Hey guys I’m looking at changing my setup in my loft to make it more efficient and better for purpose. I’ve been growing in my loft for two years now and after adding some smaller tents for clones and a small mother It’s become expensive to run in the winter months as I’m running an oil rad per tent as smaller options weren’t up to the job.
I currently have:
4x4 loft tent with a living soil bed, led lights, 6” ac infinity extractor (passive intake).
75 x 75 x 160 tent, 50l fab pot, led lights, 4” ac infinity extractor (passive intake).
60x60x90 tent (on its side used for seedlings/clones/bonsai mother)4” ac infinity extractor (passive intake).
10l humidifier and 5l humidifier I move around depending on needs. Also have a dehumidifier but I try not to use it unless it’s essential as it puts out heat and I’ve found I don’t really need it as I grow for hash and don’t aim for big dense buds.
My loft space has the decent super quilt stuff on the rafters but not all of the loft is covered mainly the part with the tents is though. Also I have all the floor insulated with roll and boards on top.
I was thinking I could section off the space I have the tents in as it’s only in one end of the loft. Then I could use the superquilt from the rest of the loft to make the dividing walls and any gaps I could fill with loft roll or the cheaper bubble foil insulation? Maybe I could add a small fan drawing air in from the room below to fill this space so I can keep the tents on a passive intake then if I used a larger oil filled rad in the space outside of the tents that would do the job?
Maybe If the opposite happened and I needed it colder in summer months I could eventually save for a small portable ac unit and put that in the space outside the tents?
I guess the other option would be to remove the tents and build out a space but it’s actually our goal to try and do an extension in the loft at some point in the future so if this is a better option I just don’t want it to be a big pain to remove.
What does everyone think? Any guys with good perpetual or living soil loft setups that fancy sharing some tips?
Cheers
@yoshi hi mate, love that you're utilising that space. Tricky, in as much as lofts seem to have a tenancy to be cold in the winter and hot in the summer, kinda the reverse of what ideally you would want. Is this what you find ?
Time to grow old disgracefully.
@toploader Yeah exactly that. The heat in the summer can be really hot and I can keep it under control in the winter but it just requires a lot of heaters
@toploader nah the sun moves over my roof and hits both sides.
I defiantly think I need to section off the space and make it’s as sealed up as it can be. Then I’ll draw air from the bedroom below as I sleep in that room and the temp is nothing like being in the loft.
Maybe there’s a way to put my extract fan from my main tent so It passes through my veg tent, making use of the warmer air?
@yoshi well there certainly sounds like there's two separate problems, a summer and a winter one.
For summer increasing air flow in the loft to dissipate the trapped heat sounds like it would help, even without a North facing cool air zone. Also if you have detachable drivers on your light, moving those outside the tent too.
Where are you discharging your extracted air ?
Time to grow old disgracefully.
@toploader I’m exhausting through an old chimney stack so not heating the loft space. And yeah I already have my drivers outside of the loft space. Maybe I could put them back inside during the winter though.
I was doing some searching about multi tent grows and I’ve seen some people have been intaking from a room in the house, then that goes into the veg tent. Then the extraction from the veg tent goes into the flower tent as then you only end up heating the veg space as you benefit from it having lights on etc for longer.
This sounds like it could be a good idea apart from I’d imagine then humidity could become an issue? I’d guess I’d need a higher airflow going through the veg space than I normally have so it could be hard to get 60-70% in there or if I did then I could end up making it too humid in the flowering tent.
Or I do the opposite and push the exhaust from the main tent into the veg tent. This seems slightly more logical but I’d guess that it would probably be blowing the veg tent up (hard to achieve negative pressure) and pushing warm air back into the loft space. If I upped the extraction to match again it would be harder to keep humidity. But it would be less energy to keep a humidifier on rather than a heater.
@yoshi I'm thinking summer time really, as that's the season that's upon us. Ducting air directly from outside, or your bedroom, rather than the loft space if possible, sounds like a plan.
Partitioning off the whole grow area, say with insulation board (easily dismantled if necessary) sounds a logic move for winter mate. Don't know your circumstances, but if you have central heating, perhaps extending it to the lift space might work ?
Time to grow old disgracefully.
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