How does one start a Grow Box

Well first would be determine amount of space you have for the box or tent. Then decide how stealthy it has to be. Decide what kind of grow you want to do (LST,SoG, SCroG). Is this perpetual or you goning to start from seed each round? What kind of lighting are you going to use? the list go's on and on.

 

Well With HD lights we know were going to need a decent amount of space to handle the heat and also good ventilation.

As for "stealthy" i mean do you need to have this hidden well or can you just use a tent in a room? Ive seen grow cab built in just about everything dressers, pc's, filing cabinets, wardrobes and these are are fairly well hidden.

 

Can you accommodate a full size refrigerator? If you can, you will have the space required to run heavy CFLs or an LED and keep it pretty stealth. I've seen people try HIDs in a full size fridge but they usually have temp problems. A refrigerator can he pretty stealthy bc people expect a certain level of noise to come from them. I've even seen fridges with beer taps on the door as a front do people don't open them. Just food for thought.

 

will the reward be worth the time and risk in a computer case is more of the question, probably not.

 

I don't know what your situation is, but if you have to hide it in plain sight then you might want to consider modifying a piece of furniture. You could do a stealth grow in anything from a tv stand to a wardrobe.

Personally, I'd go big. A 6' wardrobe, 400w cooltube w/ carbon filter, and a S&P silent fan. You'll get 5-10x your investment in bud. Just put a lock on it, maybe a killswitch for unexpected company.

150/250 hps is easy to cool with those S&P fans, I just pulled 6oz off my 250

 

Killswitch can kill anything you want it to. So if there are light leaks then it will kill the lights. If you are afraid your fans are too loud I would not suggest putting these on a kill switch as it could stink up the room quick. I leave running box fans around the room with my hidden grow room that way it masks the sound. Something I didn't see discussed was the smell factor of your security. Most budding plants put off quite the aroma that have gotten many people caught. You will want to look into a fan with a built in carbon filter, or you might want to look into the DIY ONA bucket. Both easy to use to control smell.

Also you need to decide how big this thing can be. We don't really know your dimensions or what you are looking to do. I managed to hide a 6.5'X5'X4' grow room in my room hiding it behind book cases and making it look like an extra closet. Storage on to give the image of it being storage. You can do a micro grow in a PC tower but don't expect much out of it. Might get a couple nice buds out of it. Can you accomidate an old TV armoir? a set of drawers? Old projection TV? so many things you can build a nice cabinet out of you just need to look at the dimensions that you can spare to keep it stealth. Then you need to go out and look for something to fill that space. You can make a grow out of anything honestly.

Just more food for thought.. Took me a couple months of reading before I finally got to the grow stage. Good Luck and do your homework =) it WILL pay off.

 

Unless you have a clone of a female plant you're going to need to grow more than one plant. There's a good chance that the plant will turn out to be a male, which is almost useless. Just sayin'.

 

Unless you scrog, flowering one plant is mightily inefficient, consider 4 or 6 or more.

In a small space, HPS is hot, consider PL lamps, instead. They come in a huge variety of sizes and make great weed (especially if you add a UVB lamp in there).

A completely stealthy/invisible grow is definitely doable. Think hard about air-flow, where it comes from (if against a wall, consider pulling air from the wall space, or a cool smoke-free room), where it travels around, where it exits the cabinet (a DIY carbon filter made from a well-drilled 50 disc DVD case (plastic) running out of a 1500+ RPM Gentle Typhoon works excellently). In a small space, a 12V rail is handy, you can run multiple 12V (PC) fans off it, get the air-flow completely under control.

If you split the cabinet into two areas, one for veg, the other flowering, you can run a perpetual system for continuous weed production. Keep a couple/few good mother plants in the smaller veg area and make clones. A size ratio of around 1:2 for veg/flowering areas works well (obviously, if you NEED the flowering area to be a certain size for the lamps you are using, the veg area will have to be smaller - so use household CFL's in there instead of PLs).

Every lighting system has a "goldilocks zone". Calculate/experiment to find out the best number/size of plants to produce the maximum yield. For example, if you have 4x55W PL lamps (plus an 18W UVB Lamp in the middle), you may find that six plants every month, vegged to around 6" (in 13cm pots) produces the most bud. Or maybe ten plants a month in 10cm pots (20 in total) is the sweet spot for that system. Time and experimenting will tell.

Start by setting up as much light as you can while keeping temperatures within "human" ranges (under 32C, for sure). NOTE: when a system is full of plants, it will lower the temperature by a couple of degrees.

When setting up, look for a multi-plug adaptor (aka. "4-bar" or "6-bar") with a switch on it. This can act as your kill-switch (they are quite common, and usually illuminated). Run everything out of there. If you need 100% stealth for any reason, you just switch that off (add gravity shutters for total security).

I've setup a few cabinet grows recently, dealt with a myriad of issues, if you need help with something specific, drop a post here, I've probably dealt with it already.

-mu

 

One plant? Well ideally you would need a minimum of 1 foot X 1 Foot, and these plants can get up to 6 foot easy. Some strains get really tall so you will need to do your homework on what strains you can grow in the room that you set aside. You need to do a lot more homework that just opening a thread and brainstorming though =) I did research and development on my grow for 3 months before I ever did anything. The research you do will pay you back in the end. You get back what you put into it. Don't put a lot and you will be one of the people wondering why everything is dying.

What I recommend is reading a bunch of the stickies in the Absolute Newbie board, DIY board, and some of the training board as well. This should give you a good understanding of the growing process and what the plants will need. You can decide from there how you want to grow. You are going to need to decide how much room you are willing to dedicate first. Micro grows will give you a small amount of bud but are easy to hide, there are middle sized cabinets and other things that will let the plants get a couple feet to 4 feet. Then you might be able to get a full sized grow on where you let the plants get to a decent size to produce more.

Then you need to decide what kind of lights you want to use. DO NOT let other people bully you into using their own kind of lights. Lot of people on this board think their grow methods are the ONLY ones that work. There are pros and cons to all lights. Power usage, heat, light output, cost, personal preference. Then you need to decide a growing medium, are you going for soil? And if so you will want to investigate different soil mixtures to get a good one, usually have to add things to make a great mix. Then there are Hydro and Aero systems.

Then you will need to decide what kind you are going to grow. If you have very little space and only can do 1 at a time you are going to want to go to a major seed bank and order feminized seeds to guarentee a female plant eventhen its not a 100% guarentee. I have heard people go off after months of work finding they were growing male plants and have to destroy the plants and have nothing to show for it.

There is a lot to this and the more you look into it the better off you will be. If you are looking to be told what to do there are enough people on this board that will tell you to just spend a fortune building a setup for little results. However there are a lot of us that will help in making decision with you and give ideas. Read think for yourself and make an awesome system! =D Lets all grow together. Also is a great idea to read Grow Journals there is a lot of knowledge in them.