August 01, 2020
Controlling heat in the grow room/indoor grow tent is one aspect of growing medicinal plants indoors that can be difficult for many of us growers. Grow lights provide our plants with lots of life-giving light, but they also produce heat, and big grow lights can produce a lot of heat!
Most medicinal plants start suffering when their temperature gets over 80-85°F (27-30°C), so it’s important to keep your grow space below that threshold. This tutorial will teach you tactics that you can use to control temperature and fix heat problems. You’ll also get some tips to help make sure your medicinal plants do great even if it gets too hot!
Building a vent for your grow tent exhaust is very important. This helps to suck out the hot air from the grow tent.
It is often recommended that you use a ceiling vent; this is because of the direction the heat rises. Placing the exhaust vent on the ceiling enhances the drawing out the heat from the grow vent.
While grow tent fans will not eliminate the heat inside of your grow tent, it will help you to circulate the air. This is important, because you will traditionally want to keep your plants as close to the light as possible, where the most heat is being generated. The use of an oscillating fan can be used to disperse the heat created by your lights, and cool the plants.
Your plant is much more resistant to heat if the roots don’t cook too, whether you’re growing in a pot or in a hydroponic reservoir. If you can find a way to help keep the roots around 70°F (21°C), your plant will suffer less and recover more quickly from a hot spell!
Watering your plant regularly when it’s hot will definitely help keep roots from drying out, and adding mulch on top of your soil can help retain moisture and keep roots cooler. Placing your potted plant inside a bigger, ceramic pot (or otherwise finding a way to block the pot from direct light) can also help protect roots from the heat!
Humidifier for grow room will help to reduce temperatures even further, while increasing the humidity to appropriate levels. However, you will want to be careful not to let the humidity get too high - which can inadvertently increase temperatures. For vegetative medicinal plants, a humidity level of around 40% is considered ideal - whereas seedlings will benefit from much higher humidity levels.
Opt for 18/6 Light Schedule in the Vegetative Stage
Many growers give their plants 24 hours of light a day in the vegetative stage, and although this results in the fastest growth, having the grow light off for several hours each day will dramatically help keep the temperature down.
Get an electrical timer to set your grow lights on a scheduleAlthough plants may grow slightly slower under this light schedule, 18/6 is a common choice for growing medicinal plants in the vegetative stage and here’s why: Although you want to maximize how much light you’re giving your plant, giving as much as possible doesn’t necessarily give the best results.
Strategically placing buckets of water throughout your growing area will both help to increase humidity levels, and reduce the heat inside of your grow tent. Ideally the buckets should be filled with cold water - and you can even use ice, or frozen water bottles. The bucket of water will act as a heat-sink, and absorb the heat inside of your tent. Also, using a grow pot promote faster plant growth through better aeration and it helps keep the plant cooler when the surrounding is getting too hot. Allows roots to breath and grow healthier, boosts plant growth and yields.
Controlling ambient temperature: Regulating temperature outside the grow tent also influences the temperature of the air inside the tent. Naturally, the temperature of the surroundings is usually less than the temperature inside the grow tent.Hence, the generated heat within the grow tent be dispersed to the surrounding areas by improving the airflow.This is why it is essential to direct the exhaust vent to an external window to avoid the accumulation of heat around the growing section of the tent.