Forget MH im going back to Flourescent

I have an apt and built an indoor grow box to put my 250w MH inside with a duct running out of a window. My light is 4 foot off the plants. . .
Within an hour my plants are getting overheated at 110 degrees. not to mention how dam hot the apt is getting and the expensive eletric bill.
FUCK IT. flourescents are just fine for now. I will pop in a hps when im ready to bud. Do i need a pane of glass or something under the bulb to keep the heat off of them? I dont understand how people pull this off... and when I go to bud what do i do about the hps get a really low wattage bulb?
any help is always appreciated

IcedoutKu$h said:

I have an apt and built an indoor grow box to put my 250w MH inside with a duct running out of a window. My light is 4 foot off the plants. . .
Within an hour my plants are getting overheated at 110 degrees. not to mention how dam hot the apt is getting and the expensive eletric bill.
FUCK IT. flourescents are just fine for now. I will pop in a hps when im ready to bud. Do i need a pane of glass or something under the bulb to keep the heat off of them? I dont understand how people pull this off... and when I go to bud what do i do about the hps get a really low wattage bulb?
any help is always appreciated

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i made a cooltube for my 400 watt HPS and connected an exhaust fan to it. takes the heat right out of the room.

If the lights are causeing over heating in the grow room then you need to do some work on it.Get your hand's on a decent exaust fan not a computor fan one that will pull the hot air out no problem.Also get a large ossalateing fan to blow up at the light's to keep the heat of the plants.Going back to flouresent's is not the answer bro you will gain nothing from those light unless you are useing them for clone's or seedlig's.Run some duckting into a loft space or a crawl space.Then get a exaust fan to pull the hot air out and put it into loft or crawl space.I don't like venting hot air out of a window,This can be picked up by helicopter on the flur camera.

u need at lest a 160 cfm sucking air out of ur room. if u can suck off the light then even better. u have to have almost that much cfms blowing in. I have a 2.5x 4x 7 closet that has no issues as long as u dont do what i did and veg in tell there 5 feet tall.
if u do decide to go with fluorecents, i would go with a full blue spectrum. i was happy with the way they were growing. i have pics if u want to check them out. they wont grow as fast with regular fluorecents but a blue spectrum u can do something with. i have personaly used and still use every know and again. agrosun is the name of the blue spectrum. there like $18.

ur gonna have the same problem with the hps as the mh. mh does create slightly more heat than the counterpart of the same wattage in the hps . but either way ud see more growth outa the mh over floro. and ud be able to run the hps just fine if u just took care of ur exhaust problem. like people said above me, either construct a cooltube, or simply get the glasss pain for ur hood, and buy a 4'' inline fan above 150cfm, hook it to some dryer vent exhasut it right out the box, and have it either attached to ur hood, or if there is no attachment, have the dryer vent sucking in a posistion where it catchs all the heat coming off the lamp. shouldnt be a big deal to control. i have 2600w and am able to achieve a even temp never surpassing 80.

I have a small box, 4" X 2' X 6' with 10 plants in 3 gal bags at day 34 under 8 T5 tubes. The plants are thick, short and bushy. I'm not sure if it's worth buying a 400W HPS for budding in this set up. I do have a 4" 170 CFM inline fan. I wonder if this would keep my box cool enough with a 400 HPS? I'm tempted to just complete this grow with the fluoros which have been outstanding so far. Any suggestions??

Thanks,

kk thats alota help thnx all

Where's the ballast located. You don't want the type of fixture that has the ballast inside it. You want the ballast somewhere outside the grow box with just the wires going into the box to the bulb. I put the ballasts inside a nearby closet. The closet gets hot but it's trapped in there.

You said you live in an apartment and you have a duct going out your window. That's going to look weird and unless you have a good carbon filter on it the odor may be noticed by neighbors who have their windows open.

With only 250 watts you really shouldn't need a lot of ventilation to keep the box cool enough. I had a 3x1.5x3 high box with two 150 HPS in it. That's more wattage than you and the box only got to about 85 degrees. Of course, 250 watt ballasts are almost as big as 400 watt ones, whereas a 150 watt HPS ballast is quite small, you can hold it in the palm of your hand. Maybe two of them put out less total heat than one 250 watter. They also spread the light more evenly than one larger lamp.

To remove the heat from the box, this is how I set it up. I drilled 2" round holes in the top of the box right above where the arc tubes of the lights would be (using one of those round saw drill bits). The bulbs were positioned so that the glass was only about 1" below the holes. You could put them lower but I wanted as much vertical space below the bulbs as possible and the box was only 3' high so I wanted the bulbs as close to the top as possible.

As a reflector/heat transfer device I simply put a small piece of foil directly on top of the bulb, bent so that it would sit on there and go out a little as reflective wings on the sides. The piece of foil would probably blow off of the bulb if there was a fan in there but I don't have a fan in the box at all. I also drilled some small holes in the bottom and top of the box (3/4"), like 10 holes spread evenly around on each. So what happens is that the heat from the lamps takes the air upward from the bottom holes out through the holes above the lamps and in the rest of the top. The most heat obviously comes directly off the top of the bulbs so most of the heat goes right out those 2" holes above them.

Above that top with the holes, I put another solid top 6" up. So it's like a little chamber at the top where all the hot air goes up into. I put odor absorbing products in that chamber to remove odor from the hot air before it is vented by a low volume fan from the chamber directly into the apartment air. I also use low odor strains like NL and Chronic so there's really not much odor to deal with in the first place. Gets a little warm in the apartment but nothing a small AC doesn't solve, which I would need anyway in the summer.

You don't need a fan inside the box with this setup. The air comes in at the bottom and passes upward through the plants and out through the top holes. That's all the air movement they need, along with the small fan in the top chamber helping to pull the air through. They grow fine. The top of the chamber is removable so I can put deodorizers in there when needed. It's also good for rooting clones over because of the warmth from the chamber below it.

That is a very good idea and I will see what i can get out of it. However I wuld like to say for the record, my box is my entertainment center... completely stealth you would never know it. Also I have a personal balcony with a small window near the floor. It is perfectly hidden. We are having problems with keeping the place cool as it is with this FL heat. But I got a piece of glass to under the bulb and duct fan suck the air right off the beast.

smoke and coke said:

i made a cooltube for my 400 watt HPS and connected an exhaust fan to it. takes the heat right out of the room.

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Hey Smoke and coke where did ya get the glass from. Plus nice DIY

Do I hear another tutorial

keico said:

Hey Smoke and coke where did ya get the glass from. Plus nice DIY

Do I hear another tutorial

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lol yes i will be doing a tutorial but not until the fall. too much going on this time of year.
i got the glass tube from ebay. its called a bake a round tube. i got a couple of them for about 25 bucks each including shipping.
they work like a charm.

smoke and coke said:

lol yes i will be doing a tutorial but not until the fall. too much going on this time of year.
i got the glass tube from ebay. its called a bake a round tube. i got a couple of them for about 25 bucks each including shipping.
they work like a charm.

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Yea thats great

I have seen other DIY Cool Tube using the "Bake Around Tube"

The only thing is there great for HOS bulbs, but not the MH bulbs with a larger diameter

keico said:

Yea thats great

I have seen other DIY Cool Tube using the "Bake Around Tube"

The only thing is there great for HOS bulbs, but not the MH bulbs with a larger diameter

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your right on that.
i think they make a horticulture bulb and or an aquarium bulb that is a MH but shaped like an HPS.
i only use the cooltube for the HPS