First Grow room, new 1000w & plants fell over.., Too hot! Any pointers?

[LAmike]

My plants are standing again not as pretty, I thought 3' was safe.. :( Ok at 3' I am > 90°F on my plants and my 3 weekers fell right over man.. Installed fan blowing right on bulb, installed fan right in front of plants blowing away. At 4' my plants are at 72°F. No good this sucks how can I get them closer? My hood doesn't have a fan. I have an A/C unit to install tonight but that sucks, don't want to run A/C. Is it just light cooling? How close will I be able to get the light with a properly cooled hood? 400CFM hood or somethin?

By searching looks like the hood is the ticket. I can duct the hood to attic if I need to. And I have A/C. Just wanna hear what you guys think. This is a bedroom, the whole room avail with a window and 1000w HPS light.

[Prodaytrader]

Your not going to have a choice Mike. You will have to vent a 1000w light system. Having read your other posts I think I have a pretty good idea of what your doing here and it boils down to lack of commitment. Your trying to half ass this project and your finding out that it's not going to work. You bought a good light but you failed to consider that a light that big has additional factors. How much heat will it produce and what are you going to do to handle that heat? It's too hot to be left alone which you are finding out. Every inch that light is away from your plants, the cooler it will be on the plants and by a huge factor. Maybe an 1" per degree in your situation. However and this is a big however, every inch you move the light away, you reduce your available lumens to the plants. Each inch away is something like a few k lumen loss. This has to make sense to you...surely if you took your light down the hall and thought that it would feed your plants you would start to get the idea. Every inch is a life changer at this game.

Yes, you will need to vent the hood into the attic. Ideally, you will draw in the cooling air from the attic too. Practically speaking the intake and exhaust for your light will only be about 2 feet away but in the attic you need to extend those lines so that they are at other ends of the house if possible. No since in going to all the trouble of installing proper ventilation and then suck in your exhaust air too no effect.

The attic intake exhaust system is simple enough. Look on ebay for a vortex fan. 4 to 6" will be big enough for you and make sure you get all the adapters needed since you probably wont want to run 6" ducting through your ceiling. I would recommended 4" aluminum ducting with fittings to take it to 6" for the air cooled hood and finally a 4" vortex fan. 6" is also suitable for everything depending on how anal you are. Personally I find 4" to be adequate but then again I run a 600 watt light. Install the fan in your attic as detached from the rafters as possible. The fan will make noise and if your mount it right on a rafter then it will vibrate your house loose. Try and suspend it if possible. Connect to the fan your ducting that runs to the light. I think the best way is to suck the air through the hood and out to a vent in the roof. So point your fan in such a way as to suck through the hood and then push the air to another line to vent close to a whirly bird in your roof.

Your also doing aeroponics and something else I haven't seen you talk about yet is what the temp of your reservoir is. The argument is still out on how hot you can allow your reservoir to get but I can assure you that if your plants are at 90 then your res is likely way over 100 degrees. Your cooking your roots. Are they brown? If so then your res temps are too hot. You will need to figure out a way to get the plants down to around 75 or 80 at most and the water temps to around 70 at most.

Sometimes new seedlings get too tall because their stalk hasn't caught up. Make sure you aren't running the lights 24/7 and that you have a fan blowing on the plants. The fan is to help the plant grow strong not necessarily to cool the room. Even if cooling isn't an issue for you, have a fan blowing lightly on the plants to simulate wind. This will tell the plants to grow a thicker stalk.

Quit half ass'ing this project and do it right! Your on the right track, but I think you should make sure that you consider all factors on your next attempt to get things right. You don't want to keep dragging out the process of balancing out all the conditions for your plants to grow or else you wont be happy with what your plants do.

[LAmike]

Thanks that was a ton of help. You are right I am half as$ing this project, I tried to forget about temp and that won't work. I haven't started Aeroponics yet I have seeds planned for that but I don't want to screw it up. So I am in dirt for now. Will switch to 18/6 today when A/C is in, just needed to keep it 24/7 until I got the temp right. Tomorrow during afternoon it will be lights out, yes I have good light control at least..

I will have intake/outtake into the attic and a backup a/c unit. The intake will be by a vent hole. The temp control on this little 12000BTU a/c I am installing is great, I need to find a smaller A/C that has great temp control. I think here in Cali in the summer I am just going to have to go lights out or just burn CFL to do a 3 month VEG. lol I will post up my results when I am done with the vent system.

I am stopping and buying a vented hood today. What do you think about that tube HOOD? The one I seen at our local hydro shop said not for BT-56 socket, gotta see if that is what I have.

[LAmike]

I am getting a Cool Tube w/Adapter cord, an 8" 765CFM fan, a Reducer to 6" and enough tube to vent it out TODAY. Since I started out half as$ I am going to go overkill now. I am told by the shop owner if I do this I can drop it to inches.

After I recover I am going to get a temp/humid control system worked out. Why waste 1000 watts...

[Prodaytrader]

yea the cool thing about those tubes is that they can be water chilled too. If it's the one I think it is, you can run a water recycling chilling unit through that to do a water chilled hood. The thing about light distance is all about heat which is why the LED guys can let their plants touch the plants.

Whatever ferts you end up using, stick to about 40% of what they recommend as their most conservative cycle. Somewhere around 200 or so starting out and then work your way up the scale from there.

[markjames1503]

HEy Prodytrader -
I wanted to ask you a question regarding the attic ventilation system you were describing. I have a similar set up. I have a 1000w HPS hooded light with two 8" openings on either side. It is about 18-24" above my ladies. I connected an 8" 755CFM fan to one side and 6" duct to other. I have the fan blowing into the hood to suck air from the room through the hood into the duct and into the attic. I also have a window with a portable airconditioner/dehumidifier attached to it, right now we use it as a dehumidifier which pulls air from outside into the room. We also have a ceiling fan to circulate the air. I was confused about you saying that the exhaust fan will be pulling air from the attic? We only have one vent leading to the ceiling, so this shouldn't be pulling air back in with our system set up correct? Also we can't get the room humidity lower than 50%. We were wondering if this was adequate?
We run a hydroponics drip system, 8 plants, 1000w HPS, about 6 weeks into flowering. Any advice will help. Thanks man