Getting Ready to Flower, Temp Problems

I'm on Day 60 of vegging, and am planning on flowering in the next couple weeks.

I'm growing in a closet, 2x10x6.

Lights - T4 tubes and 6500 spectrum CFls (I will be switching spectrum of all bulbs for flowering.)

Temp is 84 with the door open, and can get up to 93 with the door close.
I have three fans in the room - 2 4" box fans blowing up and out, and a 14" oscillating tower fan blowing on the plants.

So when I change my light schedule, I am concerned that these temps will ruin everything. I am renting the apartment, so I can't start drilling big holes into the closet.
Any suggestions as to how to drop the temp? Thanks in advance!

making a hole in the cieling to vent out would be best best. and its easy to fix. they sell sheetrock repair kits at walmart and lowes and its really easy to cover it up and make it look like it was never there. seriously i think this is your best option.

Yeah, I might need a second-best idea. That sounds like a bit much for my situation. I'm not handy, and I'm too paranoid to ask my hand friends for help...opening the ceiling is too much of a risk.

Would using mylar as a door, and connecting fans to some ducting be feasible/effective?

it should only be hot in there when the lights are on

You have options.

Suck it up and cut a hole in the cieling like I did... makes life 100x easier when I know my exhaust is installed and adequate for whatever I want to do.
Run the lights at night, open the door as much as possible and crank the AC down until your temps are under control.
Buy a cheap hollow plywood door from lowe's or home depot, replace your current one with it. Cut a hole in the top for exhaust and one in the bottom for intake.

I actually have passive intake on the bottom of my closet door and active exhaust into the attic form the inside. Negative pressure, air turns over 2-3 times a minute and keeps my cooltube cool enough to touch. Ambient closet temps are ~5F above intake room temps.

Flowering at night any my plants never go above 80 unless I forget to turn the air on before bed.. then they can hit low 82-83s..

any pictures of your girls ?!

Ok, thanks for the ideas-- actually adding a door sounds like something plausible.

This is my first grow, so everything I do is a new expense...I don't even have any tools outside of a hammer/screwdriver


Here are a few pictures. I have three from bagseed going. LST'ing the third .
You can probably notice that the CFLs got a bit close to one of them so her leaves are a little charred.

These pics are from their 55th day.

You could also drop the money on a portable AC unit too..

ULMResearch said:

You could also drop the money on a portable AC unit too..

Click to expand...

What do you think about something like this? http://www.amazon.com/SPT-SF-608R-Portable-Evaporative-Cooler/dp/B000OKHY2S/ref=dp_return_1?ie=UTF8&n=1055398&s=home-garden
Most portable AC units are a bit pricey, this seems like the cheapest option.
My humidity is around 35%.

Anything that moves air out the top should lower temps. A small bath exhaust fan would vent into attic or between next floor.
To get better air flow from the box fan from Walmart in window I should block off leaks? Just do what you can when it works you post & boast.

LHighChief said:

Yeah, I might need a second-best idea. That sounds like a bit much for my situation. I'm not handy, and I'm too paranoid to ask my hand friends for help...opening the ceiling is too much of a risk.

Would using mylar as a door, and connecting fans to some ducting be feasible/effective?

Click to expand...

This is my closet door for example.

You could do something simlar at the top, except instead of another grill on the inside you could run your exhaust duct to it.

Those doors are like 30 bucks and they will cut them to fit your jamb if you take the measurements.



Makes for a great light trap too. Can barely see a glow from the 400W HID in pitch black. No normal light can come close to penetrating.

ULMResearch said:

This is my closet door for example.

You could do something simlar at the top, except instead of another grill on the inside you could run your exhaust duct to it.

Those doors are like 30 bucks and they will cut them to fit your jamb if you take the measurements.

View attachment 1702069View attachment 1702070

Makes for a great light trap too. Can barely see a glow from the 400W HID in pitch black. No normal light can come close to penetrating.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the help. Just trying to figure out the vents on the door. Do you have fans pressed against that vent to circulate air? Can Home Depot do something like this for me?


The other thing I was thinking about was making a fake wall with mylar or panda film halfway in the closet and cutting holes in that material to add fans. Do you think this would work?

I'm not handy, so I'm trying to go for the most simple way to fix this. Again, thanks for the help!

So...I have fixed some things up in this room, making it light-proof (still have a few spots to tape up) and hopefully I've at least begun to tackle the temp problem.

I have made a fake wall halfway into the closet as someone on this board suggested. I used gorilla film (I think that's what it's called) and added a zipper in the middle. I just used duct tape to secure this.

As far as ventilation, I have added a 9" box fan that sits on top of the fluros blowing air out of the room. I also bought a 171 CFM from Valueline. Hydro store guy suggested it. It's connected to a 4" duct at the bottom. Next to it is a passive intake 4" duct.

So I have a ton of negative pressure. The first time I turned on the fan, the fake wall was sucked in and I had to quickly retape it to keep it from ripping off.

The temp as of now is 87.... Before the wall, with the doors open the temp was around 84...with the door closed, the temp could get as high as 94. So I guess it's better, but not perfect.

I know the exhaust should be higher, but I don't have any shelves up there right now...wanted to see if this would work first.

Any suggestions on how this is looking?

dood..temps are way to high..get em to around 76 then your talkin serious bud.
your t5 spectrum is off for flowering to btw.
get the 3000k or 2700k spectrum bulbs and leave one of those 6500k bulbs in there to fill out the spectrum.
switch to 12/12 light cycle .
the exhaust is doing nothing if its not up high..and that little fan is not going to cut it bro to get your setup right..
instead of using black plastic for a false wall, by a piece of dry wall man! paint it white..
make it hinged like a door..the black plastic is also heating it up a little with the lighting.
look online or at ace hardware, homedepot etc..find some actual inline fans.
4" should get it done..get two of them..should run you an entire 60 bucks for a sheet of drywall, and two real inline duct fans.
you got more than that into it in theat t5! do it right homie..
i'm here to help
you really dont want to ruin those plantz by flowering them right now, get your setup straight first, then flower..trust me on this

Haha 76. A lot of us in the US can't even get our houses that cool with A/C running 24/7, much less a spot under mini-suns in closed rooms.

87 is warm, if you could get it to 82-84 at peak that would be fairly acceptable.

Thanks for the help.

I'm going to raise that inline fan eventually...I just don't want to make another trip to the hardware store today.

Those are T4s - I just got the red-spectrum bulbs -- this I heard are good for flowering, no?

I have a real inline fan in there...at least it better be since it's loud as hell. You can't see it in the photo since it's on the inside of the room. The opposite side of that black sheeting is white and supposedly does not retain heat.

I was looking into getting a portable AC in there, but I'm kind of running out of space. Should I just keep loading up on fans? At this point I have the inline exhaust fan, a 9" box fan blow out, a 4" fan blowing out, and a 14" oscillating fan blowing over the plants.

Short of cutting a hole in the ceiling, which I'm not going to do, I don't know where else to go

Hybrid Theory said:

dood..temps are way to high..get em to around 76 then your talkin serious bud.
your t5 spectrum is off for flowering to btw.
get the 3000k or 2700k spectrum bulbs and leave one of those 6500k bulbs in there to fill out the spectrum.
switch to 12/12 light cycle .
the exhaust is doing nothing if its not up high..and that little fan is not going to cut it bro to get your setup right..
instead of using black plastic for a false wall, by a piece of dry wall man! paint it white..
make it hinged like a door..the black plastic is also heating it up a little with the lighting.
look online or at ace hardware, homedepot etc..find some actual inline fans.
4" should get it done..get two of them..should run you an entire 60 bucks for a sheet of drywall, and two real inline duct fans.
you got more than that into it in theat t5! do it right homie..
i'm here to help
you really dont want to ruin those plantz by flowering them right now, get your setup straight first, then flower..trust me on this

Click to expand...

True story ^_^ If you start flowering now your just gonna end up with overly fluffy buds and plants with almost no weight (at least compared to optimal conditions).

ULMResearch said:

Haha 76. A lot of us in the US can't even get our houses that cool with A/C running 24/7, much less a spot under mini-suns in closed rooms.
87 is warm, if you could get it to 82-84 at peak that would be fairly acceptable.

Click to expand...

When speaking of closed rooms its really irrelevant what our houses are at A small portable ac unit can fit into almost any of our growrooms, and since the growroom should be sealed anyways the ambient temp of the house shouldnt matter too much. Hell i remember being in new york, my bedroom temp was about 90+ during summers, but inside the grow tent it was 75ish

So Trichome, do you suggest I invest in a portable AC or is there a cheaper solution here? I've pretty much run out of rooms for fans...there is a ton of circulation in there.
Do I need a bigger push on my intake duct?

If you can't exhaust it any better than you are now then a portable A/C unit is your best bet.

ULMResearch said:

Haha 76. A lot of us in the US can't even get our houses that cool with A/C running 24/7, much less a spot under mini-suns in closed rooms.

87 is warm, if you could get it to 82-84 at peak that would be fairly acceptable.

Click to expand...

thats a false statement if i ever seen one..sorry i used to live were it was 100% humidity and 102 degrees each year and my spot was always between 76-78 degrees year round..its about proper ventalation my man..
peace