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2000 Watt Custom Cooled Closet and More
Posted May 20, 2012
I thought I would add some information to my blog about how I built my flower room.
I started off sacrificing my bedroom and had to sleep in my living room for almost 9 months! I have a new bedroom now though .
The bedroom measured approximately 11' x 12' with an 8' ceiling and a crawlspace underneath. I chose (2) 1000 watt switchable ballast lights to go with 50 Watts per square foot. I am running 7,500 lumen of light per square foot. The closet comes out to be 40 square feet in size, which measures approximately 4.5' x 9'.
There was a window in the closet which I removed and boarded up with insulation and wood and used that to install the ports for exhausting my fans. I went with (2) outdoor pre-hung triple insulated doors for full lightproof and convenience of accessing the plants. To the left of the closet you can see a door, that is there to access the furnace pipe mostly, it was a tiny closet for the bedroom, it was pretty much unusable space for the flower room, so I painted the door white.
 
I added 3 vents on the outside of the closet level with the top of the doors. The vents go through the wall cavity and they work like light traps. There are 3 vents on the inside of the closet at the bottom near the floor. This is so the closet can intake air and be able to breathe while the lights are on or off while the doors are closed.
I added (2) 6" high output can fans, 440 cfm each. A total of 880 cfm will exhaust out the vents where the window was.
 
The outside window vents each 6" with dampers.
Here the lighting/venting system is complete. In the center there is a 16" osculating wall mount fan. For the custom cooling, I took the lenses out of the light hoods so I can exhaust air from both ends of the light hoods, there is suction from each end of the light for maximum cooling efficiency. Each fan is hooked up to each hood so that I can have the option to run only one fan but still run both lights. For instance, in the winter when it is cold, I only need to run one fan. It also serves a safety purpose. If one fan fails, the other fan will still be cooling both lights. I did the same with the electrical; each fan is plugged in on a separate breaker/fuse.
The room needed an air conditioner for the hot humid summers. This room required a minimum of 12,000 BTU. This had to be custom installed too, my windows slide open sideways.
 
Well, after building it, the system worked, but I wasn't fully satisfied with the cooling and the efficiency of it. So I added an 8" high output can fan at the ceiling, I call this an air exchange fan. It only takes air from the grow closet and pushes it back into the main room. It helps keep the air temps balanced between the closet and main room. This solved a lot of problems. In the winter, the main room was too cold which made it unusable, even though the flower room temps were just fine. If I restricted fresh air from outside to prevent the room from getting too cold, then I was exhausting heat out of my house just as fast as it was going in. With the air exchange fan, that is no longer a problem. In the winter I am only exhausting about 100 cfm out of the flower closet. The air exchange fan at 740 cfm putting warm air back into the main room now allows the room be usable, there is only about a 5 to 10 degree temperature difference between the main room and flower closet. The air exchange fan also helps with the closet getting too cold in the winter during lights off. Also, during humid times of the year, it helps prevent mold/fungus issues in the flower room. The air exchange fan is set up to be light proof. I can leave it running at night and keep the temps right where I want them. Another benefit of installing the air exchange fan is, I am able to make use of that dead space where the furnace pipe is.
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 "Air Exchange Fan")
