3 Top Grow Tents Tested Out. Heres the Results!

[anbesol]

I have had the pleasure to test out 3 different grow tents for various operations. We have the Homebox XS, GrowLab 80 and Secret Jardin DR80.

I have read various sites of people claiming which they feel is best, but never heard anything about people testing more then one. I have always used a Homebox as you can tell from my other grows. I feel that was always my standard for grow tents. For starters the Homebox I have has the white interior, 3 4" ports and the flaps. After one year of use the zippers have been fixed and frayed a lot. It ended up resorting to the clone room/mom room. Good for a T5 lamp, even though I've ran a 250 HPS in there. I personally would recomend this for someone who is starting off and will upgrade later. But I still love her. Its only $119 from most places.

Next we have the GrowLab 80, Now I'm big on stealth. and this thing is a monster grow tent, I have a feeling it was deffintly meant to hold a nice hydro table with a 600 watt hps or soil with a 1000k. Its 6 feet high, even though they claim it to be 5'11". I love The large space and the amount of exhaust holes it has, great for an air cooled and Co2 injection. Silver interior walls. It has some great flaps to view your grow from inside, but the windows are a bit hazy to look through since its thick plastic. The windows dont do much for stealth since any person can walk up and rip open the heavaly velcroed windows and see them/ruin a light cycle. Unlike the Homebox XS I was unable to attach my locks on the tent zippers just for home security. This would deffinitly be a good tent for someone who lives alone or can stash this in a basement behind a refrigerator lol. Price is around $200

Now, The final grow tent I have tested is the Secret Jardin DR80, They are a bit harder to find and deffinitly a bit cheaper then the grow lab pricing at $180. Now from the pictures I have seen on the net I wasnt so sure about this one, But heard great reviews online. It also has silver walls, Extremy tight nit vents with velcro. Its a 7" shorter then the growlab but 1" wider. I like the idea that this tent has 2 zippers but they meet up to make it one long line of zipper to throw a lock on it. No windows with this one, but it does have an amazing Port lay out, Not as many as the Growlab but it has double flaps in the ports to make it extreamly air tight. The only thing i didnt like was the top braces that hold the light wasnt as tight fitting as the growlab or Homebox. And the secondary floor was pretty loose. [

Hope you all learned some info on this. Any questions please ask, Im willing to answer. Good Luck on your tent hunts.

anbesol Reviewed by anbesol on 10-11-2009. 3 Top Grow Tents Tested Out. Heres the Results! I have had the pleasure to test out 3 different grow tents for various operations. We have the Homebox XS, GrowLab 80 and Secret Jardin DR80. I have read various sites of people claiming which they feel is best, but never heard anything about people testing more then one. I have always used a Homebox as you can tell from my other grows. I feel that was always my standard for grow tents. For starters the Homebox I have has the white interior, 3 4" ports and the flaps. After one year of Rating: 5

[anbesol]

So Which one is the winner? Secret Jardin. Its my personal favirote. But others may say different.

[pooneej]

Could I use CFLs for light source in any of these boxes? I am complete noob so if thats a dumb question, I'm sorry.
My goal is to get one of these premade setups and either put in my basement or a spare bedroom on 2nd floor and see if I can learn how to do this.

thanks!

[FreeDaHerb]

You surely could if you had enough light in the right spectrums, would be plenty for a few small plants and a small yield for personal usage. I would encourage you to go with a high quality LED though because watt for watt the CFL's will likely produce just as much ambient heat as HPS if you are running alot of them and you still won't have the light output of the HID. This means you are likely to have heat issues and need ventilation, etc. The LED's run much much cooler, use way less electricty and put out basically all PAR watts which is the usable plant growth spectrum.

A good starter light that is extremely bright and only uses 125 watts of electricity is the Procyon 100 LED, equal to approx 250 watts of Metal Halide HID in real world usage for flowering Cannabis, and to about 400 watts of HID for leafy crops like spinach, lettuce, etc. They easily cover a 2 ft x 2 ft area and plants up to about 24" tall effectively. The lights run about $500 each online and will give you many times the useful output the CFL's would and last many many years, however because they are just blue & red spectrum for use during flowering you will need to introduce some full spectrum light into the mix to power certain processes the plants use for budding signals. You can use just 2 CFL's to accomplish this (I would use one warm white 2700k bulb and a full spectrum 5500k in say the 100 watt equivalent sizes) There are some home depots & lowes stores that have huge ones that are like 300 watt equivalents and put out many thousands of lumens each. One of those would surely work too.

If you don't have the budget for the LED then make sure you get as many CFL's in there as you can without having a heat issue. Any constant temps over 85 F or God forbid 90 F without any added CO2 enrichment are not going to be good for your plants health or their growth and will severely affect their yield, flowering time, & potency not to mention make them stink alot more smell wise and dry everything out constantly. Ideally you want temps in the 75 to 78 F range...a little warmer is fine but they transpire alot more at higher temps and you will have humidity issues with no active ventilation/exhaust etc. If you can spring for a small 4" can-fan combo (costs like $139 or so for the combo) and exhaust all the hot air outside of the small tent that would be ideal then you could run a shitload of CFL's in it or even a small HID light like a 250 watt HPS for instance. It would likely yield more than the LED light but will use twice the electricty and runs very hot.

For yield I would rank them like this:

1 - HPS
2 - Metal Halide
3 - LED
4 - CFL

For quality/potency of bud I would rank them like this:

1 - LED
2 - Metal Halide
3 - HPS
4 - CFL

For initial first cost I would rank them like this:

1 - LED (cheapest in long run due to very long life & less heat)
2 - HPS
3 - Metal Halide
4 - CFL

For most heat I would rank them like this:

1 - HPS
2 - Metal Halide
3 - CFL
4 - LED

Hope this helps! :rastasmoke:

[FreeDaHerb]

Great write-up on the tents by the way OP. :thumbsup:

Personally, I would choose the newer GrowLab tents for many reasons including their IR blocking highly reflective inside material and updated features like built in vents with drawstrings / covered viewing windows / most frame weight capacity for holding equipment / ability to just set the exhaust fan on top of the tent instead of mounting it inside and much more. From what I can tell they are the best on the market and virtually lightproof.

[irydyum]

For most heat I would rank them like this:

1 - HPS
2 - Metal Halide
3 - CFL
4 - LED

Hope this helps! :rastasmoke:

Thanks for the invite. Just curious, is this part from personal experience, or is it just an assumption?

HPS puts out LESS heat than MH because it is the most efficient. More watts turned into light less turned into heat. MH runs HOTTER because it puts less energy into light, and more into heat, of course because it is less efficient. I would have thought someone with your VERY EDUCATED OPINION would know that, but hey, it's just an opinion right?

[FreeDaHerb]

The only part you left out was the radiant heat which in many cases is alot more than ballast generated heat INSIDE THE TENT since it's in a grow tent here in this discussion and 90% of the time the ballast is OUTSIDE the tent. The HPS light makes alot more lumens in the high heat spectral range, i.e. "warm white" as opposed to the MH "cool white" and thus generates more ambient heat. But hey, let the trolling begin because you obviously now have to prove how big your pecker is. :jointsmile:

So to summarize: the HPS makes more light = more ambient heat.

You proved that in your post so thank you.

[irydyum]

Here's my tents with the ballasts on the outside of them.

HPS ran around 80 degrees light on, MH ran around 87 degrees. Not opinion, no science needed. Pretty simple observation if you have experience running both. Notice how i'm not speculating, but sharing actual living experience. I only lack the pictures of the thermometer to prove it. BTW, I only had to look about 4 or 5 posts back to find something I felt like commenting on, I'm sure I could find plenty more.

I'm done pestering with you. To each their own. If you prefer what you read and hear that's fine by me. I'll take experience every time.

[FreeDaHerb]

Well, I guess you can assume what you will as far as my experience goes, but I did'nt learn what I know reading High Times lol. Your MH bulb type (enhanced or standard) would definitely have a big impact as well as your hood type and ventilation along with many other factors. I don't think there is a HUGE spread in the first place between the heat output of HPS & MH and it's a good debate on which bulb is "hotter" or radiates more heat but simple science proves that more light = more radiant heat. the HPS is proven to make MORE LIGHT, so you do the rest of that equation. What we have you saying is one thing and no real evidence to back it up, no pics of temp readings just you using "evidence" to support your side that really is not evidence because you don't have the real information.

I was going to just rank them as "HID" to keep it simple but since the other rankings all broke down HPS, MH, CFL, LED (and you don't seem to want to debate any others of them) I figured I would keep it the same and seperate the HPS/MH. Bottom line is HID is way hotter than LED and I think we can all agree on that. From my experience HPS is the hottest light source. Maybe your experience is different but that's okay because that's not really what this thread was about in the first place. You found a post of mine because of our "discussion" in the other thread about the lumigrow light and tried to come into this one and discredit me somehow, someway. The truth is I actually do know what the fuck I'm talking about. Believe it or not.

[DreadedHermie]

The HPS light makes alot more lumens in the high heat spectral range, i.e. "warm white" as opposed to the MH "cool white" and thus generates more ambient heat.

What's the "high heat spectral range?" New one on me....:i feel stupid:

I'd like to avoid those wavelengths if possible. I hope it's not Starburst Orange.