How Often To Replace Carbon Filter In Grow Room

So y'all've completed setting upwardly your grow room, and you lot've started cultivating some plants. You don't notice it at first, simply eventually you notice your growing surface area has a rather telling odor.

Carbon filter set up inside a grow tent. Whether it'due south the potent smell of your plants or a piddling bit of funk from humidity, chances are yous'll want to keep the aromas of your grow room to yourself. If you want to keep your operation discreet, or you simply desire to go along the smells from your growing surface area out of your house, you should consider using a carbon filter in your abound room.

What Are Carbon Filters?

Like well-nigh air filters, a carbon filter is designed to purify the air that comes into information technology and exhaust fresh air into the room. These metallic cylinders are filled with carbon media and connect to a high output fan in order to remove odors and particles from the air in your abound room.

Carbon filters are bachelor in a diversity of sizes depending on the size of your grow room and the corporeality of filtration you're looking for. When ready up properly, all the air from your abound room will get through the filter, and the odors in your grow room volition disappear.

How Carbon Filters Work

How a carbon filter works. Information technology's really quite elementary: Carbon filters work past trapping unwanted smells (odor particles) and dust particles in order to let fresh, odor-gratuitous air to filter through the tube.

In that location are a diversity of materials carbon filters apply, but near — including Yield Lab carbon filters — use charcoal. It's a porous material and useful for many things — from getting rid of certain gases in the air to being used as lining for face masks.

Active carbon has a massive surface surface area with hundreds of pores. These pores can trap molecules from the air through a process known every bit adsorption . This procedure allows molecules similar dust, clay, and odor molecules to stick to the carbon, preventing them from traveling freely back into the air.

Of course, air doesn't just bladder into the carbon to be filtered. You force the odorous molecules from your abound room to stick to the active carbon within your carbon filter with an exhaust fan. The fan pulls all the air in your grow room and pushes information technology through the filter, effectively keeping dust and odor molecules from escaping and spreading odors exterior your grow room or grow tent system .

Using a Carbon Filter in Your Growing Area

When it's time to start using a carbon filter in your growing surface area, there are some important steps y'all need to keep in mind.

Find the Right Size

All carbon filters are not made equal. Depending on the size of your growing expanse and the cubic feet per minute (CFM) value of your exhaust fans, there are dissimilar-sized carbon air filters that will be right for you lot.

In order to determine the CFM value, you lot will need to follow these steps:

Mensurate the summit, width, and length of your grow room or abound tent .
Multiply these numbers in club to calculate the cubic footage of the space you'll be using.
Multiply this number by the exchange charge per unit (the number of times you desire the air to be completely exchanged each hour). To have a abiding flow of fresh air, y'all'll want to multiply by 60, which is once per minute.
Your CFM is this number divided by 60.

The best way to effigy out which size carbon grow room filter y'all should use is to make sure that your filter's CFM value is either equal to or lower than the CFM value of your abound room and your exhaust fan.

For instance, say you have a 5ft x 5ft 10 8ft grow tent:

Multiply 5x5x8. You get 200, which is the cubic feet of your growing infinite.
Multiply the cubic anxiety (200) by the number of exchanges per hr (60), which gives you 12000.
Carve up that number (12000) by the minutes of exchange in an hour (60) for a total of 200 CFM.
Take the 200 CFM you have and look for a filter that meets or exceeds that CFM.

Rule of thumb: It'south e'er amend to become over your CFM requirement than under. If yous get a smaller filter than you'll need, you'll use upwardly the carbon quickly.

Set Up Your Filter

Grow tent odor control using a filter setup. Once you lot know which size filter you demand, y'all then need to make sure that you gear up it up properly. In order for yous to make the most of your carbon air filter, you demand to ensure that it is filtering all of the air that is in your grow room.

This ways you need to connect it to a grow room fan and connect ducting to information technology, then seal information technology properly using duct clamps.

Place the fan and filter above or near your plants. Next, position the fan so information technology pulls air from your grow room and exhausts it into the filter. This setup volition make certain that all of the molecules in the air will laissez passer through your carbon filter earlier any air leaves your grow room.

Maintain Your Carbon Filter

When all of the pores, or adsorption sites, in the carbon are full, your carbon filter volition no longer be able to trap new molecules. You tin maintain your carbon filter by making certain you lot make clean it regularly — typically once a month.

Ducting in an indoor grow room. In order to make clean your filter, y'all should have the filter out of your grow room, then milk shake out any trapped dust and debris.

Note: Contrary to popular belief, using water and soap to make clean charcoal in a filter can actually have an adverse effect. Retrieve that charcoal breaks down, and with the aid of water, you lot tin can speed up that erosion.

Eventually your carbon filter will become to a point where it is unable to trap as many molecules equally it used to. Depending on how much work information technology'south forced to do, carbon air filters should exist changed every i to ane-and-a-half years. That said, if you start to discover a strong odor even after y'all clean the filter at home, chances are it's time for a swap.

Should You Utilize a Carbon Filter in Your Growing Area?

The answer to that question is a resounding yep!

Carbon filters are the best option for keeping the odor from your growing area out of your firm and away from your neighbors. More importantly, they're the all-time way to make certain even the freshest air is used by your plants to grow.

It'southward worth noting that there are other brusk term solutions that you tin can use, like air purifiers or neutralizing sprays and powders. That said, these tools exercise not completely remove the smell from your growing operation, and they volition not completely eradicate any dust particles that come from your grow room. Fifty-fifty worse, a lot of times, sprays and gels that attempt to scrub the air really harm the terpenes and flavor cells of a plant.

The best fashion to guarantee that your abound room is safely odor-free and keep smells from escaping your growing area, is to use a carbon filter.

You tin can outset by finding the right filter for your grow room past clicking here!