Need some major help with my first stealth grow.

Discussion in 'Micro Grows' started by Weed4Help, Jun 16, 2011.

  1. Alright so me and my friend are thinking about growing some weed because everyone in our town does it, even our teachers. So we were going to have like a 1 plant stealth box to grow it in, we have a garage with electrical outlets (2) that we planned to put it in. But because the house is rented out the garage is full of the land lord's shit. Obviously we don't wanna get kicked out, or caught, so it has to be the most stealthy that it could possibly be. We were thinking about taking a card board box and throwing some CFLs into it (about 6, is this too much for 1 plant?) If you have any other ideas that we could use for a stealth box that is extremely easy to make and extremely stealthy, please provide a link or just explain how it's made.

    For our box we planned to take a card board box and line the insides of it with reflective tape/mylar and then have some hooks at the top of the box and have the lights on a chain so we could raise and lower them. We were gonna use a 5 inch computer fan for the exhaust and put it on the bottom of the box near the plants base and then put a 4 inch computer fan for the intake and put it at the top of the box diagonal from the exhaust so that with the exhaust fan being stronger it will suck the air threw faster and hopefully cool down the CFLs so my plant doesn't burn.

    Anyways, we're just using some bag seed we had so we don't really know the strain or anything all we know is that it's indica and it smokes nice lol. I had never smoked before and when I smoked this shit it was so smooth I didn't cough once, and I was taking some big ass hits.

    Anyways any links will really help, please tell me how many lights I should use and what size fans and what my box should look like and shit.. I really need some help with this first grow, also do I have to have nutrients? I know people say it helps with the growth of the buds but that shits expensive and im pretty fucking poor right now.

    Do me a favor and help a stoner out, stay high. [​IMG]

    Update: I just found a dresser that i plan to put them in instead of a cardboard box lol.. it's pretty thick though so i need to know how to put some fans in it without having to cut into 3/4 inch thick wood. If it's absolutely needed i guess I will have to do it, leave me an idea on how? :D
     
  2. #2 Bongsauce, Jun 16, 2011
    Last edited by a moderator: Jun 16, 2011
    First off I recommend against card board..a small wood box with a hinged door is pretty cheep at a thrift store of garage sale...but if cardboard is all you have, then use it.

    for cfls you'll need about 75-100 watts per square foot. So if your box is gonna be 1 foot x 1foot you'll need about 100watts of real cfl (not equivalent). I recommend the smaller wattage (24-26w)spiral bulbs because they are more efficient then the larger (42w) bulbs.

    For venting just use your strongest fans for the exhaust..don't worry about the intake..just make a hole and the exhaust will suck air through your passive intake. It's really a waste of fan/power to put a fan on the intake...you're actually blocking some of the intake "flow" by clogging it up with a fan. The placement of the intake fan sounds good, the way you plan on pointing at the bubs, just keep in mind intake pressure is not necessary.

    Intake holes should be low and light proofed, exhast should be at the top and close as possible to the lights.

    You can probably get by with some cheep soil and nutes...but you reap what you sow in this game..starting out on the cheep is great to get started but plan on upgrading asap if you want some quality/weight.

    I highly recommend picking up some nice clean soil at a hydro store or something...most other stuff is either precharged with nutes, too acidic (for flowers) or will give you bugs (fungus gnats are pretty much a guarantee with miracle grow organic soils) For soil I recommend fox farm ocean forest (20-25$) with their nutes "grow big" and "big bloom" ..about 10-15 bucks a piece.

    edit: doh missed yer update...I've "cut" holes in plywood with a drill before...I drill like 100+ holes in a circle as tight as I can get them, then I pop out the circle with some force and file the edges smooth...works in a pinch if all ya have is a drill....having the right tool for the job make this 100x easier btw. you can also get a cheep little handsaw (like a pumpkin carving type saw/knife)and do the holes by hand.
     
  3. Alright so just to give you an idea on how big this "box" is it's fuckin huge lol. It's width is 2 feet 7 inches, it's height is 4 feet 6 inches, and it's depth is 1 foot 8 inches. So I'm thinking about growing more than one plant now, and everyone talks about this Fox Forest shit, where can i get it? Anyways, how many plants do you think i should put in this space, and how many lights should i put in the thing now?

    Thanks for the reply, i'm running the same question on 3 other sites trying to get as much input as i can and i'm not getting very many replies, anything that i can get, i'll take it. Thanks again.
     
  4. that sounds like a nice box to use. I'd separate a "layer" up top to put in your exhaust fan, electric stuff, timer, filter etc in....your growing section only needs to be about 3 feet tall at the most...with cfls you won't get buds more then about a foot from the bulb. So figure 6-8 inches to mount lights, 12-16 inches for plant growth, and about 8-12 inches for your container height.

    Foxfarm ocean forest can be found at pretty much nay hydro store. If you don't have a hydrostore or w/e then try Ace hardware..sometimes they carry it. Also sometimes bigger garden centers will carry some too, as well as the fox farm nutes and maybe some other goodies like GH.

    I'd throw in 1 or 2 ~24w cfls for now and pop some seeds..maybe 6-8. Bagseed usually has a higher chance of being female, but count on 50% males anyways. Grow em out about a month and a half and you'll be able to tell sex and weed out the weaker ones, hopefully ending up with 3 nice healthy girls to flip into 12/12.

    Make sure to learn how to train and top your plants so you end up with about 3 little bushes that fill the space nicely instead of 3 tall beanpole looking plants. Personally I top very early with seeds and clones...like on the 3 and 4 nodes topping twice very early on to develop a nice bonzai structure.
     
  5. Alright man thanks alot for your input, I'm thinking about going out and buying some supplies this weekend and throwing it all together, is there any cheap way to make a carbon filter? Also i've seen a bunch of shit about LTI and topping and shit like that, all I know is that you grow a plant and you cut it off and you hang it to dry.. Not really that educated on this shit yet, if you can give me a link to something that explains how each one is done and what the ups and downs are of each, but yeah i want my plants to be low and bushy and high yielding. And I'm pretty sure i can get another box for my next question if needed, so here it is. If I get a male plant should i take it and a female and breed them so that i can have more seeds? What is the down side to having a pollinated female besides the fact that i'll have seeds?

    And considering you seem to be speaking from past experiences, i'm guessing you've grown from bag seed and used CFLs? If so, how much do you usually yield per plant?
     
  6. here's my favorite micro carbon filter

    GC actually has a whole section on training n stuff. basically IMO the pros and cons of topping vs training is that :

    LST training - you're not removing any growth, but plants can still stall out for a few days while the auxin levels build back up. You also don't get a very uniformed plant in the end most of the time they end up having a big side branch sticking out of the pot which can be a pain later.

    topping - if you top correctly and the plant is healthy they grow right through it. You also don't need any strings or tie downs for topping. It's a little more difficult because you need to understand how the plant is gonna react, but it's ez once you learn how.

    I prefer topping vs. training now..I use to do LST and scrogs..but I realized that after I trained the plant into a screen, about halfway though flower the screen could be removed and the plant stayed put, also the screen prevented me from repositioning any branches once they grew through it.

    I recommend topping the plant (s) early and trainin g them into a screen so you get a first hand idea of how the plants react to bending and stuff.

    With the seeds I don't know if it would be worth your time to make more bagseeds..I mean, you can get some great stuff from bagseeds but if you're gonna go through the process of seeding your weed and stuff I'd do it with some better (known) genetics. You could throw together another little box pretty easy to make seeds. It takes hardly any room. I've grown a plant for seeds in a 20oz MT dew bottle and it yielded about 1/8 of seeded weed..packed full of about 500 seeds. 20oz Mt Dew bottle and about 20w of cfl over it. You could literally do it in a shoe box. Downside of pollinating your plants is of course the seeds. You can try to isolate the pollen to one branch of the plant and grow just a dozen or 2 seeds. If you're careful you can do that without seeding the whole plant. To give you an idea of how many seeds can be in a bud....look at a nice shot of a growing bud... every pair of white "hairs" could potentially be 1 seed. If you were to pollinate a whole plant you would have reduced yields for sure..but just doing a branch you'd hardly notice.

    hmm really depends on the size of the plant, container size and lighting mostly. To give you an idea I used to grow in 1 liter fiji water bottles...under 110w of cfl per square foot I'd get about 3-6 grams a plant..depended alot on strain too. That was also from clone though, not seed. The clones would go into flower as soon as they had roots @ about 3 inches tall, and would finish at about 12-16 inches with one nice big top bud. I guess you've got about 3.5 square feet to cover so figure having around 300-400 watts of cfl in there by the time you flower. On a first run with cfls I usually see people get 1/4 to 1/2 gram a watt. I could see you pulling a QP out of the cabinet first time if you get it all running smoothly and do a ton of reading....but you have to be on the ball....growing became my obsession for about 2 years..that's how I got to where I am.

    With the size of that cabinet have you considered any larger lighting like maybe a small hps with a few cfls? I think you can pick up a 70w hps at lowes for 40$ .. I dunno your budget though...the cfls will do fine by themselves too, a small hps would probably get you a little more bud in the end but would be a bit more work to hook it up and keep it cooled....a tradeoff.
     
  7. Alright basically it's my friend doing all this shit and I'm about to move so i was just gonna help him set up his grow box and teach him the basics and shit but he's only got about $25 right now L0L. I think we're gonna go power-mow some lawns this weekend and make some quick cash so we can buy some better shit.

    HPS seems a little too complicated on my first grow, and if I get a fucking QP of weed, I think i will spend even more time learning how to set up a HPS lol. The more weed, the happier i am. Anyways, thanks alot for your input, are carbon filters NEEDED? Im growing it in a fucking garage that's away from people, and my mom doesnt give a fuck as long as she gets 1/10th of the profit (I don't mind as long as they water it while I'm at my dad's house).
     
  8. I'd use a filter...if you get a good harvest, a few oz.'s can easily stink out a garage. You'll (he'll) probably be ok through veg with some airfreshners...but one the trichromes start forming at about 2-3 weeks into flower you need some kinda oder filter, covering it up just isn't enough unless you want your garage to smell like a perfume factory. That carbon filter I linked in the last post should only run you about 15$ or 2 for 25...A container of carbon does 2 filters...1 of those might cut it but 2 of them would filter the smell properly.

    You'll do fine with a few cfl's spread out on top...just keep buds close and keep in mind pretty much anything more then 12 inches from the bulb isn't gonna be worth trimming/smoking so grow your plants accordingly.
     
  9. Thanks for the help man, will be making the box tomorrow and possibly taking multiple pictures along the way and making a seperate topic post about how i made it.

    Probably going to start a grow log and post my nutes/soil and all that shit. I've spent $160 on supplies so far which includes EVERYTHING to grow, I have 12 seeds germinating right now and i'm hoping at least 6 of them sprout, i'll plant all 6 and hope for the best.

    Anyways, look forward to a grow log, thanks for the help. :smoke:
     

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