Connect with us

Grow Better Weed With This Homemade Humidifier

Grow Better Weed With This Homemade Humidifier

Cultivation

Grow Better Weed With This Homemade Humidifier

One of the most important things when growing at home is air moisture. To regulate it you’ll need a humidifier.

If you are smart about it, humidifiers and the electricity they require don’t need to hike up your grow room’s budget. If you’re experiencing dryness or setting up your first at-home grow room, you’ll need a humidifier. For a small grow room with 25 or fewer plants, a DIY humidifier will do the trick. We’ll go over why you need to pay attention to air moisture and how you can make a homemade humidifier for your grow room.

Why Humidity Matters

Grow Better Weed With This Homemade Humidifier

There are a couple of key reasons to be concerned with how humid the air is in your grow room. For one, if humidity levels are off it can damage your plants, and you could lose your entire crop.

By keeping an eye on your room’s humidity, you reduce the chance of this happening. In addition to keeping your plants healthy, correct humidity levels promote plant growth.

In some cases, the presence of humid air can double a plant’s rate of growth. And this will help your plants produce the most potent bud possible.

There are a couple of tools you need to stay on top of humidity levels. First, you need a hygrometer to measure how much moisture is in the air. Fortunately, they are inexpensive. You can find them on Amazon for less than $10.

It’s important to monitor the humidity levels in your grow room continually. Simply having humid air isn’t enough. As your plants grow they require different levels of humidity at different stages of growth.

Too much or too little humidity at the wrong time and things could go sour — and we don’t mean Diesel.

The second piece of equipment you need is a humidifier. Since these can get fairly expensive, it can be a good idea to make your own. It’ll save you money and keep your grow room under budget, all while giving you precision control over the room’s air quality.

If you care about your cannabis plants, you need to monitor and control the humidity of your grow room. You could lose your entire harvest if your humidity levels are off.

Consequences Of Poor Humidity Management

Grow Better Weed With This Homemade Humidifier

Having the wrong levels of humidity can result in mold, mildew, and nutrient issues.

Mold

By neglecting to manage the levels of humidity, you can get bud mold that will make your crop unusable. Worst of all, many growers don’t find the mold until they harvest.

Imagine staring at a huge cola nug you just trimmed, cracking it open and finding the entire insides coated in white or brown mold.

If your bud is in that condition, it cannot be safely smoked, and it should be thrown out immediately. All that time put into growing and harvesting could amount to nothing without the proper humidity management.

White Powder Mildew

The appearance of white powdery spots is a sign of mildew growth. Mildew results from air that is too humid.

Mildew is especially dangerous because it can replicate in any clones you take from the original plant, as well as any other plant with which it comes in contact.

Once mildew forms, a tremendous amount of effort is required to get rid of it. Many growers end up abandoning the crop.

Nutrient Issues

If the air is dry and it gets hot, your plant will drink more at their roots. As a result, the nutrient levels will be too high.

By taking in more nutrients than it can utilize, the leaves will suffer from nutrient burn.

Nutrient burn manifests as yellow or brown edges on cannabis leaves that eventually turn brown and dry out.

The problem with that is your leaves will have less mass capable of taking in light, which will ultimately result in weakened plants and compromised buds.

Optimal Humidity Levels

Grow Better Weed With This Homemade Humidifier

Young cannabis plants typically love high levels of humidity. Mature plants, on the other hand, thrive at lower humidity levels.

Most growers pay attention to the Relative Humidity or RH when talking about humidity in a grow room.

RH lets a grower know how much water is in the air compared to the maximum amount of water that can be held in the air at the current temperature.

Depending on the stage your plant is in, you’ll need different levels of humidity. And throughout the entire growing process, keep in mind that your plants also need the right balance of nutrients. Fortunately, you can make your own plant food right at home.

Young Plants (40-70% RH)

Younger plants that are in the vegetative stage grow a lot of leaf mass if the growing environment is right.

During this stage, the plant barely has any roots. That means that instead of pulling moisture in from its roots, a young plant takes in water from the air through its leaves.

By having relatively high levels of humidity, you give the leaves on your young plants plenty of moisture.

A lack of nutrients can also slow the growth rate at these early stages. So higher levels of humidity will promote faster growth in young plants.

At the start of your grow, your RH should be at about 70 percent. You can slowly decrease this as your plants get closer to the flowering stage.

Flowering Plants (40-50% RH)

Once a cannabis plant reaches the flowering stage, it will have a large root system for taking in water. During this phase, 40 to 50 percent RH is ideal.

Giving them too much humidity at this stage will lead to nutrient burn or mold. In fact, when it’s closer to harvest some growers bring the humidity down to 30 percent or less to force cannabis buds to produce more resin.

Without a humidifier and hygrometer, you’ll be at a huge disadvantage.

Clones (70-80% RH)

If you’re dealing with clones, you’ll want high humidity levels. Clones need extra time to develop their root system and intake water.

In fact, young clones can only get their water through their leaves. This means if there’s no water in the air for them to take in they won’t grow as well as they could.

Getting water through the leaves is only possible with high humidity. That’s why many growers place new clones in humidity domes.

Homemade Natural Humidifier

Grow Better Weed With This Homemade Humidifier

With a homemade humidifier, you won’t have to pay for the electricity that store-bought humidifiers require. Not only that, but you’ll avoid some of the problems that growers sometimes run into when they use commercial humidifiers. What’s worse, some of the humidifiers that you can purchase spray actual water droplets into the air.

Some humidifiers spray water droplets into the air, and this can lead to the growth and spread of harmful bacterias and molds. If you have a humidifier like this, you’ll have to regularly clean your room and your plants to ensure they’re healthy.

Using a homemade humidifier can be cheaper and can give you better control over the air quality in your grow room.

How To Make One

What you need:

  • large absorbent towel
  • large bowl
  • coat hanger
  • water
  • hygrometer

It may sound fancy, but a natural humidifier is nothing more than a bowl, towel, and coat hanger. All you need to do is hang up a wet towel. Water will evaporate into in the air, giving it added moisture.

The coat hanger is used to prop up the towel to ensure that all the water evaporates. But you can use anything else, as long as it will effectively hold a wet towel without collapsing or forcing the towel to bunch up.

Once you’ve got all your materials ready, fill the bowl with water. Then you can take your towel and hang it above the bowl so that the bottom half is submerged and the top half isn’t.

The towel acts as a wick, soaking up the water and dispersing it into the air. Finally, use your hygrometer to measure the level of humidity.

Keep your eye on the hygrometer and make whatever adjustments are necessary to achieve optimal humidity levels. If you need more moisture in the air, use a larger bowl with more water, or maybe even multiple bowls placed in different parts of the room. You can then scale back as the plants mature.

One final tip: Make sure you change the towel and wash the bowl every few days to prevent any mold or bacteria from building up and spreading.

More in Cultivation

To Top