Couple of ballast and heat questions

First, are there HID ballasts that have variable watts? Like so I can plug a 400w bulb in for now, but upgrade to a 1000w later?

There any way to get an idea of how much heat a light's going to produce? What's the smallest area(assuming decent ventilation, but not direct cooling) that you could put a 400w light in? a 1000w? There anything you can do short of ac if you live somewhere it gets over 100 degrees F, even with direct exhaust?

Tsolrathe said:

First, are there HID ballasts that have variable watts? Like so I can plug a 400w bulb in for now, but upgrade to a 1000w later?

There any way to get an idea of how much heat a light's going to produce? What's the smallest area(assuming decent ventilation, but not direct cooling) that you could put a 400w light in? a 1000w? There anything you can do short of ac if you live somewhere it gets over 100 degrees F, even with direct exhaust?

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i personally have never heard of a variable wattage ballast but that doesn't mean they don't exist. if you're worried you'll need more light later on just start off with a 600W or 1000W.

The ballast will heat up your grow room quite a bit. When my ballasts were running 18hrs a day they were real fuckin hot to the touch. a way to avoid this is by getting a remote ballast so you can place it outside of your grow room. 400W lights are good for up to a 4x4 room, 600W up to 5x5, and 1000W up to 5x7, according to the bottom of the page 1000W HPS Grow Light Systems

to help keep temps down keep your ballast out of the grow room, get a cool-tube light system, get ventilation fans such as box fans or oscillating fans, get an intake and exhaust fan to pull fresh air in and hot air out, you could use an ac also. also according to the 2nd law of thermodynamics heat goes from hot things to cold things so if you have a big open container of water in your grow room some of the heat will be used to warm that up instead of the ambient temp in your room. this won't have drastic results but if your out of options it might help out.