cooling/ ventilation q?

Evlaar

Active Member
I just finished my stealth grow room. It has 8 26w cfls and 4 40w 4' fluorescent tubes. It has a 30 cfm fan on the input and a large inline fan on the exhaust. The air being brought in is cold when you put your hand in front of it because of a special ice contraption thing I built. The issue is that when the lights are on the room still gets up to around 85 degrees. Is it possible that my exhaust fan is too strong and all the cold air is basically getting like streamlined up to the exhaust vent? Please help I wanna get temps down so i can put some plants in!! :weed:
 

Evlaar

Active Member
sorry i forgot to mention that the room is 5' x 30" x 30", so its a long but not tall rectangular prism basically. Idk if that matters for part of the figuring :confused:
 
in my experience even though 85 is high with the lights on, it should be ok to put plants in. make sure your humidity doesn't get to high as well. after about 60 percent your carbon filter will lose efficiency. I'm no expert but I make sure my room never exceeds 90 on a really hot day. what is the temp with the lights off? mine is around 70 or 75. you could consider buying a a different light set up with a sealed hood to vent out the hot air. also I have had better luck bringing dow heat by fixing my exhaust rather then adding cool air. hope this helps. are you venting from the top of the room? heat rises. you could put your input lower if its not already.
 

Evlaar

Active Member
ya the intake is at the bottom and the exhaust is at the top, on different sides of the room (about 5 ft apart). With the lights off the temperature is nice and low, between 70 and 75. Its confusing me because the air coming in is comin in pretty quick and its full on cold. Idk. when you run your plants at 85 do the buds still get nice and dense and all that?
 
air quality, temp, humidity will all affect your bud. best bet is to keep it around 75 but your plants will not suffer much from 85 degree temp with the lights on. if it gets too hot one day just turn off lights until the heat goes down. this will be safer then leaving them in the heat. I would suggest getting a new light and hood with ventilation and glass to keep the heat in. florescent lights will produce much more heat then a 400 HPS with a vented hood. you can look on craigslist if your area has many growers. I can find a 400 in my area used for about 100 bucks with vented hood. if not then online there are some deals for full setups.
 

Evlaar

Active Member
thanks for the help p/c, but I am out of money now from setting up what ive got! :wall: so I guess I'll have to just try to make what I have work. I really think the problem might be an airstream of all my cold air going straight out my exhaust, is this even a possibility? has anyone had a similar issue?
 

Hairy Bob

Well-Known Member
I don't think that air flowing through the room too fast is the problem. On the contrary, if it is hanging around long enough to get heated up, it's more likely not moving fast enough.
A cost effective solution would be to have both fans at one end of the room exhausting air, and have a cooled passive intake at the other end. If both fans move about the same amount of air you would be doubling your airflow. Think about it, if each fan moved, say, 100 cubic feet of air per minute, then with one intake and one exhaust 100 cubic feet of air would move through the room every minute, but if both were moving 100cfm out of the room, and chilled air was free to enter the room, then that would go up to 200cfm.
Ventilation is about moving as much air as possible until you get to a manageable temperature. Forget this idea you have that if you put cool air into a room with a heat source, multiple in your case, that air will stay cool. The heat from the lights will be transferred to the air, and then you need to get that air out, and keep more cool air coming in.
The only time you can have too much ventilation is if the room is too cold, you are using co2 and it's all getting sucked out of the exhaust, or the humidity drops below acceptable levels.
 

Evlaar

Active Member
Thanks for all the help guys, I have had the room running all night and my thermometer says the room never got above 77. I bought a bunch more fans to move the cold air around a little better in there and it fixed the problem. I think my fan placement really was creating the airstream I was talking about because everything pointed at the exhaust on accident. Idk maybe it was just a lucky run or something but for now i'm content. Haha
 
Top