We're all fuct now

[DeweyKox]

Hellz ya, I want to make sure everyone has the rules and does not forget!

 

[SOG]

It does, thanks. Nice work.

Thank you for taking the time Al, you're very kind
i think I'm headed to uncharted water with my sealed room setup
was hoping someone will critic or maybe find errors with my design or something
its like a desert since i posted, no one seems to have experience with this type of setup
or to shay to comment

 

[Al B. Fuct]

2 questions Al:

1) Does it matter that some of the hanging buds in my dryer are lightly touching each other?

If your drying box has an exhaust fan and an adequately sized intake port (or an intake fan), it'll be fine. Air motion from the fan will stop any mould, even where a few buds may be touching one another. I would not use a timer on the fan. You are counting upon air motion to stop mould. The buds will be susceptible to mould while they are still damp to touch, so run the fan constantly until they're rather stiff to the touch, with just a bit of flex remaining in the stems.

2) I think Im drying the buds to quickly, could you read the below paragraphs & give your input please.

The buds have been drying for 14 hours & the popcorn buds (at the base of the drying chamber in the pic) already feel dry to the touch & light in weight I think it may be drying to quickly. Though the stems on the hanging buds are still moist & bendy.

Naturally, your buds will dry from the outside in. The outsides will soonest feel quite stiff to the touch, but the stems may remain soft & flexible due to the remaining water content. At that point, you can put them in a sealed plastic (tupperware type) container and allow the moisture from the stems to wick into the very dry outer parts of the buds. You could also simply shut off the box's fan and wait a day or so until the moisture wicks into the dry bits. If the buds are too soft for your liking when the moisture has wicked, turn the fan back on for another day or two.

Even if you do overdry your buds (until they are crispy & fragile), it's easy to rehydrate them. Just put a teaspoon of water on a paper towel and nest the towel in with your buds in a sealed container for a day. A couple of just snipped, fresh fan leaves can be substituted for the paper towel. The buds will return to being nice & springy. Don't be tempted to use fruit peels for this job.

The worst thing you can do when drying buds is to expose them to sunlight or temps above 29C, at which point THC begins to decompose into non-psychoactive components. I didn't see any mention of a heater in your dryer box, so that shouldn't be a problem for you. A box with a fan will do fine. It'll take about 4-6 days to dry your buds, depending on the humidity of the air being drawn through the box.

 

[Al B. Fuct]

Thank you for taking the time Al, you're very kind
i think I'm headed to uncharted water with my sealed room setup
was hoping someone will critic or maybe find errors with my design or something

No worries, happy to be of some help if I can.

You're not quite in uncharted waters per se; totally sealed ops have been done before- I've done a couple and I'm sure I'm not alone!

I did one in a storage room in the sub-basement of a BMF apartment bldg, where there was no possibility of ducting airflow through the grow. All solid concrete walls, no windows. All I had to work with to remove heat was a mop sink. I modified an air conditioner unit to have thin streams of water (from a perforated piece of garden hose) dripping over the condenser (hot side) coil. I also used water-cooled cooltubes (which I'd never use in any other circumstance). The heat went down the drain with the water. Eventually (18 mos later), the fins on the condenser coil clogged with dried minerals from the tapwater, requiring replacement of the aircon unit- but a lot of buds were grown in that time. Bit water-wasteful, that grow, but there was simply no other way to do it. CO2 came from a tank & metering unit, just as you plan.

I think you're on the right path for a totally sealed grow. The reason why you're not seeing many sealed ops is there's quite a few heroics you have to accomplish to deal with heat and to introduce CO2. Most folks just duct lots of air through the op to carry the heat away and bring in CO2- much cheaper and less complex. However, if you gotta have totally sealed, it can be done. It's just costly and workish.

 

[Al B. Fuct]

Look what I found: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY_P8kW99lU

Im not sure if I would treat my stock like that though.

I had not seen that version of the Trimpro, thanks for that.

I'm not sure I would use one either, but DAMN does it look inviting. Bam, job done, albeit with a lot of excess leaf left on the buds. Small buds would also probably get sucked into the cutting blades and be wasted, I'd think. All the bouncing around of the buds in the thing would knock off quite a lot of trichs, I'm sure. However, manual trimming does some of that, too.

As is frequently said, there's no such thing as a free lunch!

 

[SOG]

However, if you gotta have totally sealed, it can be done. It's just costly and workish.

Thank you Al (a sigh of relief )
i didn't plan on going this route,
original plan was to deploy two tents in my unfinished attic after i added some floor space
its a new house i moved into, i wasn't familiar much with the attics atmosphere,
which turned out to be impossible to grow in
despite of my planning and two 14k portable AC units,
as soon as the spring came around the temps were building up to 120f/49c in no time,
i know there was no way to grow under these conditions
i ended up building an insulated room in the middle of the attic (all is documented in my journal)
originally i was gonna vent outside the roof,
i live around a near by air port,
and to top it off; not such great area (which i learned much later)
we have police choppers fling over all day and night around here
so i decided to stay away from LEO's attentions, by distributing the heat into the already hot attic,
which shouldn't be anything suspicious since its already a hot attic
then i had the idea to brake the heat before i vent out to the attic and cool it down, with a bigger "icebox" version, which i did
after all that, i was looking at everything i went through to get my op going, which was ways far from my original plan
read about sealed room setups, i liked the ultimate environmental control
i realized i had everything in hand to pull this type setup with my "Super Icebox"

 

[Al B. Fuct]

I do think you're on the right track, SOGgy.

Since you're near an airport, seeing helis flitting about shouldn't alarm you much. You can bet that pilots have a lot more on their mind than FLIR scanning the neighbourhoods around an airport when they're taking off and landing. Takeoff & landing are the most dangerous parts of any flight and pilots will be quite mindful of that.

Knowing that FLIR isn't an x-ray and can't be legally used to randomly scan houses without a warrant should calm you somewhat as well, but dumping warm air into the attic and allowing it to be distributed out the attic vents will go a long way to minimising the appearance of hotspots which could draw the attention of a FLIR operator who is illegally using the thing.

As I mentioned a cpl pages back, you can hire a FLIR cam and get a look at what LEO will see, if it has you all that worried. Mind you, I still believe that there's a number of other tipoffs (fan noise, scent) to the existence of a grow which are much more likely than IR signature to attract attention, but as long as you address those first, it can't hurt to think about minimising IR output. Diffusion of heat through an intermediate airmass (i.e. attic, crawlspace) and venting the cooled air through a number of points is very effective and will also help damp fan noise.

 

[WoldofWeedcraft]

I grew in a sealed room once, and I'll never do it like that again. Now I'm using a sealed room, but with a window A/C unit disguised from the outside and a hot air exhaust duct for my cool tube. Both the AC and the exhaust blow hot air into the adjacent room, but for the time being that's fine. This setup has been working well, but next I'm going to try to build a slightly bigger room where I won't be able to pull off the window unit in this location since I won't be able to hide it in an adjacent room. I'm thinking about running duct from the house's HVAC and installing a thermostat to the new sub basement room which currently has no ventillation or AC. Is this the ideal way to vent/cool your room? I imagine I'd have intake through the HVAC but where would I exhaust?

 

[iloveit]

If your drying box has an exhaust fan and an adequately sized intake port (or an intake fan), it'll be fine. Air motion from the fan will stop any mould, even where a few buds may be touching one another. I would not use a timer on the fan. You are counting upon air motion to stop mould. The buds will be susceptible to mould while they are still damp to touch, so run the fan constantly until they're rather stiff to the touch, with just a bit of flex remaining in the stems.

Naturally, your buds will dry from the outside in. The outsides will soonest feel quite stiff to the touch, but the stems may remain soft & flexible due to the remaining water content. At that point, you can put them in a sealed plastic (tupperware type) container and allow the moisture from the stems to wick into the very dry outer parts of the buds. You could also simply shut off the box's fan and wait a day or so until the moisture wicks into the dry bits. If the buds are too soft for your liking when the moisture has wicked, turn the fan back on for another day or two.

Even if you do overdry your buds (until they are crispy & fragile), it's easy to rehydrate them. Just put a teaspoon of water on a paper towel and nest the towel in with your buds in a sealed container for a day. A couple of just snipped, fresh fan leaves can be substituted for the paper towel. The buds will return to being nice & springy. Don't be tempted to use fruit peels for this job.

The worst thing you can do when drying buds is to expose them to sunlight or temps above 29C, at which point THC begins to decompose into non-psychoactive components. I didn't see any mention of a heater in your dryer box, so that shouldn't be a problem for you. A box with a fan will do fine. It'll take about 4-6 days to dry your buds, depending on the humidity of the air being drawn through the box.

I see, at what temp & humidity do you dry your buds at?
Al how is that you haven't written a book on "All things Cannabis"? I know it sounds like work but you could speak it & have someone else type it (theres a term for that...but I cant remember). You know it would sell...just a thought (I hope you consider it while your in bed tonight reflecting on the day)


As for the "Trimpro" see what its priced in my country on this web-store: http://www.grotec.co.uk/search.php?search=trim&search_submit=Go

If only I could find a DIY tutorial on trimmers...

 

[Al B. Fuct]

I'm thinking about running duct from the house's HVAC and installing a thermostat to the new sub basement room which currently has no ventillation or AC. Is this the ideal way to vent/cool your room? I imagine I'd have intake through the HVAC but where would I exhaust?

It doesn't sound like you will have the ability to dump exhaust into an intermediate airspace (perhaps a crawl space in your application), but that would be preferred. It would reduce the load on the HVAC system, even if you are taking cool air from the system to feed into the op. If you can't dump into an intermediate airspace, you would duct exhaust back to the HVAC via the system's air return path.

Sharing the house's HVAC system has one major drawback- distribution of scent throughout the house. If you do this, your exhaust should run through a carbon filter before it returns air to the HVAC system.

 

[WoldofWeedcraft]

Yea I am most definately using a carbon filter, so that scent issue could be taken care of. Just can't be lazy and wait around to replace the carbon regularly. What kinds of rooms would make an ideal airspace that would be common in your house? The plan is to stealth the entrance to this grow room with a hidden door or something. I guess I could exhaust into the basement with a common vent and make it look like part of the HVAC...just the part where hot air unusually spills out.

 

[Al B. Fuct]

I see, at what temp & humidity do you dry your buds at?

There's a whole thread about my bud dryer(s) here. I'm on v2.0 now but the operating theory is the same as in this diagram describing v1.0:

Bear in mind that v2.0 uses six resistors, not just two. It also has a thermostat to control temp to 29C max.



As I think of it, I'm probably on v2.5 by now. The above schematic has been revised a bit. Instead of running two sets of three resistors in parallel, there's three sets of two resistors in series. Damned if I can recall the value of the resistors without going out to the op and looking at the dryer, which I'll do later after a lot more coffee.

Al how is that you haven't written a book on "All things Cannabis"? I know it sounds like work but you could speak it & have someone else type it (theres a term for that...but I cant remember).

'Dictation' is the term you're looking for.

You know it would sell...just a thought (I hope you consider it while your in bed tonight reflecting on the day)

Yes, it would sell- but in the modern world with P2P filesharing, I'd sell one copy and a squillion copies would be floating around the net.

Also, were I ever to write a book on the topic, I'd not write one about 'All things cannabis.' I would write a 'cookbook' on how to set up an effective grow op, but I would not explore ALL the different ways it can be done. I'd write only what one needs to do to run an efficient op with minimum set-up cost. I bet I could do it in 10 pages or less.

If only I could find a DIY tutorial on trimmers...

Keep looking, someone somewhere will have cooked up a DIY trimmer. I just haven't (yet).

 

[Al B. Fuct]

Yea I am most definately using a carbon filter, so that scent issue could be taken care of. Just can't be lazy and wait around to replace the carbon regularly.

Yep, I'm running a carbon filter now. My main complaint about it is that I'm so accustomed to the smell of buds that I can't trust my own nose to tell when the filter has stopped working.

I probably should cook up a manometer out of some plastic tubing and water with some food dye which might tell me when the filter is blocked with dust, a pretty good indicator that it's time to replace it.

What kinds of rooms would make an ideal airspace that would be common in your house?

Garages are great. They have resilient floors in case of spills and often have easy access to power and also to dump waste air into the attic. Just make a grow tent out of pandafilm and hang it from a timber frame which is screwed to the ceiling joists.

Basements are a good second choice but it's usually harder to get your waste air into an intermediate airspace.

Spare bedrooms come in third; you can usually punch a duct hole in a closet ceiling to dump air into the attic, but they don't usually have resilient floors and any windows must be stealthily covered- black plastic over them, which is visible from outdoors, is bad rice. Read any 'how to spot a grow house' guide on cop websites- plastic over windows is usually high on their lists.

Most cop-type 'how to spot a grow' websites mainly concern themselves with identifying whole-house grows, where the house is not lived in at all, rather just visited periodically for op maintenance.

Neighbours see more than you'd like to think. Even if you have addressed all possible stealth issues, neighbours will notice how a house appears to be used. The stealthiest grows are relatively small ones in a house which is occupied in the usual way. If you grow small in spare space in the house you normally occupy, you're much more likely to grow for years without trouble.

The plan is to stealth the entrance to this grow room with a hidden door or something. I guess I could exhaust into the basement with a common vent and make it look like part of the HVAC...just the part where hot air unusually spills out.

You could just dump the waste air into the basement airspace, provided there's vents to allow pressure to escape to the atmosphere. Bear in mind that warm air rises and pushing it downward takes a muscular (e.g. centrifugal) blower which is rated for much more flow capacity than you would otherwise need. Keep in mind that you need an effective intake to avoid choking the throughflow.

 

[Al B. Fuct]

Damned if I can recall the value of the resistors without going out to the op and looking at the dryer, which I'll do later after a lot more coffee.

They're 680 ohms. Bear in mind that this value only suits a bud dryer built for 240V. For 120V dryers, it should be 340 ohms or the next lower standard resistor value. The dimmer will allow you to set the current if the std value resistors allow too much current, exceeding the 25W power rating.

 

[SOG]

I do think you're on the right track, SOGgy.

ty Al
the F.L.I.R is a non issue for me at this point
i thought since i got this far with my setup,
why not take the full advantage of my equipment,
i still have the option at this point, running with conventional setup
do you find any drawback with running a Sealed op vs. the conventional method of venting in and out?
(attached my original plan)

 

[iloveit]

There's a whole thread about my bud dryer(s) here. I'm on v2.0 now but the operating theory is the same as in this diagram describing v1.0:

Bear in mind that v2.0 uses six resistors, not just two. It also has a thermostat to control temp to 29C max.



As I think of it, I'm probably on v2.5 by now. The above schematic has been revised a bit. Instead of running two sets of three resistors in parallel, there's three sets of two resistors in series. Damned if I can recall the value of the resistors without going out to the op and looking at the dryer, which I'll do later after a lot more coffee.



'Dictation' is the term you're looking for.



Yes, it would sell- but in the modern world with P2P filesharing, I'd sell one copy and a squillion copies would be floating around the net.

Also, were I ever to write a book on the topic, I'd not write one about 'All things cannabis.' I would write a 'cookbook' on how to set up an effective grow op, but I would not explore ALL the different ways it can be done. I'd write only what one needs to do to run an efficient op with minimum set-up cost. I bet I could do it in 10 pages or less.



Keep looking, someone somewhere will have cooked up a DIY trimmer. I just haven't (yet).

Thanks for the pics Im already in the process of building a standard dryer but your diagram displays a better version so Ill use that as reference.
Your right about P2P file sharing, I download all my movies/tunes/audio books/ from "Torrent Leech" (another great torrent site but difficult to find invites) I recently d/loaded "See more bud" good watch.

So about that book what title would you give it? Im not going to drag the issue he he he.

If I find a DIY trimmer thread Ill post it here.

One last thing...for now: How do you quote multiple paragraphs & sentences from different members all in one reply post? That "multi" tab at the bottom of each members post doesnt seem to do anything for me, I know Im not using it right. How do you do it?

 

[WoldofWeedcraft]

Thanks for all the info Al. You truly are the man...er at least the guy that has mastered sticking it to him. You must have some kind of Ph.D. I will definately be keeping the op small, and I don't want to do too much obvious damage to the property in case I want to sell the place. So I figure whatever is the most non-invasive ventillation should suffice.

 

[Al B. Fuct]

do you find any drawback with running a Sealed op vs. the conventional method of venting in and out?

Yeah- the setup and op costs of a sealed system will be MUCH dearer than a conventionally ventilated op. There's a number of showstopper failure points in the sealed system, too. It's a lot less complex to shift heat by moving air than with refrigeration and a lot cheaper in operation, to boot. A big centrif exhaust blower might pull 200W, a 150mm cooltube blower will suck 30W or so- consider those against 1.4-1.8kW for a small aircon unit. Initial setup of a CO2 system can cost $thousands, with controller, regulator, tank rental, etc., then there's tank refills... which in a sealed system will be mandatory in a you-dang-well-better-not-forget sort of way. I don't use CO2 mainly due to cost and inconvenience. I've run CO2 ops before and the additional growth is nice but I can get by without just fine.

So about that book what title would you give it? Im not going to drag the issue he he he.

Probably 'Get A Harvest Every 2 Weeks.' Gets the point across in a nutshell.

How do you quote multiple paragraphs & sentences from different members all in one reply post? That "multi" tab at the bottom of each members post doesnt seem to do anything for me, I know Im not using it right. How do you do it?

I use the REPLY WITH QUOTE button to reply, which gives me the complete text of the msg I want to quote from in the editor. Then I highlight text I want to quote in my reply and hit the QUOTE button

in the post editor, which wraps the txt in QUOTE tags. I delete stuff that doesn't need to appear again to keep it all short & sweet. Then I poke in my commentary between the QUOTEd blocks.

Thanks for all the info Al. You truly are the man...er at least the guy that has mastered sticking it to him. You must have some kind of Ph.D. I will definately be keeping the op small, and I don't want to do too much obvious damage to the property in case I want to sell the place. So I figure whatever is the most non-invasive ventillation should suffice.

Well, thanks for the compliments and approval, but The Man probably doesn't notice me poking him too much... and that's a very good thing. Attracting no attention is very valuable.

Small ops are good ops. A single kW will keep you and a few mates well supplied with buds, unless you're really seriously incorrigible drugpigs. Since I personally am an a really seriously incorrigible drugpig, I use a pair of kWs in cooltubes. Have used that arrangement now for approaching 10 yrs with no grief.

 

[iloveit]

https://www.rollitup.org/images/editor/quote.gif[/IMG] in the post editor, which wraps the txt in QUOTE tags. I delete stuff that doesn't need to appear again to keep it all short & sweet. Then I poke in my commentary between the QUOTEd blocks.
.

That title sounds tempting to those who do judge books by their covers, perfect.

Nice of you to help out with all these questions minor & major issues, I like that your willing to pass on your knowledge to us. Thanks again uncle Al

 

[Al B. Fuct]

No problem, glad to be of help.

However, my RIU visitation time is just about up. I go back to the salt mines tomorrow morning and I likely won't be back for a spell.