Hi all–been lurking here for a few months getting up to speed for my first grow. Thanks to the many folks I've learned from. I've finally start work on my growbox. I will be growing in soil under CFLs, and will be experimenting with SOG, ScrOG and LST to see which works best for me. My goal is to build an odor-free cabinet that can be safely heated. After looking at the NBG stealth box and lots of other stealth cabs out there, I've come up with my own variation. I started with a 48"x72" cabinet – the kind you get at Home Depot for $100 that many others have used. I've had one sitting empty in my garage for 3 years. But based on what I've seen in grow journals, that's way more space than I need. Plus the location I've chosen for my grow doesn't have enough vertical clearance. So here's the cabinet reconfigured. It is now 42" tall and has an actual plywood back instead of the cheap cardboard that comes with these cabs. You can see my carpentry skills are not perfect by any means, but it's close enough to true for my purposes. The two outer chambers are 18"x19", and the middle is 10"x19". The right side will be flowering, and the left side will be split in two to support bonsai mums and short veg cycles. The middle chamber house all of the utilities – ventilation, scrubber, power, timers, etc. – as well as a drying chamber. Any feedback or suggestions are welcome! Coming Next: Ventilation
hey this design looks great, there might be a little set back eventually how are you going to put the cfl's in and how will you emulate humidity? you want to keep the cfl's close the the plants and if you do a sog, i would suggest getting the same cab and puting it on top of that one get a couple 2' florescent GROW LIGHTS mabie mount them on the sides and putt 1 or two 100 watt cfl's with a reflector that has a white film, this will maximize your lumens per square in. a good way to dry in the bottom though is to get so glass mason jars and put the buds in there move them around to even out moisture but do this after you cure them in a paper bag, you may need something else to make it smell prof though mabie some silcon spray or caulk but you might want to buy an additional smell prof system cause flowering and drying marijuana has a quite pungeant smell. great job on the ideas, you'll do fine just love and care for you plants and don't get greedy karmas the life of horticulture, let me know what you think.
Thanks mr.mjsativa, I'm not sure I follow exactly what you're describing. I should probably add that my goal is to get up to a perpetual harvest of ~1 oz. per month, so I want to maximize my use of that space rather than adding more, otherwise next thing you know I'll have a 4kW grow lol! I'll be flowering under a 250W CFL batwing reflector as primary lighting, then I'll add hard-mounted CFLs on the sides as supplemental if necessary. My cabinet will be located in a garage loft, so temps will get low, which is why I've got a heated intake (pics in the next couple of days), but humidity in this part of the country is conducive to MJ plants, so hopefully I won't have and hard work to dial that in. All chambers will be vented through a carbon scrubber, including drying. My plan is to hang some rails in the front of the middle chamber that I can slide in a few drying trays. My only concern is over-exhausting that part of the cabinet. I think I'll have to get a duct end-cap and cut a small hole so I've only got 1-2" of exhaust there. It'll make more sense as I get pics posted. My overall plan is as follows: 1. Reconfigure cabinet. (done) 2. Install ventilation intake ducts. (in progress) 3. Install ventilation exhaust ducts, fan and carbon scrubber. 4. Line cabinet with insulation and panda film. 5. Install divider on left to create separate clone/veg chambers. 6. Mount reflectors in flower and veg chambers. 7. Mount supplemental (side) CFLs in flower and veg chambers. 8. Mount CFLs in clone chamber. 9. Light seal the cabinet. 10. Temp/hygro test cabinet. 11. Plant some babies. I'll worry about the drying racks while I'm growing something to dry. Thanks for your help.
That box looks good thats like the same size one i got from walmart for 2o bucks all you need to do is drill holes for fans and lights and ur good to go. I got 2 45 watt cfls and 2 26 watt daylight cfls in mines and the temp stays at 77-78 in there wich is perfect. For humidity i would juss put a small bowl of water in there. The lights will eventually start to evap tha water thus makin it moist.
your welcome ganjananda, that sounds like a great plan now that i have all the specs but still with the amount of space I just hope your flowering plants don't grow big enough to be burt by the lights, all though cfls dont get that hot the actual bulbs if touched for prolonged time will burn your crop. I would go with the (LST) method and that would most deff give you at least an ounce a month. keep me posted very interesting setup- a very inspiring design for newbies to learn off of. you'll do great.
Thx mr.mjsativa–I'll probably give LST and SOG a try and see which I like better, then try to dial that in for max yield. I'm interested in Dr.BudGreenGenes SOG method, but first things first, lol. You can see a pic of the intake I just built. This is view from above. The big register box fits a small space heater. I'm hoping this will work to bring temps up since the box is in my garage. I'll try to pull more pics this weekend. I also lined the flowering chamber with reflectix. I need to pick up another roll to finish the other side. My S&P TD-100X should get here Monday then I can build my exhaust. Thanks for the tips and for visiting my thread!
Pic of the intake from the back of the cab. I'll be mounting a register cover over it once I get the box screwed back down. Also a bad pic of the whole cab as of this am. It was dark so the camera on my phone couldn't focus.
Good job man, hands down some good quality creativity, I would just be careful with space heaters cause instead of warming the air it {cooks) it making the humidity very low and the air hot and dry, for a little extra heat in my box i just put a 75 watt enhance flood light it has full spectrum out put and it gets kinda hot so i just have it over a bowl of water to keep it humid it keeps it around 80-85 degrees. but i would try the heater since you live where its already humid. how many cfls are you using? soil? and you must know the p.h of your water, test the runoff and before you water.{6.8 great) what nutrients are you going to use? you want to find this out before you start. and a word of advice use reverse-osmosis water great p.h and e.. keep the posts coming your doing great.
So flipping cold...at this rate I'm not going to get this thing done till spring! I'm worried about humidity with a space heater. I've got to make sure it's temp-stable before I put plants in, then hope that humidity is ok. I have FFOF soil and the FF trio of nutes. I've heard abt FFOF burning seedlings so I was thinking I would germinate in pre-flushed soil which will buffer the seedlings when I move them into pots. I have a 125W 6500K CFL + batwing for moms & vegging and a 200W 2700K CFL (*not* 250W as I incorrectly said earlier) + batwing for flower. Plus I picked up a handful of 42W CFLs of each temp in case I need more lumens. I haven't pH-tested my water yet, but I do have a digital tester! I was planning on using pH-adjusted day-old tap water. Does RO really make a big difference? Thanks for your help and suggestions.
What are the inside dimensions of your cabinet? I have a 4' T5 high output fixture (47" long x 22' wide) and was wondering if it would fit. thanks
Bountyhunter–The internal dimensions are 46" x 20", so sounds like your light is just barely too big. I CANNOT BELIEVE how stupid/stoned I have been. I just realized the other day that my stupid ducting is a direct light channel between the veg and flower chambers. DUH! So meanwhile my new fan is still not installed because I haven't figured out how to fix this yet. I tried a few different configurations of the ducting but they all sucked. And by sucked I mean they filled up my utility chamber with ducting and no room for drying. I could do it with a duct "Y," but I haven't been able to find them anywhere and I have to lay off the packages for a while or my wife is going to get suspicious. So today I picked up some big PVC pieces at Home Despot to see if I can do anything with those, if not I'm going to hammer together some light traps and run the ducting into those. That's the most compact option, but I fall short of a master carpenter and I'm afraid of going down a rabbit hole on that. Slow progress, but I'd rather do it right than have to fuck with it after something's growing inside. Thanks for visiting. Hopefully I'll get this ventilation business finished this weekend and can move on to lights! Namaste
ganjananda- Thanks for getting back to me. I feel your pain on the ventilation. I set up a quickie grow room in a spare bath by enclosing the tub/shower. I knew ventillation was going to be a problem and thats the reason I went with the T5 high output flourescent. I have plants growing and have to open the grow room door about 1/4, open the bath door and open a window in the bedroom to keep it around 75. it's a good thing I'm home during the day and can keep an eye on it. When I tested it out I only had 4 of the eight tubes on and i was ok. I was exhausting the air back into the bath room with a 4.5' 110CFM fan. That didn't work so I removed the shower light and flex ducted the exhaust through the opening into the attic. I looking for a bigger exhaust fan today. O well I went into this as a hobby and I'm planning my permanent grow space. keep working it and you will get it figured out.
you could use something to block the lite, like a box with the bottom face left off so no light comes in...e mail me
Thanks for your suggestion shoeshoe. I had already bought the PVC when you posted. I had actually experimented with making a light trap box but me and straight lines don't work so well. So I picked up some 3" PVC parts at Home Despot and here's what I've got. Picture 1: Left and right chambers vent through 90 degree bends and into a junction. This PVC junction actually joins 3:1, but I sealed the top to turn it into a 'Y'. A short length of 4" ducting connects the S&P TD-100X fan. The fan is actually sitting in the duct hole that runs into the exhaust port. Picture 2: The top chamber is the back of the exhaust port. This will be sealed off and a vent will be cut into the rear of the cabinet. The lower chamber is the intake. Negative pressure created by the fan pulls fresh air through the elbows into the bottom of the growing chambers. Not visible: A small space heater sits in a sheet metal register box and can provide heated air. I tested one chamber (sealed the other) and had no problems keeping the grow area 65-70F. Picture 3: The whole thing so far.
Okay, so since I got my ventilation installed I've made some big progress. These pics are my flower and veg chambers with lighting installed. Well...preliminarily. I'm still putting up the panda film. Why am I putting panda film over reflectix? Moisture and protection. The reflectix damages easily and I want a moisture barrier to keep moisture and smells inside. For veg I have a 125W 6400K CFL, and for flower a 200W 2700K CFL. These are big lights! The 200W bulb even has a cooling fan! They both kick out a bit of heat, but it's not enough to survive the New England winter air so I've come up with another solution: ceramic heat emitters for reptile tanks. I picked up the 150W version and it took my chamber up to 80 degrees when it was 25 outside! That means this will be a year-round grow box. Obviously that's even going to be too hot much of the time, so I'm wiring them in with baseboard thermostats, which can control line voltage heaters. That works great for temp, but raising the temp raises the moisture capacity of the air so relative humidity will drop. I've got a plan to make a compact humidifier out of pvc and a computer fan, but I may just pick up a couple of Exo-Terra Foggers and be done with it. In the meantime I'll just have to grow fewer plants to make room for a regular humidifer.
Quick update: both sides now have heat and thermostats wired in. Still need to secure the wiring. I also picked up an Exo-Terra fogger to see if that's sufficient to get RH up to acceptable levels. And for the record, if I never touch panda film again it will be too soon! Maybe this stuff is great when you're applying to a solid surface, e.g, directly on wood, but getting this stuff to apply over the reflectix has been a bitch and I'm still not done.
Got the lights mounted in the cloning chamber. Right now there's 4x26W @ 6500K. I realize now that there was really no benefit to getting the big CFLs. When they reach end of life I may pull the mogul bases off the reflectors and switch to regular CFLs. Live and learn. Here is the whole thing lit up and the utility area which is very dark.
damn thats pretty nnniccccceeeeee! how many do you plan on flowering at one time? and how much weight do you think your gonna get?
Thanks, doobee. I'm not sure how many I'm going to flower, I haven't grown before. I want to try the DrBud's micro SOG because so I can have a few strains in perpetual harvest, but if I don't like that I'll probably try to LST four plants. And for the record, I haaaaate working with panda film!