Well seeing as I use tents and really wish I hadn't wasted the money on them,I'd suggest you stick with your current set up. Or buy you some heavy black vinyl fabric and partition off parts of your room. It honestly works just as good because I've done that as well. Problem with the tents in my humble opinion is this:
A.)The quality to price ratio isn't correct. Even the cheapest tents cost more than the vinyl fabric would.
B.)Most of them will give off funny smells when heated. Example-when the temperatures rise over 70 mine will produce a solvent like smell.
C.) They are hard to cool without a very strong fan. The duct booster fans do nothing with these things and even with my a/c going straight into the tent via tubing it still is a super pain in the ass to get to work right.
D.)Humidity is a problem,especially if you are running a duct into the tent. My temps were dropping down to the low 60's with 90% humidity and I had no clue why until I realized the a/c was still getting into the tent after I had shut things down. Coupled with the fact that no fans were running it almost killed my plants. In a bigger,more open lay out,you don't typically have this problem.
Well I hope I've helped,been trying to actually contribute more and all that jazz. Just remember it's only my 2 pennies on the matter.
Not trying to argue, but I use 2 tents and been around plenty more. Half of your problems just don't seem right, and the other 2 seem more like individual setup issues than tent-specific issues.
A. I dont think it's a bad deal to spend $150 for a cheap 4x8/5x10 tent, even if its cheaper quality than a SJ or something. Smaller tents can be easily had for under $100 shipped. After considering the metal, fittings, zippers, stitching, waterproof floor tub, massive number/sizes of vents, and amount of time it would take to make something of a similar quality that's probably less aesthetically pleasing and convenient to use/access anyway, not bad IMO.
B. Never experienced or heard of this, and temps for some of the tents I've dealt with were well into the 90s.
C. No different to cool than a room or cab of the same dimensions, so I'm not sure how thats relevant as a downside. Using a duct booster instead of an inline fan is widely discouraged for a reason. So is trying to duct an a/c into an enclosed area.
D. Again, no different than a room or cab of the same dimensions. If anything, probably EASIER to keep lower since tents don't hold air as well as a sealed environment.
OP: I agree with edude, gotta know why youre thinking of switching to give more specifics, but the downsides I've seen with tents:
-Limited height
-Difficult to run a sealed environment
-Zippers leak a tiny amount of light (high-end tents don't)
-Some tents use plastic clips on the supports that will break if you hang a light from them. Either get a tent without plastic, or hang from the supports that are all metal.
And keep in mind if you put multiple tents in a room, you have to get the cool air into each tent instead of just into the room. So you're creating a mechanical lung, cooling the entire room so that the tents get cold ambient air pulled in, which is less efficient than just using the room itself.
