Winter is upon us! As the days grow ever shorter and temperatures steadily drop, indoor growers may experience tent temperatures too low for optimal growth.What should we do? Below are some helpful tips that may offer us some inspiration:
Consider ventilating your grow tent from a lung room: a crawlspace, attic or other room in our home that does not get as cold as the outside environment.
Dim our intake/exhaust fans with a fan speed controller. Some fine tuning may be necessary here. Remember if we’re air cooling our lights, attaching a fan speed controller to the duct fan(s) that cool your lights is also an option as well. We do not typically recommend a thermostat to control the intake/exhaust fans (when temperatures become too cold, they are great for cooling our tent) because we want sufficient air exchange to maintain optimal CO2 and humidity levels. If our grow tent is getting too cold as a result of pulling in cold air, then using a thermostat will simply ensure our intake/exhaust fans are rarely operational.
De-glass our hoods. If we are using air-cooled HID lights in our grow tent, simply passively cooling our lights will drastically warm our grow tent. Not to mention, de-glassing our hoods will also net we 10-15% more available light for our plants.
Create an air diffuser. When cold air is introduced from our intake into our tent, the plants closest to this cold air will suffer if the difference in air temperature between the two is great. In order to not shock our plants, creating an air diffuser is a good option. One easy DIY fix is to simply use flexible ducting. Run a length of ducting from our intake fan long enough to wrap around our grow tent. Next plug the end of the ducting. Then cut small slits every few inches across the length of ducting. Congratulations we have created your own air diffuser!
Add more light. Rather than putting a heater into our grow tent (which is usually not a good idea, depending on the size of our tent this could be a safety concern), have we considered adding more light? If we have not maximized our grow space, ensuring even light throughout, then adding more light is a viable option. Why would we pay more to run an expensive space heater when we can kill two birds with one stone and simply put in an HID or T5 fixture, which yields both light and heat?
Using some smart temperature sensors to monitor the growth tent temperature, especially those real-time temperature and humidity sensors with alarms, which will help us know and control our growth tent better and keep our plants have optimal growth.
Hope all can have wonderful winter gardening!