Bubblelicious, New York Power Diesel, and Super Skunk in DWC

Firstly, decided to go with 4 600s vs. 3 1Ks - easier to cool, lower electrical cost, more efficient, and I wouldn't have to have an electrician come in and change a circuit over to 240V like I would with the 1Ks.

Assuming I can get dialed in with 4 600s vertically, that'll produce more than enough for my purposes - would love to get to a 1lb. a light, and anything more than that will be icing on my cake.

Secondly, decided to say fuck the chiller and ice box idea - just seems like too much of a hassle to do all that shit in the crawlspace with no guarantee that it'll work and the much larger startup costs vs. an AC ($2000 vs. $500), so I've decided to go with a 14K portable AC.

A lot of people say that portables suck (and they very well might, I've never used one), but I'm confident that in a well-insulated room and with drawing in air from the crawlspace that is AT MAX 70F (during the height of summer, and more like 55F for the other nine months), the 14K could cool down that room with little to no problem.

The benefit of it doubling as a 100 pint dehumidifier (doubt my 25 pint could hold up, so I was gonna have to buy a larger dehumidifier with the chiller setup) is an added bonus.

I'm definitely planning on utilizing that cool crawl space air, but I'm going to do it in a simpler fashion - just put as large a reservoir as I can fit down there (probably have to plumb some smaller ones together) and run a Hydrogen CO2 generator - I think exhausting the heat into a 150-200 gallon reservoir would do a lot to lower the AC needs in there.

So the plan for today is to finish with the intake and exhaust fans and then finish cleaning up - the next step is getting some wood in here and building the motherfucker.

Lol, so decided not to go with intake and exhaust fans - just too fucking loud, and stealthiness is kinda big to me.

Planning is still going, but without having even a lick of construction/planning experience, it's slow going and the plan is always changing.

Have now decided that I'm just gonna frame out the back portion of the garage and make that a sealed room, as opposed to building an entire room within a room - there's a beam in there and some garage door braces that made building an 8'+ tall room impossible.

Also would've been stupid cramped in there with everything I was gonna try to fit, so more room is clearly better - gonna be about 15'x10' now, roughly.

Don't do much during the weekends as that's the only time I see my girl (she works crazy hours during the week), but I'm heading to HD tomorrow and buying some wood to start framing.

FYI, also have 4 600 dimmable ballasts, 4 Super HPS bulbs, and 4 socket/mogul sets on the way that I ordered yesterday (my productivity for the weekend).

Question - ANYONE KNOW A GOOD METER TO BUY TO MEASURE LIGHT INTENSITY?

Was gonna go with the Hydrofarm, but that only goes up to 5000 foot candles - is that sufficient?

Gonna set up the lights roughly how they're gonna be and then take some readings to figure out exactly how large I can make my octagon - I think I can make it a lot larger than El Blastido's design - at least one more plant site (if not two more) per level, per "side".

If only one more (which I guarantee I can do), then it will be 126 sites; if two more, which I *think* I can do, then it'll be 168 sites - don't wanna "overlight" my octagon and kill a lot of the yield I could get with proper sizing and spacing.

Will take some pics of the start of contruction tomorrow - gonna need some input from some people who know what they're doing because I'm fucking clueless.

I use the hydrofarm light intensity meter... I had to do a little research to fully understand foot candles, but it certainly does the job.... and no batteries to replace ever! Fans are loud, I am having noise issues as well,

I started framing, barely - in my defense, pretty tough to do a lot of the things I do by myself, and when you throw in my total lack of knowledge about construction, I'm surprised I get anything done.

Real quick - since I ramble so much (for my benefit to review at a later date), I'm gonna start bolding and making the font larger of important things that someone skimming can pick out rather easily.

Now, here's some pics:

Mounted a 7' 2x4 about 9' off the ground on either side; gonna run a 10' 2x4 and connect them across the garage door; the total structure is gonna be 14x10 (will end about where that black mount on the wall is - that's my Sentinel mount); need to figure out how to best fill in the large gaps in the drywall (drywall mud, methinks) and under the garage door - Great Stuff?; and then there's a pic of some Super Skunk clones who will help to populate the octagon on its maiden voyage - thought you guys would get a chuckle that they're right in front off my closet, when we came to this site to get away from closet grows.

Truthfully, it's fucking hard to hold up a 2x4 with one arm, drill with the other, change the drill bit with one hand, and then screw it in, so mounting those two took me a while.

Ordering my AC tomorrow - can't really finish the ceiling framing without knowing what I'm doing with the AC (really how loud it is, because if it's not that loud I'll exhaust it where I had planned on putting my exhaust fan to keep temps down in the garage).

Also, after some reading last night from Ddoc (the inventor of the Coliseum and Cage, etc.), I had some doubts about the root space that 3" PVC would afford to the plants - looking around in Home Depot today (when I bought the wood), and have decided to go with 4" PVC wyes (but which have a 3" opening) - about $3 more expensive per wye and about double the cost for the other fitings (waste T, etc.), so that's gonna increase the octagon cost from about $700 to closer to $1500.

Oh well, would rather pay more up front and make sure the fucker works than try to save some money and end up with a $700 piece of shit.

Also, and don't ask me why I'm so stupid I didn't realize this before, but I just realized last night that I can run 5 (if not 6) 600s in there - gonna wait to see what temps get like when everything's set up, but certainly going to run 5 600s in the fall, winter, and spring when heat's not that big a deal.

And finally, since I realized that I can run many more than four lights (and also because I'm trying to stay away from inline fans and the noise they produce), I'm putting the cooltube idea on the back burner for now - for some reason I think a large axial fan blowing straight up would remove just about all the heat, but I'm gonna try it out and will go to a cooltube if I need it.

Im not sure what fans you are using, but with proper mounting and placement, they are almost silent. I use a 6" can fan on full speed, and you can only hear a slight hum if the house is completely silent, and thats only when you are literally standing on top of it. What do you guys use and how loud is it?

Integra21 said:

Im not sure what fans you are using, but with proper mounting and placement, they are almost silent. I use a 6" can fan on full speed, and you can only hear a slight hum if the house is completely silent, and thats only when you are literally standing on top of it. What do you guys use and how loud is it?

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I have all Valuelines - it's just where I was trying to exhaust (above my garage door) is directly on top of people who would be entering my kitchen.

Pretty much no fan that would be quiet enough for that application, unfortunately...........plus in my totally sealed room, I have no desire (and hopefully, need) for any inline fans.

Might have one steadily running through my 6" Phresh filter, but that'd be about it.

Integra, making a video now for you and will post the link to my other journal (or just find "sogbobsmith" on youtube) - wanna get on the same page with what I'm trying to do and how feasible it is.

Video will be online within a half hour.

OK. Ill try to check it out, Hoping of in a minute, ut if I dont get to it tonight, I will for sure tomorrow.

Hey Bob,

Where in the world are you?

I'm at home - where are you?

Great thread dude, I just finished watching your videos.
Just a word of advice for your signature so people can find where you started your new construction and build instead of wasting time to look for the post #. Copy this into your signature please

Hey Alex, thanks for stopping by - not gonna put that in my sig and am actually gonna leave my sig blank (as I had it for a while, then recently put it back).

Anyhow, have thought about it and am going to try to have the beams correctly (vertically) positioned across the ceiling for a little more sturdiness.

Still plugging along, progress is slow and steady.

Also, since my cloning skills seem to have taken a dive - they've been yellowing on me and shit, so rather than humiliate myself by reading up on cloning and figure out what I'm doing wrong, I just ordered an EZ-Clone 120, and depending on how many plant sites the octagon ends up holding and how I like the first one, I'll most likely get a second one within a month.

Gonna need ~240 clones to get this octagon filled to its potential (either 126 or 168 sites) with all superstar clones - I think October 1st is a reasonable date to shoot for (two week's veg, 10 week flower, harvest right around New Years).

Girl worked from home yesterday so I thought I'd actually have a helper in the garage, but she had conference calls and shit all day so that didn't pan out - however, I've told her that I own her this weekend, so I should make a lot of progress (hopefully).

Decided that having an exposed fluoro in front of my closet prolly wasn't the best move to get vigorous mothers, so bit the bullet and setup my little tent inside.

Was looking for my reflector hangars (can NEVER find them when I need them) when I thought "why not just take the bulb out and hang it vertically? Be a nice intro to vert lighting, if nothing else".

So I did (see pics below); the central AC had tripped its circuit and it was 83F in the house when I took the initial temp readings (96), but even with the house at 72 the thermometer in the tent is reading 82.

Still early, but I'm thinking that reflectors work WAY better in tents because they trap the heat from the bulb and make it mucho easier to vent out of the tent - bare bulb just lets that heat go wherever it wants, and keeping temps in check is much harder than I would've thunk.

Have a 4" (170CFM) for exhaust and passive intake, and temps are ~7 degrees warmer inside the tent than the room it's in.

This issue has also made me rethink whether the 14KBTU portable I ordered will be able to keep temps in check, and I'm fairly certain (during the height of summer, anyways) that the answer is going to be "no", but obviously time will tell - the cool intake air should help, as well as insulating the fuck outta everything, but we'll just have to run it and see.

As long as I'm thinking of it, anyone have any idea how many BTUs a 600 digi ballast puts out? Could put the ballasts in my crawlspace, but then I'd have to go down there when I wanted to dim them, etc........a MASSIVE pain in the ass, but if the BTUs removed are large enough, might just be worth it.

That being said, need to utilize the cool air in the crawlspace better if I wanna really get a handle on my temps, and I think I've come up with a solution - planning on plumbing ten of these together under the crawlspace, giving me 200-225 gallons (I'm assuming, not sure how much water I can fill in each) of cool water.

http://www.homedepot.com/Storage-Org...3#BVRRWidgetID

Not gonna run a cooler and am simply gonna let the cool air below the house cool it - that being said, here's my question - would it make more sense to utilize that cooling power on two 8" iceboxes or a Hydrogen CO2 generator?

I don't believe I could do both because I'd worry about the Hydrogen heating the water up to a point where the iceboxes would be blowing hot air, so I'm thinking they're mutually exclusive.

Before I forget, ordered my digital lux meter yesterday - goes up to 200K lux (brighter than the sun) and some equivalent number of footcandles, so it's a pretty badass model.

I know some people are thinking "Bob, you just like spending money", but I'm thinking you only really get one chance to setup a room right, and I wanna really have my ducks in a row on this one, so the original $4K budget is out the window (octagon alone will prolly run $4K) - trying to keep it under $10K, but whatever needs doing is what needs doing, costs be damned.

Oh, also found some spider mites on the bitches, so sprayed them down with that organic green shit.

And the clones hated the bare bulbed 400; gonna have to put them back under fluoros until they pop some roots - they were not happy this morning after being in there all night.

Oh, also have read a couple of places that you can "double up" on your EZ Cloner, so my 120 can really be a 240, which would be nice (both for space savings and money savings).

As long as this is the longest post of all time, lemme continue - here's my reservoir/system idea:

Okay, so ten MPB totes plumbed together - thinking 1" tubing should be enough to keep their water levels equal, although 2" would work much better, in all likelihood.

From there, run 1/2" tubing (via a 800-1000GPH pump) up to an insulated marine cooler located inside the grow room.

Run 1" (if not 2") tubing back to the reservoir at the other end of the bucket system, making the water constantly fllow through the totes when the system is on - the 1" fitting will be located higher on the cooler than the 1/2" to keep water in there when the pump is not on - also gonna have a backflow preventer (a check valve?) so water will stay in the cooler.

And that's about it; either run a Hydrogen or two iceboxes from that cooler and call it a day - I like being able to access the reservoir if I want to "ghetto cool" it (throw some frozen water bottles in the cooler) on really hot days or something like that.

Sorry for the rambling.

So anyways - framing the roof tomorrow, but I have a couple of questions:

1) Would you go with 16" or 24" spacing? I'm definitely leaning towards 24" because this shit doesn't need to be "up to code", but if someone has a good reason 16" would be better, I'm all ears.

2) What would you use for the actual ceiling? I'm thinking thin-ish plywood, but that's gonna be pretty expensive for as much as I need - is there something else (not drywall) that you guys would use instead?

3) What insulation would you guys use for the ceiling? Since I'm laying my beams across the "proper" way, I'll have a 4" gap between the top and bottom of the ceiling (if that makes any sense) - thoughts?

Thanks guys.

Still gonna give it a couple of hours before I put the stove back to make sure, but it works and I don't smell anything so far

Ahhhh, what a nice feeling

Took me a few hours from start to finish (4 trips to HD, thank God it's only five minutes away) and used ungodly amounts of that Pro Dope shit (but not so much that it'd clog the pipes).

Pictures are pretty self-expanatory, but lemme know if anyone's got any questions - pretty cool that I just did that, feeling damn handy right now

Website is not letting me upload pics, Jesus.

Cool thread Bob O. Learning alot.

Nice nice..... Interested to see how things take shape Bob, Having a hard time visualizing what you got going here, I do love construction at any point though....

wonderblunder said:

Nice nice..... Interested to see how things take shape Bob, Having a hard time visualizing what you got going here, I do love construction at any point though....

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Gonna try to post pics again......seems like it worked.

Gonna do some overhauls on the veg tent because I can't seem to keep temps up top down...........reworking some things and getting ready for the EZ Clone 120 to go in there today.

Gonna try to start the ceiling framing, but I've got a lot on my plate today so no promises.

Subn

don't stop the music.

Knickers said:

Subn

don't stop the music.

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Good to have you along, should be fun - building shit sucks because I'm so bad at it, but once the room is finished I get to play with all my new toys

About to order my Marey Tankless Water Heater (basically a Hydrogen Water-Cooled CO2 generator) - would've gone with the Hydrogen (price isn't much more, and I'd rather support a good cause) but they stopped making a natural gas unit (which I didn't realize until this morning).

Also, I can claim a 30% tax credit on it (and installation costs) because it's an energy efficient device - you gotta love that

Hi Bob, I run digital 600's. They put out virtually no heat at all. Especially compared to a magnetic ballast. They shouldn't heat your crawlspace up at all.

Roofing material; sheets of masonite are much cheaper than plywood and should work for your application.

HTH.