Best Ways to Discreetly Exhaust Your Grow Tent
While grow tent kits come with detailed instructions for assembly, you are still left to make critical decisions about where to situate them in your home. When trying to figure out grow tent placement, your primary considerations should be ease of use, garden security, and tent exhaust options.
Especially for novice cultivators, it can be really challenging to figure out where to vent your grow tent. While manufacturers have developed amazing equipment to be used inside tents, there is not much information available on situating your exhaust outside of the setup. As such, we wanted to walk you through some convenient and discreet ways to vent your grow tent.
Grow Tent Exhaust System Basics
To successfully grow cannabis in a tent, you need to install an exhaust system that regularly exchanges stale air for fresh air.
If possible, you should try to exhaust your grow tent to outside of your house. Novice growers sometimes fall into the trap of venting grow tents directly into living areas, such as bedrooms. This approach isn’t recommended, as heat and humidity can make your living conditions quite uncomfortable – especially in the summertime. In the worst-case scenarios, exhausting directly into your home can cause issues with things like black mold.
Most tent growers opt for a negative pressure exhaust setup. With this approach, your chosen inline fan is large enough to not only remove excess heat and humidity from your grow tent, but also pull clean air in from outside the tent. To illustrate, the AC Infinity Air Filtration Kit is designed specifically to be used in grow tents. Their 6-in fan is rated at 352 CFM, which works well in any grow tent setup at 8ft x 4ft or smaller.
(Read also: How Slight Negative Pressure and Keeping a Light Tight Growroom Can Help Maximize Yields)
With proper balance in place, your exhaust should expel stale air completely outside of your home, while pulling clean air into your tent from the ambient indoor environment.
AC Infinity’s Air Filtration Kit
Use Existing Outdoor Vents
For most experienced indoor cultivators, pre-existing outdoor vents are the preferred method of exhausting a growroom or tent. Not only are these vents designed for the purpose of moving air to the outside of your home, but you likely don’t have to do any major renovations to access them. Even better, outdoor vents are extremely discreet and secure.
Laundry Room
If you have ample space, the laundry room is one of the best places to situate a grow tent. Not only do these areas have built-in exhaust ports to the outside, but they also come with water hookups and electrical outlets.
To utilize your laundry room vent, you can position your ducting to push air directly out the vent made for your dyer. This will likely require a ducting boot that matches your ducting size and the vent. If you want to keep your dryer connected to the vent as well, you should splice the grow tent ducting into the existing setup with a ducting divider. The second option might also require a booster fan and shutter to ensure hot air from the dryer is not pushed into your grow tent.
Attics & Garages
Non-climate-controlled parts of your home like attics and garages feature “passive vents.” If you didn’t know, passive ventilation functions to exchange old air with fresh air without the aid of any machines. If you have seen vents in your attic or garage that are open directly to the outside, you have seen passive vents.
To utilize passive vents, you have two options. First of all, you can place your grow tent in either of these areas and exhaust directly out of a passive vent. However, due to changing weather conditions, you can only use a grow tent in a garage or attic for certain months of the year. Secondly, you can cut a hole in a wall or ceiling and exhaust your tent into your garage or attic. While the second option is more labor-intensive, it is more sustainable for year-round cannabis growing.
In order to successfully exhaust into a garage or attic, you need to ensure that enough air is moving through these spaces. To avoid mold or excessive heat build-up, you can add a simple booster fan to your passive vents, allowing for better air exchange. AC Infinity Airlift Shutter Exhaust Fans are great options for moving air out of garages and attics.
Different Window Setups
Many cannabis growers opt to exhaust their grow tents directly out of windows. In all reality, windows are probably the most convenient and popular choice for this job. However, as window exhaust systems require you to leave your window open, they lack discretion as compared to outdoor vents. Even more, open windows that lead directly to cannabis gardens are a security concern.
(Read also: Maximizing the Placement of Your Grow Tent Equipment)
Still, windows are often the least labor-intensive exhaust option for tents, and you can use them without having to alter your home. Finally, as windows are located throughout the house, they give you more flexibility in situating your grow.
Window Vent Kits
Some tent growers opt to vent their cannabis gardens through window vent kits that are designed for portable air-conditioners. Not only are these kits readily available on websites like Amazon, but they also are engineered specifically to work with ducting. Even more, window vent kits likely won’t draw any attention, as they are regularly used to move hot air out of AC units.
Boarded Windows
For the boarded window option, you start with cutting a piece of plywood to the size of the chosen window, then paint it black. Next, open the window about 6-inches and mount the black piece of plywood over the whole window frame. Finally, cut a circular hole the size of your ducting into the piece of wood. This hole will act as your vent.
This setup allows you to place your grow tent near a window without causing much noise leakage. From a distance, the blacked-out board gives the appearance of a simply darkened window.
Summary
Grow tents are a convenient and affordable option for indoor cannabis cultivation. While these kits are often easily assembled, you still need to do a bit of design work in figuring out where to place them. This notion grows more complex and challenging when you consider exhaust options.
If they work with your living situation, outdoor vents like those in laundry rooms are generally the preferred method for tent growing. Not only are such vents designed to move air, but they allow you to keep your garden secure from the outside. While window vents work as a “quick fix” to get a garden started, you will likely want to look into something more secure and permanent for sustained operation.
AC Infinity is the foremost name in air delivery systems, designing and developing the latest innovations in cooling and ventilation technology. They offer a suite of quiet inline fans that automate the growing progress and track key metrics. Visit acinfinity.com or contact [email protected] to learn more.
