Author: Aqua Gardening

How To Choose The Right Fan For Your Setup

Video Transcript:

Hi I’m Shiran from Aqua Gardening

Why do you need a fan for an indoor growing area? Why can’t the plant manage with just the air in the house? Well plants need CO2 the same way we need oxygen. If we don’t have fresh air the whole time, we’ll suffocate, and the same goes for plants!

Now place a plant in a restricted and somewhat sealed growing area with artificial lighting. The same thing is going to happen to you or me or a plant – we’re going to get heat stress and suffocate.

Unfortunately ventilation is often a last priority for the beginner grower, but it should be as important as the lights you’re planning to buy! When corners are cut on ventilation, you end up with noisy and sub-standard gear, which is going to forever annoy you and prevent your plants from thriving.

So where to start?

First you need to know what suits your room and grow. And to make it easy, we have a calculator that does this for you.

Simply type in your room or tent dimensions, whether you have 5m of ducting or not, and tick if you don’t want to use a carbon filter. Carbon filters take away any smells that you can get with some plants like tomatoes and other crops.

The calculator will tell you how much time it takes to change over the whole air volume inside your tent or room – this is important information because your ventilation fan system needs to be capable of replacing the air volume in your tent every 2 minutes. So once you know how much the air volume you have, you can now select your fan system accordingly.

So what types of fans are there? Let’s start from the smallest.

A DUCT BOOSTER FAN is a basic fan to use with cooltube lights. They only pass a minimal amount of air through and don’t work with a carbon filter which is a type of air scrubber.

Next is a PC Fans – a computer fan with a 240V cable. These are great for propagation areas and small grow spaces. They are quiet but move a decent amount of air.

Next come Axial Fans, basically PC fans with flanges. They are also relatively quiet and have flanges so you can connect ducting onto them. Great for small tents or to be used with cool tubes.

After this there are the more powerful centrifugal fans. These fans are great with carbon filters and move high quantities of air at a reasonable noise level. They are not the cheapest when it comes to power use. However, their performance on noise and air flow are great.

Mixed flow fans are the latest in technology, and the digital ones such as the hyper fans offer great control over the flow of air. They are also some of the lowest in power usage.

But beware, with the high flow of air comes a loud sound, so check out the silenced fan options we offer as these ones are not even audible on their lower flow settings.

Check out our fan kits if you need a fan with a carbon filter, as we have already matched the best quality and most practical fans and filters together to make your life easy.

Small grow spaces become hot boxes with artificial lighting, so learn from our years of experience and make your space a place your plants will thrive inside.

Checkout the links below for relevant products and more videos about hydroponics and indoor growing.

Keep watching to learn more about our automatic garden systems, or click on the link below to find out how you can access our members only online video training, something not offered anywhere else in Australia!

I’m Shiran from Aqua Gardening, for safe healthy food that grows itself.