I only have a quick moment but appreciate this. It is about the environment. Create the best environment that you can. Put expenses into that before anything or you will be disappointed.
HID in winter, and I liked ceramic metal hylide during summer. Led or any quality cooler light in warmer months.
For a first start, consider soil and adding a few amendments for mid to later periods of growth as the plant readies for each stage of development.
I also like soil and recommend for new growers because it is more forgiving than soiless and hydroponics.
Your gonna get alot of advice. Take it all in, breath deep and enjoy the ride. Worry not, your gonna have ups, downs, disasters and triumphs. We all been there and done that and is part of the natural order.
Get familiar with pest and mold aspects. specifically powdery mildew, spider mites, thrips and fungus gnats for starters. Donāt worry thereās moreā¦ Dang pests.
Understand the environment and conditions they like and multiply in. Take precautions and effective measures seriously.
Itās gonna be an exciting time and I wish you all my best!
I like the impromptu in-line, @LzBoy . Damn good work-ina-pinch. I hope itās giving you a nice boost. @skyeden the heater in the tent even sounding like a risk will keep you worrying about it. Hahaha. Trust that youāll find plenty to worry about. The great thing about a lung room (fancy term for the room your tent is in) is that it acts as a buffer between your plants and everything else. Keep the temp up in the lung, and youāll be fine in the tent. Interior tent space is a precious thing.
Same for your other environmental parameters, do as much as you can in the lung room, and dial that ambient air into the precise numbers you want in the tent. Thereās plenty of great advice from solid OGās with a lot more experience than me and my partner in here on some methods to get that done in your space.
Keep on learning and asking questions, and follow or watch some seed-to-harvest type videos or diaries. Youāll come out with something great to try every time. @Terpsnpurps , @shade
"Based on scientific study and experimentation, LumiGrow has found that an increase in the ambient room temperature of 5-7Ā°C in LED-lit rooms relative to temperatures in HPS grow rooms is necessary to achieve similar internal leaf temperatures and plant growth rates as those experienced by plants in HPS-lit rooms. Keep in mind that as the ambient room temperature increases, the relative humidity decreases, and proportionate adjustments should be made to the relative humidity to adjust your Vapor Pressure Deficits. Optimize your cannabis grow for LED
Just a quick pull with a little more information. We keep a cheap Harbor Freight infrared temp gun on hand to check LST and off-set our VPD in our controller that way. There used to be customizable VPD charts (which allowed for LST differential) available free at Pulseās website, but I was actually on there for another reason just last night and couldnāt find it again. Others are a Google search away, though.
Stay up
Coffin_Dodger
I actually stopped by the store today to get a couple 2" boards. He messed up the measurements by a couple inches. They ended up cutting new boards to correct dimensions, gave me the messed up ones for free, then massively discounted the correct ones. So Iāll have 4" on top & bottom each now for only $14 total.
I canāt believe all the help everyone has provided so far! @Coffin_Dodger Iām going to attempt to warm the lung room w/ an oil heater first, maybe throw some duct from it into the tent like @LzBoy did. If that doesnāt work, Iāll either move it inside the tent or go back to the drawing board.
Thanks so much everyone I really appreciate all the advice!
Maybe thatās the reason I needed to be warmerā¦ see what I mean? The light makes the need for uptakeā¦ yet itās heat that causes itā¦ so the light caused 3 times the need for uptake than yoursā¦ so I needed it pretty warm to keep up with nutrient/uptake needs ā¦ so it makes senseā¦ so you may be able to get away with closer to 80 Ā°f like the others were saying
Ventilation. This tent will be in an enclosed 170sqft āsun roomā that basically has floor to ceiling sliding glass doors as the walls (no actual windows) covered completely with bamboo blinds. The tent will be exhausting into the same room it resides. Simply cracking a couple or doors to allow outside air in is not a problem, but that leads to my next issue. (This doesnt work i tried doing that with this setup in my office and had to build a window plate for the exhaust or it was 92f or higher.)
Temperature. I live in the Midwest and winter is coming, we have some nights on the horizon that will be in the mid teens (fahrenheit). Being in an uninsulated room that is not temperature controlled leads to this room getting very cold at night, but warming up quickly once the sun comes out. I was contemplating some of those heating tubes inside the tent I saw on another post here as they are low wattage, but not sure if those would even be enough. The floor is concrete so I was thinking a piece of foam board insulation under the tent would help, plus the pots will be slightly elevated off the ground on the risers. If I crack the doors for venting, this will only increase the cold problem. (I have my lights come on at 7pm and turn off at 1pm during veg, and 7:00pm - 7:00 am during flower.) this will keep things warm, and will also save you money on electricity because you miss peak hour electricity costs. Which is from 1pm to 7pm that will be your dark period during veg and costs less. Dont let it get down under 62f. I use two inline fans 6 inch one for intake(from the house, and exhaust out the window plate.) i live in colorado so low temps as well but grow tent in in room temperature.
Iād suggest venting out of that room just for the sake of humidity unless you implement a dehumidifier; as you mentioned crack the window open a lilā.
You can also get an inkbird humidity controller for cheap and set it so itāll force vent this room when your RH% peaks, this will help with the humidity build without consitantly bleeding the warmed air.
I run in a cold as fuck basement and needed to do the following:
Tent on insulation (i used anti fatigue foam from the dollar store, thereās also construction insulation, workout mats and children play mats.
Heat mats with controllers. No matter what I do my evening temps are close to 16-18c in the air, so I have heating mats (like for seedling starting) in all my tents set to 22c. This keeps the roots warm. If you check out the start of my Yogi co-op thread youāll see the difference a week of keeping the roots warm at night do for your plants. If you go the heat mat rout keep the pots ON THE GROUND or itās less effective.
If you have a southern facing wall that gets blasted with the sun, you can put in a black water barrel (bin, etc) thatāll collect the heat from the sun into the water which will be released overnight when the sun is down. Add a little bleach into it to keep it from blooming, and you could get an aquarium heater in there to keep it going.
I also created a āheated air lung boxā, which is a simple plywood box with vents that holds a small oil heater which has a duct-boosting fan located it itās roof that feed the hot/dry air to 2 of my tents.
Getting controllers will really help if you are (like me) dealing with wild shifts between daytime and night time temperatures. I slowly replaced all my inline fans with AC Infinity cloudline units as I can program them for many variables.
Hope this sea of info helps @skyeden ! Best of success!
Iām experimenting with seedling mats this yearā¦ didnāt really want to try to heat the room my tents are in, so settled on the heating mats (on top of foam board to insulate from the floor). I think I may put them on their own timers so I can do 15 minutes on/15 minutes off during certain times of day. If it works and doesnāt break the bank Iāll report back.
Checked your thread. Really amazing how much those heating pads helped. My current plan is to try something like @ifish said and surround the tent with the 2" insulation foam boards to make a sort of āboxā and hold heat in. After reading your thread, also now thinking I should look for some heating mats under my pots. I saw you had the sensors between the mats and saucers, but didnāt see you mention any specific temps? What was your on/off temps for the heat mats?
I have my grow tent set up in my sunroom. All 4 walls are sliding glass doors, 1 joining it to our living room (this one has about 4 foot of an interior wall on each side of the door, more on this later) while the other 3 open to outside. The roof is a single slope metal roof (not shingles like the rest is my house). Iām in the Midwest so winters can be single digits while summers get quite hot. My tent is only 3x3 and I donāt plan on doing more than 3 or 4 plants max. I am running a 4" 195cfm inline exhaust. I am looking for some opinions when it comes to ventilation.
Easiest option is to just exhaust into sunroom and allow passive air intake from the same room. I would assume Iād need to crack a couple outside doors as to allow humidity to escape/fresh air to enter, but maybe I donāt? My concern here is temps as it can be very cold/hot in this room, and even worse with doors open. This also adds a (while very minor) security concern as my doors will always be open.
Most difficult option is cutting a hole in the roof and installing a roof vent cap with draft blocker, then running my exhaust straight up and out the roof. I could then cut a hole in the wall joining the living room and install an air vent, then connect a duct to my tent for passive air intake that would pull air from the living room. I feel this would provide more stable temps as well as allowing me to keep all exterior doors locked.
Thoughts? Would option 1 be OK? Go with option 2? Some other ideas or combination of both? Is venting inside AC/heat controlled air straight from your house into the tent a bad idea? I just wanna get this right the 1st time. Thanks!
Or pump your exhaust into another room ( upstairs thru ceiling )
Save money on heat ( not throwing it outside ) and no crazy no turning back roof cutting , just plasterboard and floorboards to cut , easy and replaceable
Compass , pencil, pipe , jigsaw ,a drill and long drill bit for pilot hole
There is no upstairs. Itās a a sunroom. 3 walls are sliding glass doors going outside, and 1 wall is a sliding glass door going to living room. The 1 joining to the house at least has a few feet of actual wall on each side of the door though.
No upstairs, single story. Would it make sense to both intake and exhaust to the living room from the sunroom? Something like this in the sliding door? https://a.co/d/atO1M5d
You could also get a doggie door insert that goes in t he sliding glass and kinda modify it to be able to mount a dryer vent hell i popped out the window in my
Growroom To mount an ac and a dryer vent to the outside
.
