LEDs and other marijuana lighting alternatives are good for smaller rooms, and auto-flowering marijuana, but not yet intense enough to power full-size marijuana plants to their best harvests.
We all know about the excess heat that high intensity discharge lights create.
You have to remove unwanted heat from your room in order to maintain the right temperatures for your marijuana plants.
For small grow rooms with at most one one-thousand watt HID lamp, a ventilation fan might be all you need to remove heat.
It’s best to place your exhaust fan high in the room because heat rises. Finding a fan with the proper cubic feet per minute (CFM) makes a huge difference in the removal of heat.
The generic formula is to have at least 250 cfm capacity for every 1000-watt light your grow room contains.
For multiple HID lights, using cooled reflectors is an efficient way to remove heat, and may even negate the need for an exhaust fan, although if you can safely exhaust without spreading cannabis odor where it shouldn’t be, it’s nice to remove stagnant air.
Air cooled hydroponics reflectors have ventilation ports on both sides allowing the gardener to attach ducting to a fan to remove heat directly from the lighting fixture.
A “closed” air-cooled system has both sides of the reflector ducted with one duct connected to a fresh air intake and the other end connected to an exhaust fan.
The “closed” system is the most efficient, especially when running a CO2 system because the heat from the lights can be removed but you’re not removing the C02.
An “open” air-cooled HID system leaves one end of the reflector open and the other end connected to the exhaust fan.
This removes heat from the lighting fixture and removes excess heat from your hydroponics grow room as well.
You can utilize “open” or “closed” systems with individual reflectors or create a series or chain of reflectors allowing one fan to cool multiple lighting fixtures.
Water-cooled lights are a bit more complicated. Water removes heat way faster than air, but water-cooling involves more equipment and set-up than air-cooling or venting.
The main thing to always remember is your marijuana plants give you the most THC and weight when they’re within a narrow, optimized range of environmental conditions.
Most marijuana growers aren’t giving their cannabis plants these ideal conditions, and it hurts yield, growth rate, and potency.
One really cool thing (ha ha) about air cooled or water cooled lights is that you can put your marijuana plants closer to the lights, which means more light intensity to fuel photosynthesis.
Before you decide to upgrade the ways you deal with heat from HID lights or other heat sources in your marijuana grow room, visit a well-stocked hydroponics store to look at grow room cooling technology and options in person.
