"Outdoorsy" indoor grows during winter

Anyone have experience with setting up something in an uninsulated part of a house that exhausts INTO the house to dump the heat from the HIDs? Is that even realistic? The idea is that it would prevent external exhausting during the cold months where heat is valuable. I am in a northern climate and need to consider that it will probably be very cold in this space.

The biggest problems I'm seeing are:

a) Is the light going to produce enough heat to effectively warm the exhausting air to above the air temp inside the house?

and

b) What about the 12 hours of darkness period? I am concerned that it will get too cold in the tent at "night" (even if it's during the day, when the temps might come up to 20's-30's) so then I need to, what, run a space heater? Then I'd have to have my exhaust off all during the dark period, which isn't ideal for ventilation.

Has anyone handled this sort of situation before? Tips/tricks?

Another solution I came up with was to get a second tent and run two side by side on a flip-flop schedule so there's always one light burning.

How much radiant heat can I really count on from a 600w or 1000w HPS? If I am exhausting through an air cooled hood out of the grow space entirely, is there going to be any heat "left over" to warm the grow space while the lights ARE on?

That brings me to another point, I'd have to rig some sort of continuous flow of air between the two tents anyway to keep the warm air circulating.

I'm tempted to just say fuck it and set up indoors in the part of the house that gets cold but it would be pretty obvious and intrusive to the living room.

If you are in a northern climate, growing in an unisulated area, like for example a connected garage that is unisulated and unheated. Your lights alone wont even be enough to heat your grow area. You will need to heat the area. Forced air heating and cooling is relatively inneficent when compared to other methods like ambient heating or cooling, much more exspensive up front cost too. Im not too far north, but I had a friend to a basement grow in a heated house and he had to run heaters in the basement, using 2k hid bare bulb.

Hi Altar, a couple of notes on this. My flower room is in my basement, in the cold cellar. I sealed/partitioned and insulated that room as it got too cold in winter (down to 55F when outside temps hit below 10F) to manage temps, particularly during the winter (cold), but also summer, once I insulated my native room temps went up 10F in winter and down 10F in summer.

a) I haven't but some people have done this, hopefully they can chime in here. If you filter the air you can exhaust into your house/basement.

b) This is the one you need to be concerned about - lights-off temps, both in summer and winter. In summer you may not have too many problems other than your temp difference between day/night won't fluctuate much, not a great thing, doable but it's better to have a difference of about 10-15F between day/night temps. In the winter though, sounds like your room will get too cold if you don't insulate, heat, or both.

Question: Since you're in a cold climate you likely have a furnace, unless you're heating with wood stoves or the like. Your furnace is typically in the basement. Is there any way you can run a new duct/line into the grow area? That's what I did, took some effort but I was able to get a vent tied into the main furnace plenum and ran that into the grow room. Since I have central air and heating, both filtered by an electronic filter system, I now have filtered air conditioning in the summer and heat in the winter. The only thing it costs me is the cost of running an inline fan inside the room to pull either warm or cold air in, it's my source of fresh/incoming air both winter and summer.

Hi guys, thanks for the responses.

GroErr: Unfortunately I am in an old rental with a steam radiator system so there's no forced air system to cut into. I am definitely mostly concerned about lights off temps. Though by what Banana said it sounds like I am screwed anyway temp wise if I go outside. The basement is more feasible overall in that sense as it will stay at 55 at the lowest, which is a lot easier to heat up with a space heater than it would be if I were starting from zero degrees.

In the case of the basement it would be great if I could figure out an easy way to duct the air up to the floor above but there's no obvious openings that I can find and I am not about to cut a hole in the floor in a rental. But the thing is this house is just consistently too cold in the winter on the first floor.. the second floor is reasonably easy to keep warm as all the heat from the downstairs tends to drift up and add to what's coming upstairs already. But the downstairs isn't evenly insulated and one end is really drafty and stays colder than the rest of the house. This is the area I was hoping to somehow supplement. It is directly above the part of the basement where i was considering the tent. I wondered if just running 1-2k HPS would be enough but by Banana's measure above it sounds like it wouldn't do much... I thought for sure that the heat from even just 1 1000w would be enough to warm the basement up a bit, maybe even drift up to the first floor....

Okay so I'm leaning towards the basement as it is less outside-y.

Banana, was your friends op contained or open air, with the bare bulbs?

I have a small tend, a 2.5x4'-ish. I was hoping that by putting a lot of watts in there I could keep it warm even though it's in the basement, at least during lights on. I could see needing a little heat boost at night inside the tent I guess.

Maybe if I did open air reflectors instead and did a straight-path exhaust at the top of the tent... that's got to increase tent temps singificantly... I'm only going to be using one exhaust fan either way... either a filter>light>fan>out path, or a filter>fan>out path with the light uncovered... but that sounds a lot for such a small space, having an open air fixture with such a high wattage bulb.

I'd rather not spring for a new tent but I guess it's possible. I've been sitting on this one for a couple years waiting for the right opportunity to use it.

I could also try to come up with a way to do open air in the basement but that freaks em out because of mold risks and shit. The tent would atleast create the semblance of a boundary...

You could cut a hole that goes into a closet and put a vent cover over it. Landlord most likely wont even notice. I have this in my house, goes to my master bedroom closet (smells wonderful in there btw) keeps my master bath warm and toasty in the winter

That's an idea... there is one closet that might be possible with... I'll have to see what's directly below it though, I feel like it might have utilities below it. Great suggestion though, I will look into whether or not it seems applicable if/when the time comes... might start without venting up first and see what kind of temps I pull from it with such cold intake and then decide whether or not to route upstairs at that point...

thanks Diabolical.

I'm tempted to just buy up some panda film and go to town down there so I can have a better sized enclosure, but there isn't that much space in this basement anyway and I'd be afraid varmin might get in there. The tent should HOPEFULLY keep the varmin out, but who knows.

Fuck it, I'm just gonna move. Heh.

I kid... well, sorta, I'm trying to move, but we'll see if I find the right place before the seasons shift.

Anyway, I'm going to go down there with a tape measure and see if I can figure out a thing or two and report back... I got the dimensions of my tent here, it's 28" x 55" x 78".

Sounds like a pretty rough area, imo you're better off with the tent, then when you decide to move you can look for a place you can setup something bigger. That tent's a decent size, you can do 2-3 good size plants or more smaller plants in there. I have a DIY veg cabinet I started with for both veg/flower that's 24x48x66", when I was flowering in it it I had 3 good size plants in there, worked well with 3. Vegging I've had up to 7 in there in smaller pots, here's 4 good sized plants in 5Gal containers just about ready to flip, it's tight with 4 but they'll be out in less than 10 days, couldn't flower them in there, even 3 would be tight .

In all seriousness... 55 inches tall would kind of suck. I am missing the ceiling clearance by like 4 inches, which blows. Otherwise I could stand the tent up.

Also, that is the worst basement ever. God. It would take some time to get it cleaned up enough to use.

Very nice plants, they look very healthy and happy!

Anyway... I'm not against using the tent but I don't know about using it down there/sideways. I might try to figure something out on the first floor somewhere... or keep putting my efforts towards relocating and keep growing where I am for now (which is in a closet, I stopped using the tent because I could sound-isolate the fan better in the closet and figured I'd put the tent to good use later on, so I tucked it away.)

AltarNation said:

In all seriousness... 55 inches tall would kind of suck. I am missing the ceiling clearance by like 4 inches, which blows. Otherwise I could stand the tent up.

Also, that is the worst basement ever. God. It would take some time to get it cleaned up enough to use.

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Ouch, thought 55" was the width, that is low, but you can grow short bushes, scrog maybe. Sounds pretty rough though, the move might be easier - lol

I agree that 3 could flower comfortably in there most likely.

What I want to do is relocate to a house where I can dedicate a room, and use the tent as a veg chamber within the main room.

GroErr said:

Ouch, thought 55" was the width, that is low, but you can grow short bushes, scrog maybe. Sounds pretty rough though, the move might be easier - lol

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Well like I said, it is the width technically but I'd have to run the tent on it's side to accommodate how low the ceilings are in the basement. (So fuck it, this basement is terrible.)

Yeah, that would be ideal, for vegging that's a good size tent.

What I don't get is, if they're gonna make a tent that they only recommend a 400w or LED/T5 in, why make it so tall? Who's growing plants this tall under a 400w hps? That's counter intuitive. With the kind of height it provides you'd think I should be using something with penetration. But they make the foot print too small to accommodate that. Makes no sense to me.

If you're running something like hps the headroom comes in handy to manage temps and cooling/exhaust can take a lot of headroom, even with a small lamp. With LED's for vegging the lower tents are fine, no real heat to deal with. I use a small 2x2x4' tent for breeding and oil/hash bin material with LED's and it works fine.