When should you replace carbon filter for grow room?

What is a Carbon Filter

It might seem weird how one device can simply make a smell extinct. But when you get chemistry involved, it becomes clearer. The carbon used is all active. This means it has been treated with oxygen to give it a highly porous surface. Air will pass easily through it, but unwanted smells and fragrances will bind to the carbon. These filters will need to be replaced, but will last you a long time. Be sure to inform yourself better on this depending on the scale of your operation.

Carbon filters are huge, heavy duty tubes with loads of carbon inside. You connect them to your exhaust fan, forcing all the extracted air from your grow room to pass through the filter. If you have a small setup, a granular carbon filter will be enough. In case you run a larger operation, you’ll be needing a block filter. To understand better which choice to make, you should check for the CFM - cubic feet per minute (or cubic metres per minute/litres per second) value of your fans. You have to ensure that your exhaust fans can handle the filter. Purchase a filter with an equal or lower CFM value than that of your fan. The CFM can be easily converted to metric values with simple equations.

Carbon Filter for Weed Odor

When it comes to combating those strong-terpene odors that are produced from cannabis in the air of your grow facility and cultivation site, no other solution is offered more than carbon air filters for this cannabis odor mitigation and control. Carbon filters are highly effective at absorbing odors and gases in the air and containing them on the high surface area filter media of the carbon. This filter will collect these different odors swirling in the environment and attach the odors onto the filter which can help to combat the odors in the present time in a cannabis grow facility – which ultimately will be necessary to follow the strict odor control regulations that these facilities must uphold.

Although carbon air filters are proven to effectively collect odors from the air including cannabis odors, it also contains flaws that will leave the environment compromised overtime. Active Carbon filters will keep collecting odors, gases, and other pollutants on the filter media until the surface of the media fills up completely with no additional room left on this filter. Once the filter becomes completely full and submerged or even due to environmental changes before it is saturated, it will begin the process of re-releasing these collected odors and pollutants back into the air, re-contaminating the air once again and leave behind the odors that were collected into the airspace. When this process occurs in a cannabis grow house it will be significant and result in the buildup of odors produced from this facility.

Why use carbon filters?
Is the use of carbon filters the only way to reduce the spread of the pungent smell that comes from a grow room? The answer is no however, carbon filters are the most effective and highly preferred way to absorb smells that go beyond the grow room. The use of gel and air purifiers only masks the smell.


There are over 200 carbon filter brands in the market today all which differ when it comes to features and effectiveness. Every brand claims that their product is the best and without proper guidance, you can easily end up purchasing a rather less effective product. In this post, however, we have reviewed 6 of the best carbon filter for grow room. All you have to do is read through the features, pros, and cons and determine what suits you best.

How Long Does a Carbon Filter Last

The lifespan of a filter is an important aspect to consider when selecting an air filter or air purifier technology to utilize when controlling odors in an indoor cannabis grow house or facility. Cannabis grow facilities are infiltrated with an array of different airborne pollutants that will taint the indoor air quality and lead to odor issues throughout the surrounding areas of this cultivation site. Researchers have long known that VOCs emitted by plants can contribute to smog and when these VOCs mix with nitrogen oxides it can create an even more hazardous pollutant in the air – ground-level ozone.
When these chemical VOCs are present in the airspace of the indoor environment it will travel throughout the air and will taint air quality while emitting an odor – like the VOCs terpenes that create that pungent marijuana odor in the air. The carbon air filters, when used in an environment like a cannabis facility will likely not consist of the longest lifespan due to the heavy levels of pollutants found in the air that the carbon filter must attach to its media surface. As the media surface of the carbon filter begins to fill with collected contaminants and odors, the filter will become completely full and saturated, which will result in the re-release of the collected contaminants on the filter back into the indoor air – this has been compared to that of a sponge.

First thing first, the entire carbon filter never goes out of order, only the activated charcoal does.

However, usually activated charcoals last for around 24 months of regular use. But we have seen people use a carbon filter for 10 years with just one refill. On the other hand, sometimes, it needs to be replaced once in a year.

In case you’re looking forward for changing frequency of a air filters of other types, here is a quick roundup

Air Filter Changing Frequency for Different Types




How to Recognize the Time To Change The Filter?

Obviously, when your carbon filter will be out of order, it won’t be able to trap the smelly particles anymore. So smells will come out and let everyone know about this ‘hobby’ of yours.

But what if your nose can’t recognize the moment when it happens? You know, the olfactory receptors of yours are pretty used to the smell. So it can’t recognize the sudden presence of it.

So, is there any other way to recognize how often to change carbon filter in grow tent?

Yeah, there are two ways actually.

#1- Smell the Active Carbon

Remember the sweet carbon smell when the filter was new? Well, that smell is an indicator of how much alive the activated carbon is. After every 3-4 months(or whenever you feel like), seek for that smell in the carbon filter. The moment you won’t sense it anymore is the moment when the activated charcoals need to be replaced.

#2- Let Someone Trustworthy Smell It

Another alternative way is, let someone else check for the smell outside grow tent. The person should be someone who doesn’t live around, and someone who’s not used to the smell of your grow plants.

Either way, you should have a firm idea on the carbon filter change frequency.

How Often to Replace Carbon Filter in Grow Room

When carbon filters are installed into a cannabis grow room, these filters will continually work to collect odors onto the filter until the filter media is full. Once the carbon filter is too full to capture and remove toxins from the airspace the filter will begin to release pollutants from the carbon filter into the air. The lifespan of these carbon filters is often ambiguous and will often be hard to gage when it’s time to replace these filters, specifically when utilized in a cannabis grow facility. As we discussed earlier, the carbon technology is very often compared to that of a sponge, as they both collect materials through adsorption and once it reaches maximum capacity on the surface area it will begin to re-release these capture materials back into the environment. This process will occur with a carbon filter, it is however, a matter of when – it could be a week, a couple of weeks, a month, or even months. Sometimes even changes to temperature and humidity can cause the release of previously captured chemical

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