day to night temp change and indoors growing
 

For folks that grow indoors, how do you manage (or do you) the temp change that so many culture sheets seem to advise? Do you really let your house go from 75° during the day to 65° at night?

I'm in Houston. I feel pretty lucky that right now our night time temps are in the mid 70s. There have been years when the temps at midnight are almost 90 (obviously, that's an extreme).

On top of the fact that the temps never get low at night, we have someone in the apt all of the time, so we don't let the temp go up a lot during the day. Our temp change in the apt is maybe 3-4 degrees.

I mostly keep the plants on an east facing windowsill. I'll do the same during the winter, and hopefully, at night, it'll be a bit cooler near the windows than in the middle of the apt and that will help.

What do you do to accomplish a large temp swing?

I just open the window next to my windowsill orchids. It's not scientific nor controlled temps, but it seems to work. If I don't want the cold air to penetrate the rest of the house I close the door to those rooms.

hahahah. It must be nice to have cool night time temps. Our temps (at least, this time of year) are generally the type that always require AC. Opening the window at night in July would just confuse the plants because the temp would go up 10°.

Our temps right now at night are around 60-70 degrees. Our house goes to 78 degrees before the AC comes on. I don't worry about it in the summer, and winter seems to take care of itself.

I heat 100% with wood, and one of my grow spaces is in a room at the opposite end of the house from the stove. During the day I keep the door to the room open which gets temps into the high 60s low 70s. Closing the door at night will give a night time temperature drop of anywhere between 25°- 40°, depending upon outside temps. Naturally I only keep cool/intermediate growers there. Everything is outside now.

just to keep costs down we heat to 67 in winter and let it get around 55 or a bit less at night so it should work without effort.

Is something like this even an option for you?

Indoor grow chamber up and running

I have since switched to LED bar lighting, and their on/off cycle gives me about a 10-12 degree swing year round.

Plus I can keep the RH above 55 day and night.

Just throwing it out there.

The day-night swing is not as important as people say it is for most warmer growing species. Hybrid orchids especially don't seem to care. Unavoidable seasonal swings are much more important, in my opinion. Cloud-forest, and cold to cool-growing orchids, probably consider these day-night temperature swings more important than do warm growers. And any plant will better tolerate hot days if nights are a lot cooler.

As an example, the best I can do in my growing room with an evaporative cooler during our monsoon is about 80 - 90 F / 26.5 - 32C by day and 80 F at night. The orchids are fine with this. I don't even bother with cold, cool nor intermediate orchids, except a couple in a terrarium in the bathroom closest to the home air conditioning unit.

Living in steamy hot Houston, I strongly suggest you save yourself a lot of grief and buy only warm to hot growers, until you feel comfortable growing orchids. We can grow a lot of stuff other people can't!

Thanks, not really an option. We downsized by a bit over half a few years ago.

Thanks, ES, good to know. I'll stick with your recommendation.

My main concern are the max temps during summer so I really don't pay much attention to the day-night swing (that I don't really have on each station of the year).

I have mostly hybrids, but so far, the species I have doesn't seem to care. I think the differences between winter and summer are what triggers anything that might happen.