Ahh.. i cant stop my heat issues.. help!!

so ive followed all the guidlines, but ill jot them down and see what you guys think about it.

I have a 250cfm inline exhaust fan venting out the top of my grow room, which is 4x4x6. i have a 50cfm fan as intake into the room, its sucking air from an out side vent. i have a 16inch oscalting fan in there. im using a 600w light. but temps are staying aorund 88 and hum is 42. i would love for it to be around 82 degress without having to leave the door open. i live in cali and its hot anyways, but it on ave is like 75 degress. my grow room is built in my garage. my room is built out of plywood. but the inside is lined with a foil like material, its used for sheeting a roof and with the foil side that faces down to insulation. so i dont know if the wood is insulated, but id be a lot happier if the temp was lower and the door could stay shut.

so what do you guys think i should do.... add another exhaust fan. i dont have ac and wouldnt want to use it anyways to cut cost.

Let me know, i greatly appreciate it. ive been fighting this problem for awhile now.

yeah, that foil material might be jackin' up the temps. Might want to get some mylar in there. If need be, you might need to go down to a 400W setup. Remember, you do what you have to.

get an air cooled reflector if you don't already have one and circulate straight through the lamp your heat won't have much chance to enter the environment that way. More exhaust may work but 250cfm should be fine. Do you know what the temp of the air coming in through the vent is? Probably won't matter but worth a shot to look at.

Heres some pics of my set up. you can see the inline exhaust fan on the right wall at the back of it. i use the black oscalating fan when it gets too hot in there to add extra movement of air. i also have the reflector with the holes in it.

let me know what you think

To max out your space and helps with the mold too, is SOG might wanna lower the black fan to have the air circlating on top and bottom. Looks good and similar! how tall are they about 2 feet at the highest?

CaliMedicated said:

so ive followed all the guidlines, but ill jot them down and see what you guys think about it.

I have a 250cfm inline exhaust fan venting out the top of my grow room, which is 4x4x6. i have a 50cfm fan as intake into the room, its sucking air from an out side vent. i have a 16inch oscalting fan in there. im using a 600w light. but temps are staying aorund 88 and hum is 42. i would love for it to be around 82 degress without having to leave the door open. i live in cali and its hot anyways, but it on ave is like 75 degress. my grow room is built in my garage. my room is built out of plywood. but the inside is lined with a foil like material, its used for sheeting a roof and with the foil side that faces down to insulation. so i dont know if the wood is insulated, but id be a lot happier if the temp was lower and the door could stay shut.

so what do you guys think i should do.... add another exhaust fan. i dont have ac and wouldnt want to use it anyways to cut cost.

Let me know, i greatly appreciate it. ive been fighting this problem for awhile now.

Click to expand...

You only have a 50cfm fan bringing fresh air in. You are nowhere near the capacity of your exhaust fan. Is there a way to bring more fresh air in? Your exhaust should be fine but a 50cfm fan at the end of a piece of ductwork is not bringing much fresh air in.

djHIGHair said:

To max out your space and helps with the mold too, is SOG might wanna lower the black fan to have the air circlating on top and bottom. Looks good and similar! how tall are they about 2 feet at the highest?

Click to expand...

good pt on lowering the fan, ill do that tonight. they are on ave 1.5 - 2 inches tall.

NLXSK1 said:

You only have a 50cfm fan bringing fresh air in. You are nowhere near the capacity of your exhaust fan. Is there a way to bring more fresh air in? Your exhaust should be fine but a 50cfm fan at the end of a piece of ductwork is not bringing much fresh air in.

Click to expand...

i have any extra 90cfm that i replaced with the 250cfm. i could switch the 90 for the 50 or i guess i could buy another 250 or a bit smaller for the intake. what is addaquete? or what is recomended to match the 250 exhaust fan.

It is more complicated than that.

First of all, what you are using in the inside of your cabinet is insulation. You do not want to be trying to keep the heat inside your cabinet. In between grows I would recommend either painting the inside white or using mylar. Let the plywood/osb board breath and help with some of the heat.

Now, how far is the intake ductwork from your grow room and what size diameter is the intake hole?

How about the output?

NLXSK1 said:

It is more complicated than that.

First of all, what you are using in the inside of your cabinet is insulation. You do not want to be trying to keep the heat inside your cabinet. In between grows I would recommend either painting the inside white or using mylar. Let the plywood/osb board breath and help with some of the heat.

Now, how far is the intake ductwork from your grow room and what size diameter is the intake hole?

How about the output?

Click to expand...

wouldnt painting it still keep it insulated, isnt that what the foil backing is doing? what if i tryed pulling it off. i noticed when i put duct tape on it and try to remove it, it comes off. same deal with the mylar right, even though its in the inside of the osb heat cant escape through it.. does that make sense?

the intake is screwed right to the outside of the grow room, with a 4inch hole that has the duct pipe running right in.

the output goes right out the top of my grow room. the duct is 4 inch as well.

Obviously, that light is your source of heat. I would think the biggest improvement you can make to your heat problem right now is going to be getting a cooltube with a fan on the intake side. That has the potential of making the light give off so little heat that you will be able to lay your hand on the cooltube itself.

You can draw air in from outside and exhaust it outside never needing to worry about smells because it will be an enclosed system. Not only with this make your grow space significantly cooler, but it will allow you to get your light much closer to your plants, giving you more penetration to the lower buds. The downside is that you will have the added noise of a fan.

There are a couple of articles on how to make a cooltube on this website here and here

You can make it work with your adjust-a-wing. Al B. Fuct has done it.

that may be the route i need to go. i briefly read both articles and i need to read them again when i can focus on them.

GrowBig - when you say to put a fan on the intake side... are you saying to use my intake fan that i have now and connect it to the cool tube or get another intake fan only for the cool tube. leaving my existing intake fan for my grow room.

which brings me to the exhaust question. on the cool tube to a make a new exhaust hole for the duct or do i tie it in with my inline exhaust fan??

Im just a little unclear about those two things.

I should have prefaced my advice. I don't have any direct experience with a lot of this, so you want to double check what I say. I've read a lot about it though. The best info about this I read on Al B. Fuct's monster thread about how to get a harvest every two weeks. My grow is extremely ghetto with just a box fan venting into my attic. But my grow is in a closet and it's a big enough space where I have to do very little venting on top of that.

According to what I read, you want to have a separate fan drawing the air into the cooltube before the light, before the air gets heated. Then you want to dump that heated air outside of your cabinet. Ideally you want two separate air systems, one for the cooltube (that hot air never enters the cabinet) and one for the cabinet itself.

The reason for having two seperate systems, is that the fan for the cooltube, you want running at max speed, all the time, keeping the cooltube as cool as possible, so you can get the light as close to you plants as possible. However, the speed of the intake fan for the main cabinet ideally would be controlled by the temp of the air in the cabinet. You want those temps to be as stable as you can get 'em, especially to keep humidity constant (as air cools it dumps moisture.) Assuming that the temps of the intake air fluctuate with the seasons, the only way you can do this is to have a fan that has it's speed controlled by a temperature sensor inside the cabinet.

You could get something like this to control your fan, but I have no experience with this product specifically. It seems that it would be able to turn the fan on and off with your preset temperature. Sadly, it won't act like a rheostat, controlling the speed of the fan, which would be more ideal. But it's pretty damn cheap solution for what it does.

I suppose you could have the heated cooltube's air dump into the same exhaust. But for the price of an extra hole in your cabinet, I'd keep them separate just so you have more control and you only have to carbon filter a much smaller amount of air to control scents. If an intake fan wasn't strong enough to do the job for you on either system, you could always add a second fan on the exhaust side of things (but get it on the rheostat, same as the intake for the cabinet.)

Of course, all of this is assuming that you have intake air that is cool enough to keep your cabinet the right temperature. If your intake air is just too damn hot, then you're going to need some A/C.

Oh, one more thing, you have your ballast outside the cabinet, right?

great info and advice. i am going to spend some time tonight doing research to can get this going. i do have my ballast out of my cube. ill read al's thread also.

Thanks for the help

Cool. Just a warning, Al's thread is insanely big. It will probably take a couple of sittings to get through the whole thing, but I highly recommend it. I learned a ton from that thread.

I'll keep on eye on this thread to see what kinda solutions you come up with. Good luck man!