Heating in the winter

[majorana]

I use a similar heater to keep my demijohns full of fermenting fruit-juice going, preparing for my moonshine/bootlegging operation. But in that case all I need to heat is basically sugar water, which also retains heat well. Heating a roomful of circulating air in contact with the freezing outdoors was an idea I gave up on.

[Grower]

I would like to try a fan heater in my 2x2 tent since temps are going below 68f.

Did anyone already try?

[soopthesa]

That's an interesting thought, Ted, but I'm afraid it would get tricky once they go into flower and I turn on the carbon filter / exhaust.

The more I think about it the less reasonable it seems. Air circulation is essential, and that means I'll have to keep getting cold air that needs to be heated. (The basement has air communicating with the outer world.)

I guess this whole post is useless, I simply need to find another space to grow at.

This idea could still work and you do a perpetual cycle going. Half the tent is your veg side and the other half is flower. Veg lights on from 11am-5am for the heat throughout the night. Flower side can be 11pm-11am. Lights always on for heat and more lights on during the night for more heat. Carbon filter only on the flower side. Once you harvest, clone veg and throw the vegging plants into flower right away to start next run. I would look into weatherproofing your room from the weather. Co2 if you seal it up.

[Maxxor]

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[unkle_psycho]

now I'm wondering what a no till pot with a good heating pad/blanket would do in those temps.. you where talking from 5C getting it up to around 15C (from 40f up to 60f) at lease it's above freezing... it can get -10f or so ( -23C ) during the winter here... and I know we have kept flowers & different plants dormant and alive in our basement / rut cellar ( 5-10C) throughout winter. kind of like keeping my animals over winter.. keep them dry and out of the wind they will be fine.. won't show good growth rates but they will survive.

in my garage I want to stick a 100 gallon no till pot with a big heated blanket under and around it... with some hay bales as a wind breaker/insulation.. under the old hps. I would try a HerbinFarmer style bottom watering system.. I can walk room temp water out.. or use another blanket around watering bucket also.. having to figure out timers for lights and blankets so you can keep the pot temp around 15C non stop.

my thinking is if you can keep that big mass of life in the pot around 60f (15C) the air temp above that 45f ish(7-8C) it should grow.. that's the lower end of what they can take temp wise.. keep the core temp up dry and wind proof.. it will grow. might not see the best production but it will do something.. now I want to try lol

I was doing some research for a heated greenhouse, and read what I could from all cold countries. Alaska was the last place to start building heated greenhouses, and they developped a trend of heating the soil rather then the air. They were able to reduce heating costs by 40%, so it was much more efficient. So instead of heating water tubes that are in the air, they put the tubes through the soil.
I imagine heat mats would work very similarly. In the spring it seems to me root temperatures are way more important then air temperature.

[unkle_psycho]

I use a similar heater to keep my demijohns full of fermenting fruit-juice going, preparing for my moonshine/bootlegging operation. But in that case all I need to heat is basically sugar water, which also retains heat well. Heating a roomful of circulating air in contact with the freezing outdoors was an idea I gave up on.

I have a room here, in a non-heated separate building. It's spring now, and since the sun has been blazing for three weeks straight, I tried to use the room with a heater. It was ok, not perfect using a couple of 400w HPS lights, and a heater, but when I switched to LED the heater was not enough. Super inefficient. I got a diesel burner designed for warehouse heating, but it would on occasion belch out a ton of heavy dark smoke, so I could not try it. Then I got a gas heater, its much more powerful, but still feels ridiculously wasteful. It does not seem to be enough to heat the room for a few weeks, the moment you switch of the heat, it feels as cool as a potato cellar. In the autumn heading to winter the space works.

At some point I could handle the room by keeping everything in a tent, and it was much easier to keep temperatures under control, but I barely used ventilation, just a few short ventilating sessions a day, and I would go sit and breath in CO2 a lot, hoping to counter bad effects of so little ventilation...

[alienfarts687]

now I'm wondering what a no till pot with a good heating pad/blanket would do in those temps.. you where talking from 5C getting it up to around 15C (from 40f up to 60f) at lease it's above freezing... it can get -10f or so ( -23C ) during the winter here... and I know we have kept flowers & different plants dormant and alive in our basement / rut cellar ( 5-10C) throughout winter. kind of like keeping my animals over winter.. keep them dry and out of the wind they will be fine.. won't show good growth rates but they will survive.

in my garage I want to stick a 100 gallon no till pot with a big heated blanket under and around it... with some hay bales as a wind breaker/insulation.. under the old hps. I would try a HerbinFarmer style bottom watering system.. I can walk room temp water out.. or use another blanket around watering bucket also.. having to figure out timers for lights and blankets so you can keep the pot temp around 15C non stop.

my thinking is if you can keep that big mass of life in the pot around 60f (15C) the air temp above that 45f ish(7-8C) it should grow.. that's the lower end of what they can take temp wise.. keep the core temp up dry and wind proof.. it will grow. might not see the best production but it will do something.. now I want to try lol

I was doing some research for a heated greenhouse, and read what I could from all cold countries. Alaska was the last place to start building heated greenhouses, and they developped a trend of heating the soil rather then the air. They were able to reduce heating costs by 40%, so it was much more efficient. So instead of heating water tubes that are in the air, they put the tubes through the soil.
I imagine heat mats would work very similarly. In the spring it seems to me root temperatures are way more important then air temperature.

I'm actually thinking of doing water heating in my greenhouse. A large reservoir of water (basically any large, black container) should give off some radiant heat and should also absorb some heat from your HPS lights during the day, so the water heater doesn't need to work quite so hard all the time. You could use that same water for your bottom watering system. You would have to worry about electrical problems if water leaks out onto your heating mats, I think, but a simple aquarium water heater is made to be submerged in water anyway.

[unkle_psycho]

I hadn't thought of these aquarium heaters... I just saw some a while back and they seemed cheap. Nice idea. I will likely do something like you said with black water containers etc for my garden greenhouse next spring.

The greenhouse project I was studying for was over 2000m2, and they had huge wood furnaces that they used to heat the air. They also had a lot of forest, so the spring time forest trim would already give them 'free wood' to heat the place with. Efficiency would have still been appreciated. We burn a lot of wood here, but not for fun.

[alienfarts687]

If you're doing it in a greenhouse, you might even want to think about using solar panels and a battery to power the aquarium heater. If your daytime temperatures are OK, you can just charge the battery during the day and have the water heat up just from the sunlight, then at night the water heater can kick in with the battery that you charged during the day.

[majorana]

The reason I gave up on heating was because I need tight odor control. To do that I need constant negative pressure in the tent, to make sure all smell air goes thru a carbon filter (two, actually). (And then two negative ion generators, an ozone generator, and two dehumidifiers with HEPA filters.) Any 25°C air would be replaced by 0°C air every minute. If I could afford to have the smell I could potentially work something out. The way things stand, winter was a season to dedicate to other hobbies.