Grow tents require strong ventilation. And growers have multiple ways to make sure that happens.
But there are smells and odors inside grow tent, which you don’t want to come out and keep your house smelling like an intense hotbox.
For odour management in such scenarios, carbon filters for grow tent are on rescue.
What are Carbon Filters?
Carbon filters play an important role in any indoor cultivation environment. Aside from growing tents, these devices are also found in air conditioning and furnaces where they help to capture contaminants while allowing clean air to pass through. When it comes to growing cannabis, the “contaminants” in focus are aromatic terpenes. Although these pleasant molecules determine the taste and effects of cannabis, they also unleash a mighty smell!
These filters feature layers of activated carbon, a form of carbon treated to features small, low volume pores. These small holes vastly increase the surface area of the filter, which provides much more space for chemical reactions and filtration to take place. What's more, if you are a beginner, a best marijuana grow kit can help you more.
What is a Carbon Filter for in Grow Room?
Before digging deep, let’s learn about the purposes of carbon filter in grow room–
Odor Management
For a grower, one of the hardest tasks is to keep the bad smell away. Specially, when you don’t want your neighbors to know about this ‘hobby’ of yours.
Fortunately, a carbon filter is able to trap all the smelly particles from the air, if air invented across the filter in a proper way. To make that happen, you’ve to deploy exhaust fan(s) to draw air and take that air through the filter before releasing outside.
Taking Impurities Out
Apart from right temperatiure, humidity and nutrients, grow plants need clean, fresh air as well. Impurities like air-borne pathogens can cause diseases in plants and ruin the whole grow yield.
And activated carbon has it’s the ability to scrub such impurities out of the air.
To let your plants breathe freely, you’ve to set up a ventilation system where all of the air is taken through the carbon filter on regular basis.
To Cut Your Bills
There are many systems for air filtration. And some of them might cost you a fortune. But grow room air carbon filters are the least pricey one of them that costs not too much and still works just fine.
As growing indoor is a power-hungry business, a good carbon filter can keep the electricity bill down.
Quick and Easy to Setup
Another good fact about carbon filters is- they’re pretty easy to install. If you think about a carbon filter-fan combo, it can be put on the right place within minutes. All you have to do is set it up at the right height, and attach with ducting with clamps.
Types of Carbon Filter for Grow Room
Air filtration in grow tents can be done in many manners. Based on grow tent sizes, number of plants, ventilation system and budget, the choice of grow tent filters is made.
For grow rooms, we can divide such air filters according to a few viewpoints- Filtration medium, fan-filter combo and diameter of filters.
What to Look For In a Carbon Filter? Grow Room Size
What size carbon filter do you need for your grow room? This is the very first question that you have to ask yourself.
Start by calculating the volume of air used in your grow room. For example, if your grow room is 10 by 12 feet, and your ceiling is 8.5 feet high. The volume is 1020 cubic feet.
That’s about 29 cubic meters for any sensible metric people out there. We are talking about the volume of air used for actual growing.
If you have a room this size, but you are only using half of it to grow your plants, you could divide the volume in two.
Similarly, if you are growing in a tent, it is the air volume of the grow tent itself that you need to take into as far as your calculations go.
Fan Size
Then go ahead and calculate the size of the extraction fan you need. You can use a fan speed controller to give yourself some wiggle room.
An indoor grow room full of mature plants would most certainly have a high demand for Co2 and transpires more moisture into the air.
This is when you actually need to exchange your grow room air once every sixty seconds. Young plants don’t need so much air exchange.
In our example, we need to exchange 1020 cubic feet of air each minute. Therefore, you would need a powerful exhaust fan, such as a 10-inch hyper fan that can shift 1065 CFM.
Air Flow Requirements
How do you know how much CFM you need? First, you have to understand what CFM is to be able to answer this question.
Well, CFM refers to cubic feet of air per minute. To compute the ideal CFM that your carbon air filter must have, you need to multiply the height, length, and width of your grow space.
You can use this number to shop for a suitably rated intake fan. For instance, a CFM of about a third of the grow space volume.
A carbon filter’s resistance would require you to increase the computed volume by twenty percent since the fan needs to be slightly stronger to overcome the resistance.
The simplest way to determine the ideal CFM is by using a CFM calculator. The dimensions of your grow room are very crucial when determining airflow requirements.
If we use a CFM calculator, our room size example would require a carbon filter with a CFM of 490, if you will be using a single grow light.
Where to Put a Carbon Filter in a Grow Room?
Carbon filters typically suspend just below the ceiling of a marijuana grow tent. Use the following step to position them perfectly:
Connect your filter to an exhaust fan that features a compatible CFM (cubic feet per minute) and duct diameter.
Secure the two devices firmly together using an airstrip or duct tape.
Hang the setup from the roof bars of the grow tent, as high up as possible.
Connect ducting to the outlet of the exhaust fan and secure with duct tape.
Feed the opposite end of the ducting through the designated hole on the side of your grow tent.
Position the ducting outlet near an open window or ventilation shaft.
Final thoughts
It isn't necessary to have the air being pulled through the carbon filter exhausted outside your growing area; depending on your setup it may even work better to have the filtered air returned immediately to the growing area. This can be accomplished by mounting the carbon filter to the intake side of the fan with a rubber coupler or ducting and placing it inside the growing area without ducting the fan's output out of the grow. In this way, the carbon filter will continuously "scrub" the air in the growing area to remove odors. As a grower, you need to know that grow tent for ventilation is important!