How To Keep The Heat Down In Your Grow Room Over Summer
As the temperature starts to rise, so does the threat to your plants from heat stress and pests/diseases. A lot of urban gardeners decide to either stop growing completely or change their grow to a more heat tolerant plant. However, this doesn’t have to be the case as there’s plenty of products available that’ll allow you to keep growing all year round.
How To Prevent Plant Disease & Pest Infestation
During the warm months, plant diseases and pest thrive, especially if they’re left unattended. Below we’re going to give you advice on how to keep your plants health and pest free.
To combat pests, the best way is to make sure your plants are nice and strong. To achieve this we’d suggest adding a silicon based nutrient to your feed, for example, Monkey Nutrients Stress or Advanced Nutrients – Rhino Skin. Silicon helps plants grow thicker stems, limits the amount of water loss and also improves nutrient & CO2 uptake. All of which helps plants combat pest attacks and also heat stress. If the worse happens and you get an infestation, you can use smoke bombs or pesticides to get rid of those unwanted pests.
To reduce disease, there are plenty of helpful nutrients available. One such nutrient is Hydrotops Bactivator which prevents fungal infections from taking hold and also protects your plants root zone from rot. As an added bonus, Hydrotops Bactivator is 100% organic!. Other nutrients that ward off disease are Atami B’Cuzz Root Stimulator, Advanced Nutrients Piranha and Atami B’Cuzz Rootbastic.
How To Keep The Heat Down In Your Grow Room Over Summer
Upgrade your light to an LED grow light:
To reduce heat in your grow room you must first look at your light. If you’re using an old school HPS light, it’s difficult to grow during the summer months as these lights give out large amounts of heat.
To counter this, we suggest you upgrade the light to a LED grow light as these are now affordable and produce little to no heat. In addition, they are also cheaper to run so they are easier on the pocket.
You can also run the lights at night and keep them off during the hotter daytime period. This allows your room to stay cool during the hottest part of the day. Furthermore, most LED lights offer users the ability to dim their output which allows users a greater control over their heat output.
Check out our range of LED lights here
Upgrade or improve your extraction & ventilation system:
The more air you remove from your grow room, the less heat you have. A simple way of achieving this is by getting a fan that is over powered for your growing area.
Combine this with a fan controller that is thermostatically controlled and your fans can automatically turn on and off according to your heat levels.
Another way to improve your extraction system is to connect the systems intake ducting to a cooler part of the house / building. Getting air straight from the coolest part of the growing area not only cools the room down better, it gives your fans a break so it saves you energy.
Check out our range of extraction systems here
Improve air circulation:
In every room there’s a spot that doesn’t get as much air circulating which also tends to be the hottest part.
To counter this, set up a pedestal fan or clip on fan and air it at the offending area. This will not only remove the warm air but will also strengthen your plants stems, allowing them to be naturally more resilient to pests & diseases.
Check out our range of air movement fans here
Cool your nutrient solution:
As previously said, nutrients are great at strengthening plants and reducing the likelihood of plant disease. However, they can also be used to lower a plants temperature.
One of the most popular is Vitalink Chill. This biostimulant protects plants against the detriments of too much heat and is useful to use all year round. Likewise, this together with the added benefit of amino acids and humic acids, enables your plants to continue through photosynthesis and develop despite the warm conditions.
Another way nutrients can reduce temperatures is by having them run through a chiller. A chiller acts as a refrigerator for your solution, keeping it at a set temperature. This keeps pathogens at bay and cold nutrients act as a cold beer would for a human; it refreshes them and keeps them nice and cool.
