The PhenoTent - round 1

Week 2 update coming a bit late but I have spent the last few days dialing in my tent, boy did I quickly remember why I don’t like tents...controlling the environment has been issue #1 this week and most of last week. I do have a tracker on my Humidity and Temperature which has helped tremendously, I’ll jump into those later. ~The Setup~ Everything has come together fairly well, I have my tent with its “dual carbon extraction system” running off one fan, the fan is controlled by a Titan modulating controller that runs the fan at a very low idle until it is needed to run full blast to remove excess heat, you can see this in the graph. ~Environment~ Temperature in my tent is running about 10dF above the ambient room temp which is controlled by a portable AC that is plumbed out the window. Interestingly you can follow my temps have become lower and more stable with time, this is contrary to the heatwave we are experiencing and I can explained it by the concrete floor is acting as giant thermal heat sink, I have had this explained to me before by an AC specialist but never been able to show it visually like this. Humidity is being added but slowly as I have to treat the entire room it is in and with concrete floors I think I have to first “hydrate” those but I will be attempting to get my environment in range of a good Vapor Pressure Deficit. ~103.3degrees~ Yep, not good! You may notice the spike on my weekly Temperature and Humidity tracking, long story short, my A/C’s Heat output fell out of its window mount and began pumping hot air into the room. Luckily I run LED and with the exception of some pretty heavy stress the damage was minimal and no plants were lost, just some leaves and now recovery time. ~50/50, Seedling soil/Worm castings~ Don’t Do It! I thought it would be cleaver because of the nutrients built in with the worm castings would be super beneficial, nope. The soil was constantly waterlogged, very dense and difficult for young roots to penetrate and held heat like crazy, while in the small pots my root temp was around 90degreesF, once the 103 degree day hit my plants took a nose dive in health so I quickly replanted into fresh pots with nice light and fluffy Roots Organic 707 with some uprising. Moral of the story, the soil companies don’t do stupid things so if you buy seedling specific soil, use it as they recommend. ~Final Notes~ Overall I think by next week the plants will be much happier, this week has been about building and testing the room. And to that end it was a successful week as the room is now done and complete, outside of that my plants are pissed at me so I’ll have to give them some extra love.