Where to Place Dehumidifier in Grow Room?
Your grow plants inhale and exhale like real living bodies, and we know that you’re all aware of it. However, this eventually gives you a rise in the humidity level of the room, especially in non-summer months.
Therefore, using the best dehumidifier in the grow room is an essential part of indoor growing. But that leaves us with three questions- What type of dehumidifier, how many of them, and where to place dehumidifier in grow room?
And in today’s post, we’ll try to answer them all (as they’re closely related to each other).
Let’s proceed-
Understand Your Grow Room’s Dehumidification Needs
The basic answer to the question that we’re concerned about, lies within the dehumidification requirements of the grow room itself. The size of the room, the number of plants you’re dealing with, the breed and type of plants, and even the airflow- that’s all-important to figure out the answer.
Consider finding these answers in your hands before we proceed further-
Question 1: How Much Water Do Your Plants Need?
At first, place, determine how many plants do you have in your grow room, if you’ve already started growing. In case you’re about to start, decide which type of growing style you’re going to choose from Scrog, Sog, and bush. This will give you the number of plants for the defined space of your room.
Question 2: What Temperature the Grow Room is at?
Secondly, as you know, humidity has a lot to do with the temperature of a grow room. The standard temperature is supposed to be around 70-80 degrees Fahrenheit. Most of the growing plants are good to grow within this range.
Question 3: What is the CO2 Enrichment?
The amount and density of CO2 in your grow system have a role to play in determining the dehumidifying requirement of your place. Keep it in mind that if you have a highly powerful dehumidifier in your grow room, that won’t let the CO2 producing devices work.
Question 4: Did You Decide the Location of Your Grow Room?
Lastly, it’s about the location where your grow room is. If it’s in a place where it’s isolated from the environment and stays cool, the dehumidification requirement will be affected by this. And vice versa.
Where to Place Dehumidifier in Grow Room: The Rules of Thumbs
Got all 4 of the answers from the previous section? Well, welcome to the core of the article then. In here, we will learn how to determine the right placements for your grow dehumidifier for different scenarios.
Before stepping in, we want you to acknowledge that there is no fixed place like ‘attached to the duct’, ‘right on the floor’ where you are advised to place your grow tent. As you know, different answer combination (from the previous questions) will give you the different idealization of this placement.
However, that being said, let’s proceed to the grow room dehumidifier placement rules of thumb-
Rule 1: Distribute the Air Evenly
If you look at the mechanism of a grow dehumidifier, you’ll get to see that there is a moderate mechanism to draw air in and take the moist content out from the air. So, you need to make sure that all of the air of your grow room gets the chance to be near to the dehumidifier.
Therefore, make sure that the dehumidifier filter is facing the center of the grow room, and passive airflow is always going on through clip-hung oscillating fan.
Usual grow room dehumidifiers are able to intake 830 cubic feet of air in a minute. So, make sure that you make the calculation of how much air you have in the room, and whether the dehumidifier meets the number or not.
That brings us to the next point, the number of dehumidifiers.
Rule 2: Ensure Right Number of Dehumidifiers
Usually, grow rooms are somewhere between 100 square feet to 500 square feet. In case we are dealing with a greenhouse, the number even gets multiplied by 2-5.
So, the bigger the area is, the more plants you can grow inside it. And that leaves us with more moisture in the air. Therefore, no matter how powerful a single dehumidifier is, you should not rely on only one of them.
What we are pointing at is, if your grow room as got an area more than 250-350 square feet, you should buy a new dehumidifier for each 250 square feet space. And once you placed them all at a uniform distance, that would cover the whole place up.
Rule 3: Make Sure that it’s Accessible
Once you’ve placed the grow dehumidifier on its place, you’ll have to change the settings over and over. Based on the dark-light cycle, the growth stage of plants, the ambient temperature, and so on, you have to keep the dehumidification right.
So, make sure that it’s placed on a location where you can physically access it without any hardship. If it’s within a compact space, putting the dehumidifier on a tool or something might help. However, if you go for a big dehumidifier size for grow room (example: hOmeLabs ones), this additional support might not be necessary.
Rule 4: Stick to the Right Installation Method
There are multiple installation methods for each of the dehumidifiers. But it’s up to you that which you stick to.
That brings on the topic of how many installation types are there, and at what point they differentiate from each other-
Suspended Installation:
The first type is to save up some space on your grow room floor. If you’re tight with the floor area, this might be the right pick for you.
In this method, you have to install the dehumidifiers with a set of brackets. And the alignment of the device is in such a way that the filter faces the center of the room.
Recommended Dehumidifier Type: Remote Control, Compact in size.
Freestanding Installation:
In this method, checking for troubleshooting and settings changing becomes easier. Because it is located on a support on the ground. For long-in-shape dehumidifiers (like the tower type), you don’t even need a tool support.
Recommended Dehumidifier Type: Tower-type, non-remote controlled.
Ducted Installation:
This is what we call setting the grow dehumidifier outside the grow tent. Once you have limited space (like a grow tent), then this method might be perfect for you.
In this way, a grow dehumidifier is placed outside of the room and operates through the ducted connection between the device and the grow tent itself.
Rule 5: Chose from Inside or Outside
It’s a common phenomenon for devices like a carbon filter, inline fans, humidifiers, etc. that, they can be dealt with or without a duct connection. Once you don’t have any duct connection with it, it can directly be exposed to the air that it will be dealing with. Once you have a properly insulated duct connection, you don’t need to expose it directly to the grow room air.
That gives us two different options of setting a dehumidifier up- inside or outside grow room. Here is a glimpse on both-
When to go for dehumidifier inside grow room? Here are the answers-
- If you have a large enough room was managing some space won’t be an issue.
- You’ve got more plants and more moisture in the air where ducted dehumidification won’t be an issue.
- Your dehumidifier is not strong enough to suck air through ducts.
Apparently, when to place the dehumidifier outside grow room? Here are the answers –
- When you’ve too tight space to house an external dehumidifier in the grow room.
- The number of plants is less.
- The moist production is not too much.
- You have ample airflow on the frontal part of the duct.
- The dehumidifier has enough suction capacity.
Whichever way you choose, make sure that you’ve taken care of the issues created from negative pressure inside the grow room.
Bottom Line
So, that’s a wrap up on this long discussion on where to place a dehumidifier in grow room, and how you can calculate the answer yourself.
Hopefully, the formula from the aforementioned questions and rules and got right away to implement them on your grow system.