growing in apartments?

Be friendly but don't make friends with others in your complex.you don't want them dropping in.Get a good charcoal filter setup.Run it as an air scrubber.Light leaks are key also.G.L.

 

there the same thing. I grow in a condo and smell is the biggest thing to deal with and like he said above be friendly but dont become friends with your neighbors.

 

control light leaks & smell. a carbon filter would be a great idea. you can do a DYI filter or buy one. be careful who you invite into your home too. keep your grow op. as secret as possible. I'm not sure if you live with someone else or not, but as soon as you move to a highly public area, you have to account for noise and other people that live around you. I would look around and see which ppl on your floor have dogs, which people are old and have nothing to do with their lives, and any other suspicious characters you might encounter. Depending on how thick your walls are, you may need a muffler for your ventilation too.

its good to be extra careful growing in an apartment, or anywhere for that matter. You should rather be extra paranoid and safe instead of getting arrested and fucked for a non-violent crime. good luck man, you can definitely do it. just be careful!

 

make sure you can hide your operation when the land-lords need to come in and spray for bugs/check fire alarms and other standard maintenance.. They should give you a few days warning and tell you what there planing on doing. I'd try to get an apt w/an attached garage so you can hide stuff in there if nessicary.. Its also better to drive your car into garage and close it before unloading bags of soil or a ton of gardening supplies in the winter... In apartments neighbors are nosey, anything that is visible from street you have to assume is always seen.

 

Apartment growers take a big risk, much bigger than most of them realize. The fact that they haven't gotten caught yet does not mean they are running a secure operation, any more than driving without a seatbelt and not killing yourself yet means that driving without a seatbelt is safe.

Your landlord can enter your apartment without notice. I know it says in the lease they have to give notice, and most of the time they do, but they also reserve the right to enter without notice if in their sole judgment it is necessary/emergency. Your privacy rights are not secure because they have to be balanced against the landlord's right to keep his property safe and secure. So, even if you have done everything you can think of to keep your grow hidden, if the apartment above you overflows their tub and it starts leaking through your ceiling (or a pipe in the wall bursts, or there is a bad cockroach infestation, or...) then the landlord can enter without notice.

Without even realizing it, you might even have given up-front permission in the lease for entrance without notice by maintenance workers, pest control, the utility and cable companies, HVAC repairmen, and so on.

And even if you get 24 hours notice, where are you going to put your grow op? We see posts on this forum all the time from panicked apartment growers who did get notice but still have no place to hide their grow or any way to move it to a hiding place.

Other problems with apartment grows: your living space is smaller so it's harder to hide a grow op's electrical consumption (using an extra 250 kilowatt hours or more of juice can blend into the bill for a 3,000 sq foot house a lot easier than it can blend into the bill for a 1,000 sq foot apartment). Your neighbors are a lot closer, so odor control must be perfect. With an apartment you are less likely to want to cut holes in walls and ceilings, and even if you wanted to cut holes you often have other apartments below, above, and/or to the sides of you, limiting your options for ventilation. Apartments often mean roommates. I could go on...

Also, you still have issues of fan noise and suspicious things poking out of cabinets or furniture. For example, suppose you learn that maintenance will be coming in tomorrow. You might be out all day at work, so you might not want to leave your fans running because the workers will hear it. Thus, your grow space could get really hot, so you'll also want to cut your lights off all day. Now you are screwing up your grow and risking hermies or ruined harvest. And it can be difficult to retro-fit a cabinet or piece of furniture for a grow while still completely concealing a carbon filter and light-traps on intake and exhaust. It can be done, I'm just saying it's even more things to deal with, more compromises to make, more design challenges, etc.

 

Would a Carbon Activated HEPA Filter work for a closet grow? One like Holmes makes? I figure setting it in with the plants would act as a fan and reduce smell...?

Here is the description:

"99% HEPA filter helps remove airborne particles and allergens Carbon filtration reduces unpleasant odors Microban antimicrobial product protection Electronic ionizer increases performance Quiet operation Dual-position, slim design is perfect for table or desktop use. Handy filter change indicator plus durable three-speed GE motor. Filtration For: N\A; Filtration Type: Carbon; Filtration: 99.000 %"

 

I got this same unit a week ago it's working great.It also has an ionizer.A positively charged grow room has been said to accelerate growth.Positive ions attache to particles that cause smell and precipitate them to the floor so it helps smell too.I have no smell at all with 5 ready to harvest plants in a 2.5 x 3 x 6T grow box.

 

How much are we talking about growing here...lol? I mean if someone is groqwing one lil plant is it that hard to keep the smell under control or to hide one plant? Im not being a smart ass I just wanna know?

 

Thanks maulcoy!

Have you ever read that an ionizer will suck the flavor out of the buds? I remember reading that somewhere, but I don't remember where.

I have one and i've been using it to suck the smoke out of the room etc... I will prob put it in the closet during flowering. I want to make sure that it's not going to ruin the taste of the buds though.

 

As far as how many plants go... right now I have 7 plants in one closet VEGGING... These are bagseeds and once I go into flowering and the males show themselves the number will be reducing quickly... male to female ratio is usually 50/50 so I figure I'll have about 3 or 4 plants by the time I need to worry about the smell too bad.

 

It's not a matter of being hard, it's a matter of having odor control at all when it's needed -- too many folks think "it's just one plant, it won't smell" and so they have no odor control. Then their plant starts flowering and they learn that even one plant can stink up an entire apartment and can be smelled out in the hallway or other public area.

The plant needs ventilation anyway for proper air exchange and plenty of CO2. If you just hook up an appropriate carbon filter to the ventilation then odor control should be taken care of.

 

no it won't suck the flavor out, let it run.It will deminish the smell of the finished product a bit.

 

whhhaaat??? are you implying that one of those little Holmes "HEPA" filters, or any other similar electrical equipment, will lessen the "dank" smell of your final product???

 

A bit perhaps.I have used em in my drying room and it seemed to take the smell of the finished product down a notch.Not enough for me to care however.

 

I have heard that too in Cervantes's video.. he said that it is not a good idea to have an ionizer in your grow room, I just can not remember why...

 

on that particular model, (shown in the pic) i am pretty sure you can turn the ionizer off, and just run the filter.

 

Yes you can. I'm about to go pick up another one, because it works great at clearing the smoke too! hehe