Another PSA For Warm Weather AC Unit Growers
I thought I'd highlight yet one more thing to be aware of when using AC units to cool your tent. I have talked earlier somewhere about how the environmental control in my garage (or any indoor space for the most part in really warm climates when connected to an outer big door like a garage door) is a living thing. The factors in play can be any or all part(s) of how open the garage door is, whether the AC unit is on high or low, the relative outdoor RH that day, how opened the door to the inside of the house is, how open the doors to your tent are or not, etc...All of these factors get tuned as a unit.
That's background to explain my situation shown in this picture, which I suspect I'm not alone in. Thus this post, in the hopes it helps someone somewhere (there's gotta be one person for god's sake, lol).
This is the right hand wall of my tent, which faces the street and the outside. It's close-ish to the garage door as you can see. Generally in the day I don't have to kick in the AC unit until around 2 pm, which is when the sun is on this side of the house and it begins to hit the tent starting low and gradually moving up. Obviously this affects the conditions inside the tent, and the AC unit mitigates them. 2 pm is when the temperature at the height of the canopy's highest spot hits 85 degrees. I don't let the leaf temps ever get higher than that, and even that is pushing it for me. I have to leave the garage door open enough from 2 to 8 as well, due to the fact that I'm tuning the environment at the same time for two very different tent situations in the same space. So from 2 to 6, when the lights go out in this tent, the AC unit runs.
At 6 pm (lights out) there are still a few hours when the sun hits the tent as shown and until around 8 it is still necessary to leave the garage door open. But now the light is out, and so now I have turned off the AC unit. No need for it overnight. It stays around the mid-70s and around 50% RH in there overnight without the unit. The amount of sun still hitting low on the tent is not an issue in the slightest regarding the environment at this point.
HOWEVER, (finally, the point!) - note that the sun is hitting the tent at a low angle at this point. It is basically shining directly into the back waffle-y part of the AC unit. Now I don't know for certain that these AC units would leak light through the unit, and out of the normal slot where the air comes out and into the tent. But I suspect it's possible, if not likely.
THIS IS NOT A CHANCE YOU WANT TO TAKE, TRUST ME.
So mitigating this risk is again extremely simple but way high tech. Let me know if anyone needs instructions and I'll post a step by step. Here's all I do at 6 pm each night once flower began to take care of the issue:
You can see the other light mitigating techniques I use on this side of the tent (everything is SO high tech, I gotta calm down) here as well for the big round port and the small cord port.
Don't let a little sunlight at the wrong time spoil all your hard work!