i got two lumatek digital ballasts with two air cooled hoods and im looking to buy a tent and get my grow setup. my questions are: i need advice on what size tent will work best for 2 lights. (my ballast can go either 600w or 1000w) should i use 600w bulbs or 1000w? what size intake/exhaust do i need and how many of them do i need? do i need a dehumidifier? anything else i need? any assistance is highly respected. thanks in advance. btw: it will be a soil potted grow.not hydroponics
I would go 2 1000 watters is a 4x8 tent answers to your other questions... http://forum.grasscity.com/absolute...-list-beginners-other-useful-information.html
Go with two 1000w bulbs. A 96"x48"x84" tent. A 400cfm minimum exhaust fan. A 180cfm minimum intake fan with additional passive intake. Depending on how you set up the ventilation on the lights you might want to run CO2, an air conditioner and a humdifier. Doing this is pretty simple. Run an intake from outside through both lights and then straight back outside. You cool the bulbs but you don't have to do anything about scent. With the other fan you attach a small carbon filter and use it to exhaust heat from the tent. In the room you have a portable AC unit, or a window ac unit, cooling the air to an acceptable range of about 70 degrees. This should keep the temperature in the tent in the upper 70's, to possibly the low 80's. A dehumidifier is run at night to keep the temperature from swinging and the humidity low. This is a semi-closed grow, with the AC unit expelling some of your CO2, so you'll want to do what you can to keep the CO2 concentrated in the tent for as long as possible. The air will recirculate in the room and be mostly scent free, but you may want to include another form of scent control like Ona or an Ozone generator. In total you're looking at Two 1000w systems A 98x48x84 tent A 400cfm fan A 180cfm fan A carbon filter -and maybe- A CO2 meter A CO2 tank and regulator An 8,000 BTU Air Conditioner A 20L/day dehumidifier This is in addition to any EC/TDS/pH meter, your media and planters, nutrients and perhaps an RO filter. Setup cost is likely in the $1500 to $2000 range, depending on how you go about doing it. Figure $700 on the lights, $300 on the ventilation, and another $300 on the tent, and you're pretty much there already. The full on CO2 setup would be at least another $1000 for all of that equipment. You could get parts of it over time though and build the whole thing. Without CO2 I think you could harvest an easy 2.5 lbs every 120 days. Possibly up to 4 lbs every 90 days if you really get things dialed. With the CO2 you can expect 20% to 50% greater harvests. A setup of this magnitude could produce 1 lbs per month without too much trouble on the average I think. Given current street prices... let's just say your $1500 investment is going to be well worth it.
The link from my first post has some diagrams showing the ventilation set ups the above poster is talking about...