Is A Grow Tent A Good Investment?

As outdoor growing conditions decline and become less favorable, the necessity to grow your plants indoors has become more prevalent than ever. However, most people are still skeptical and wonder if a grow tent is a good investment.

A grow tent is a good investment if you plan to garden indoors in a spare room or basement or garage of your home. Grow tents allow you to start seedlings, grow your plants outside of the growing season, or run a small business from a spare room. They help to reduce pests and disease and provide a barrier between your living and gardening rooms.

You’ll find more information about the advantages of using a grow tent, how a grow tent is a good investment, and more below.

Investing In A Grow Tent

Having a grow tent can mean many things to different people, depending on how they intend to use the grow tent. Let us see if a grow tent is a good investment.

Grow tents allow those who live in cold environments to grow food for themselves all year. It assists with getting a head start on the growing season and starting seedlings sooner than your weather conditions typically allow.

The benefit of a more extended growth season makes grow tents a good investment. Grow tents are also a good investment for small businesses, allowing them to grow high-quality produce on a small scale.

Determining whether or not a grow tent is worth the investment of buying one comes down to the following four factors:

• How are you using the grow tent?
• What will you use the grow tent for?
• The selling price of your crop
• Where are you using the grow tent?

By assessing all four of these factors, you can determine if buying a grow tent is a good investment. Here’s a short video of assembling my 4×8 grow tent in my home office:

How Are You Using The Grow Tent? 

How you are using a grow tent will affect if having a grow tent is a good investment or not. I Have a Vivosun 4×8 grow tent in my home office where I grow my families greens and herbs. I also have tomatoes, cucumbers and strawberries inside the same grow space.

It’s a good quality made tent with strong zippers, thick canvas and mylar walls and plenty of ventilation options to connect your inline fan and ducting. The frame is made entirely of metal making it strong enough to hang your lights and cords. The extra floor pan creates a second layer to prevent spills and damage to your home.

Growing All Year In A Grow Tent

The first is potentially the most common use of a grow tent, and that is to have an indoor garden to grow plants to full maturity the whole year round with multiple harvests per year. Learn more in my article, Do You Need A Tent To Grow Indoors? Depending on how many plants you can fit in the grow tent while still allowing space for proper growth, this is a good investment. 

To get the best efficiency out of your grow tent, you’ll want to utilize the wall space with vertical gardens and use a Tower Garden or other type of freestanding vertical garden in the middle of the space.

I have trellising along the wall for my tomatoes growing in a hydroponic bucket system. I use a Tower Garden to grow all my greens in a small footprint using aeroponics, and a nutrient film setup along a wall for strawberries and herbs.

Starting Seeds And Seedlings In A Grow Tent

The second use is also reasonably common, and that is to use a grow tent with racks and multiple lights in it to start growing all your seedlings before the growing season has begun, so once the frost is gone, you already have a head start.

Using a grow tent to get an early start on the outdoor growing season is an excellent investment due to the large number of seedlings produced in a single growing cycle. Starting indoors will negate the chances of a late spring frost killing off your crop and allow you to add more established plants into your garden.

Here’s my recent article about what types of fruits, herbs and vegetables can grow in a grow tent.

Growing Sprouts And Microgreens In A Tent

The third popular use of a grow tent is for growing sprouts and microgreens. These types of crops grow to harvest very quickly and can be densely packed into a grow tent on trays. It may take extra work to get the proper air movement and ventilation when they are tightly packed.

Is The Grow Tent Used for Business Or Personal Use?

In a scenario where you use a grow tent to grow plants for your personal use, such as growing your vegetables and herbs, you should produce enough to feed yourself and offset your monthly grocery bill. Eating locally grown is healthier because the fruit and veggies ripen on the vine rather than on a truck.

After two to three months of harvesting your herbs and vegetables, the grow tent will have paid for itself. As long as the cost of running the grow tent is lower than what you would have spent at the shops each month for your herbs and vegetables. I grow with full spectrum LED grow lights that use very little electricity and don’t generate excess heat. You can read more in my recent article on using grow lights to grow food indoors.

If the cost of running the tent is less than your average fresh produce cost, owning a grow tent for personal use is a worthwhile investment. 

Conversely, if you are using a grow tent for commercial purposes, you can consider it a good investment if it can:

• Save you money by preventing crop loss 
• You can grow enough produce in the grow tent to cover the running costs 
• Cover the cost of the initial purchase 
• Make a profit

Here’s my short video on assembling a grow tent

What Is The Selling Price Of The Crop You Grow?

Knowing the value of the crop you are growing or are going to be growing is crucial for determining whether a grow tent is a good investment for you or not. It will help if you remember that any plant grown in a grow tent will be of a higher quality than a plant grown outside, and the price has to reflect that. (Think organic, well-nourished without environmental damage.)

If the price doesn’t reflect the quality, and you price the crop too low, it could take far too long to break even. You will most likely be spending the bulk of what you have made to pay for the utilities you have used the previous month to run the grow tent, let alone make any form of profit.

Having a grow tent is definitely a good investment if you can sell your crop for a premium price and provide food varieties outside of their natural growing seasons.

I created a guide to growing peppers inside a grow tent.

Grow Tents In Cold Hardiness Zones

Where you live can also determine if getting a grow tent is a good investment or not. For instance, if you live in a colder hardiness zone, having a grow tent means still having fresh produce all year round.

It can certainly be worth your while investing in a grow tent if you live somewhere that has very harsh winters and short summers. Having a grow tent inside your house allows you to start growing your seedlings so you can transplant them into the ground when the cold season is over. You can even use your grow tent in your garage with a heater. Learn more in my article, How to Keep a Grow Tent Warm in Winter.

The Garden Tower 2 harnesses the power of natures natural fertilizers to create a fertile vertical garden. By integrating a worm composting system into the centre of the garden you can recycle your kitchen scraps back into rich and healthy soil for your crops.

Grow Tents In Warm Hardiness Zones

Having a grow tent is an excellent investment; however, the same is not necessarily true for a hot environment because it is much more difficult to cool a grow tent down than to heat one.

To cool a grow tent down, you may need to have an air conditioner inside the grow tent. In most cases having an air conditioning to climate control the room that the grow tent is in will suffice. Its best to exhaust the grow tent air outdoors to get the best efficiency from your home AC system.

An area that has warmer temperatures year round can often get by with an outdoor greenhouse in the cooler season for growing fruit, vegetables and herbs. Greens like lettuce, kale and chard are hardy enough to grow outdoors in the cooler parts of the year. 

Find more details on the differences between a greenhouse and a grow tent in my latest article

What Are Some Of The Benefits Of Using A Grow Tent?

The advantages a grow tent can offer you helps determine if it is a good investment. The following are just a handful of the benefits of a grow tent.

• The ability to grow food is almost entirely independent from weather conditions.
• Having a high level of control over the gardens growing environment.
• Better control over the humidity, temperature and Ph of the soil and water.
• Create a separation between growing and living spaces.

Grow Tents Allow You To Control The Growing Environment

Being able to control the amount of light that the plants are getting is one of the more significant advantages of having a grow tent. If a plant receives the proper light cycles, you can keep it in a vegetative state for as long as you wish. By changing the amount of light the plant receives, you can force the plant to flower. 

Having control over the temperature and CO2 levels is another significant advantage to having a grow tent. Much like humans have a preferred environment to live in; plants also have preferred growing conditions that allow the plants to grow faster and stronger.

Being able to control the humidity levels around your indoor garden is another advantage to having a grow tent. This allows you to give the plant or plants the humidity levels required to grow to their maximum potential. 

Check out my recent post on where to place a dehumidifier in a grow room.

Grow Tents Allow You To Control The Nutrients And Substrate

One of the most significant advantages when using a grow tent is that you reduce the amount of evaporation in your grow room. It is a lot easier to control your watering and nutrient supply when the when you’re able to keep the moisture where it’s needed.

The temperature of your pots or hydroponic nutrients will remain in a consistent range which is healthier for your plants.

Grow Tents Have A Closed Off Growing Environment

The fact that you can almost entirely close off a grow tent to the outside environment is the only reason you can control the humidity or the lighting to the extent that you can. However, there is another advantage to having a closed-off environment, preventing your pets and pests from damaging any of the plants being grown.

Keeping the environment of your grow tent away from your living space is good for the interior of your home. The extra humidity, light pollution and possible odor of your indoor garden can be damaging to any furniture in the area. Learn more about controlling odors from your grow tent in my article, Do Grow Tents Keep In Smells?

Depending on your growing method, there can be excess sounds from pumps, timers, and fans. A good quality grow tent will help reduce the noise transmission of the hardware inside.

Conclusion

After having shed some light on the question of whether or not a grow tent is a good investment, we now know that overall a grow tent is. In fact, a good investment and which tents are the best budget-friendly ones to get.

We have also learned what the most considerable advantages of having a grow tent are, as well as what factors make a grow tent a good investment.