How much heat will the lights produce?
How much cooling/AC will I need?
Every electric appliance puts off heat, including LED grow lights. While most of the energy coming out of our fixtures is in the form of light, any light not used by the plants will eventually warm up your growing area. Because LED lights are more efficient than other lighting technologies, they put out more light per watt and therefore have less "waste heat" than other lights. In addition, because our Phyto-Genesis Spectrum® contains less of the green and yellow light that warms up plants' leaves, you can run your growing area significantly warmer (85-88°F / 29-31 °C) with our LED grow lights, reducing cooling requirements.
So, will you need to cool your grow? Unfortunately, this is not an easy question to answer. If you're growing in a tent, it depends on the temperature of the air in the room the tent is in, how much airflow is outside the tent, the insulation in the walls of the room the tent is in, and many other factors. Larger-scale grows will generally require some form of active cooling, but not always.
For small grow tents with a small light, many of our customers actually need to add insulation around their tent to keep it warm enough. Cheap, readily-available painters' drop-cloth plastic can be draped over the top and sides of the tent to help keep it warm. Folding the plastic over to provide two or more layers will keep the tent even warmer.
If you need to provide air conditioning for your grow, there is an easy way to determine how much cooling power will be needed, by adding up the total electrical power used in your grow. Use our handy cooling requirements calculator to determine how much you need!
Enter the number of each light size in your grow room:
PhytoMAX-4 24S lights
PhytoMAX-4 20S lights
PhytoMAX-4 16S lights
PhytoMAX-4 12S lights
PhytoMAX-4 8S lights
PhytoMAX-4 4S lights
PhytoMAX-4 2S lights
Add up the wattage of all the other electrical appliances in your growing area (fans, dehumidifiers, pumps, etc.) but do not include wattage for fans which blow air out of your growing area, or air conditioning units which exhaust the heat outside of the growing area:
combined watts of other appliances