If you’re going to the trouble of building your own grow light system, you might as well put all those lazy photons you’re producing to work. It’s amazing how much light and growing potential is wasted if you’re simply running your lights in open air. I took a rather unscientific measurement of how much light was hitting my plant shelf before creating the DIY grow tent and after, and the difference was huge.
Edit 06-18-2017: Here’s another tent I built using the same black and white poly, this time paired with some spare wood I had lying around.
Advantages of Using a Grow Tent
There are a few reasons why using a grow tent is a good idea:
- You can control the temperature of your growing area better
- You can control the humidity of your growing area better
- A tent with reflective walls will redirect a TON of light back towards your plants that would otherwise have been lost. With no reflective film and just a regular old wire shelf, I was getting about 6700 Lux (Lumens per square meter).