socket giving the growers a great benefit in terms of reduced electricity costs. Furthermore, they also last for a much longer time when compared to other forms of grow lights.

Conclusion

In 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. Do comment below or let us know over mail in case there’s something more that you would like to know about how to cool a grow tent!

Happy Growing! 🙂

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