Growroom design sanity check:

Hey all, wanted to get a sanity check on my current design plan (posted this on another forum, but no responses, so let's see if rolling is more useful ):

My current thought for building my veg/flower boxes is to size both at 3.5' x 3.5' x 7' and run a 1kw cooltube in each (MH and HPS respectively). space them about 18" from one another and connecting the two boxes in the middle via a T connector with a 450cuft vortex fan sucking air out of the rooms and blowing it out of the house 24/7 (it would be mounted on the | part of the T, on the far side of each box the cool tubes would be open and routed to gather cooler air from the room the boxes sit in while hopefully minimizing light pollution traveling up the ducting for the flower box..

For air filtering I was hoping to route the active exhaust from the top of the boxes down another T into a carbon filter at ground level fed via a ~50 (or 100+ on a speed controller) cuft 4" vortex style fan sitting on top of the CF. Dual passive 4": intakes would be on the base (floor) of each box, also designed to minimize light pollution...

By utilizing two T's I could quasi seal the area between the boxes to allow me to muffle the sound the fans would create (I'll also use insulated ducting to minimize heat escaping from the cool tubes, and because it somewhat cuts down on air noise).

My concern with T-ing the cool tubes is that when one light is lower than the other there will be more airflow on one side than the other (though perhaps not a lot more, and that could be somewhat corrected by adding a second cool tube fan on the lowered side...)


Any thoughts on any part of this? In the past my veg and flower boxes have always resided in different parts of a house, or if they were connected it was an ikea cupboard size grow. This is my first true joint idea, but since I have a bit of extra room in the man cave I'm thinking about locating them there together (hence part of the desire to minimize fan noise). Oh, and fwiw, the rooms are 3.5' x 3.5' to get close to the sun's rating, and because I'm limited to 6 plants in my part of the world..

Thanks for any suggestions or thoughts that I might have missed!

IMO you shouldn't need a 1kw veg area.

For 6 plants you could veg quite well with a 400-600w light.

Thus cutting down the fan issue significantly.

You may have some radiant heat issues with a 3.5x3.5 and a 1kw.

With any luck though the fact you plan to run a sealed lighting rig with cool air intake seperate from the grow area will really help.

In order to get a better idea a picture design layout would help to see any actual flaws that may occur.

J

The down (?) side, is if I do dim the light to 400 or 600W (opted for a dimmable ballast and was thinking 400 since I need the plants to take a full 8 week veg) there will still be the same amount of airflow over the 1kw flowering bulb (~225 cfm pretty much unrestrained through the 6" ducting/outside hole). Here is a bastardized picture I've taken from the net of my planned design (note the boxes are 3'6" square and the exhaust is actually blowing out away from our perspective not up through the roof.)

Some radiant heat would actually be beneficial as during the fall/winter/early spring the room the boxes sit in will usually be ~64F, (during the summer it (should) max at 74F, we'll see how that goes this summer) a lot of radiant heat would be less of a good thing

dimming the bulbs alters the light waves that it makes and harms the bulbs ...............basically u are cutting the life of the bulb in half and getting less then what u paided for in lumens

dimmable ballast are bad i made the mistake of buying 2 of them ..............u should invest in a select/dail a watt and the bulbs u want

Erm sorry, let me rephrase what I mean by dim, I'll turn the ballast down to X (400 or 600) and then use the corresponding wattage bulb. Not turn the ballast down to 400 or 600 while feeding a 1kw bulb. I meant dim the light as in reduce the light, because as you said it changes the behavior of the light and bulbs are cheap plants are not . My ballasts are the galaxy grow amp units so they can do dimming (or I suppose amping to 1100) as well as just run MH/HPS at 400,600, or 1kw. Basically, I went with the swiss army knives of digital ballasts as I'm sick of buying grow equipment and these should run whatever I need them to in the future

And wow, your tom baker icon made me use the english spelling of behaviour originally, I'm suggestible it seems.

points for knowning his name ............and naw u just respect tom baker be cuase he was the great doctor who to ever live the only one in the whole show to use a hooka to excape from the gaurds in ep 191 about 5:31 into the frist part of the who .......called assasins