Putting the flower room into overdrive. 1110 Watts quantum boards + 2000 Watts HPS

Looks good. That cloning light may be to intense, That would be to much light for my aero cloner. But we all have different environments.
Flower looks awesome. I have a combination of quantum boards and double ended 1000 watters too. Youll be happy.
Goodluck!

Coal Train said:

Looks good. That cloning light may be to intense, That would be to much light for my aero cloner. But we all have different environments.
Flower looks awesome. I have a combination of quantum boards and double ended 1000 watters too. Youll be happy.
Goodluck!

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Good looking out. I have a 2' 8 lamp high output hydrofarm T5 in the clone tent with half the lights switched off. It probably looks much brighter in the photo than it actually is. Since we're on the subject of clones I want to discuss an interesting observation with my most recent batch of clones in the new clone tote. This is the first time I have ever had air stones inside the cloner oxygenating the water in addition to the misters. The difference I'm seeing is that not a single one of my clones is yellowing. Not even the leaves at the very bottom. I didn't trim any leaves like some do. I barely even cleaned up the lower growth on the branches before I put them into the clone tote. Nothing is wilted or necrotic. I want to say they've been in there for 6 or 7 days now. I have never had this happen before. In my last cloner, which was a terrible unit mind you, the leaves would always yellow and the clones would look kind of unhealthy by the time they were rooted and ready for transplant. They always bounced right back once transplanted, but it happened every single time. Now with the air stones providing oxygen the foliage is just as green as the day they were cut. Good action.

I decided today was the day to reorganize my nursery tents in a more appropriate setup to maximize space in my basement in preparation for a 20 amp dedicated circuit I will be wiring tomorrow just for the 2 nursery tents. I now have them on the same wall facing the same way which is much easier to service the tents. I also revamped the HVAC setup to a more appropriate design that is more efficient. This is the result:


Both tent's ventilation is connected to each other. The inline fan you can see in the photo in between the 2 tents pulls air through tent A and pushes it into tend B. I have another inline fan at the end of the HVAC that you can't see in the photo that pushes the hot air outside through a 6" louver. When winter hits I will disconnect the exhaust and recycle the warm air into the basement for heat. I will suspend the inline fan between the 2 tents with ratchet straps. I know it's quite ghetto fabulous having it propped up on a plastic container. I'm on it I just ran out of time and patience today. Had to remove a fucking work table and peg board from the corner that tent B now sits in. When I removed the peg board mount at the top of the foundation I discovered an old now vacant mouse nest from the previous disgusting fucking home owners. I then spent nearly an hour and a half scrubbing the walls, header, and joists near the area 4-5 times at least. I'm a clean freak. The former owners of my home had mice in the drop ceiling I tore out 2 years ago shortly after moving in. It was endless mouse shit and even a couple dead mice. Nasty people they were. After I ripped out the drop ceiling I scrubbed the joists with hot soapy water twice. It took me 3 days to do all of the joists in 1 room. Probably went through 30 buckets of water and god knows how many rags. I thought I had gotten all of their filth out of my home, and today I was graced with one last surprise. Absolutely fucking horrible. And it's done. I'd rather do electric for 2 days in 100 degree heat before spending an hour and a half cleaning mouse shit ever again. Just wow man. There are some seriously nasty people in this world who choose to live that way. I ain't fucking one of them.

I'll post pictures of the HVAC tomorrow. I don't have the strength to walk down my stairs and back up again today. Jonny is officially beat down today.

Nice looking grow and room. I hope to do the same to 1/2 my basement one day when my state catches up with the times.

Interested to see how the high power hps/led combo works out together. I'd be around that wattage if I added led into my setup one day.
Thanks for dropping the cash and doing the testing.

Don't see many journals here running that many watts.

Following along.

.Smoke said:

Nice looking grow and room. I hope to do the same to 1/2 my basement one day when my state catches up with the times.

Interested to see how the high power hps/led combo works out together. I'd be around that wattage if I added led into my setup one day.
Thanks for dropping the cash and doing the testing.

Don't see many journals here running that many watts.

Following along.

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Thanks for the kind words .Smoke. So far so good. I was hitting 3# each cycle with gorilla glue and then I dropped down to 2.25-2.5 with hash plant. Genetics are far more important than I thought. I assumed that with proper training any strain could achieve the same yield. It's just not true. It's quite the opposite actually. Some strains in spite of everything you do right will still fuck you on the scale when it's all said and done. I'm being much more selective with my strains moving forward.

This is what I'm rocking right now:
Girl scout cookies
Critical mass
Blue dream (just planted the germinated seeds today)
Jager (don't know much about this one. traded seeds with a friend)
Maui waui
Moonshine Haze #1 x Ghost train Haze #1 (this is my most prized strain and I only have 1 survivor)

I don't really have intentions of keeping all of these strains. It just turns into a harvest logistics nightmare. Some will be done while others are not, and you can't flip the room until the stragglers finish. It's not the end of the world or anything, but it's a big fucking inconvenience let me tell ya. Also, the wife is not a fan of my drying nets hanging out in her laundry room If I had to bet the keepers will be blue dream, critical mass, GSC, and moonshine. Moonshine I don't think is going to be a heavy producer, but that strain will not be for patients. That's my personal special stash. I'm told it's the strongest strain on earth. We shall see.

Lots of work done today. Wife bitching at me half the day. What else is the wife for eh?
New 6" ducting arrived from amazon today. 1 day shipping. Love me some amazon. Installed and removed the busted former ducting.



I decided to trash the crappy LED lights I got from a friend as a trade for clones. They produce as much heat as they do light. They look like blurlples. Total junk. Instead I installed a 600W metal halide lamp on my phantom II ballast dialed down to 60% to 360 watts. The 8 lamp 4' hydrofarm T5 in my other nursery runs at 320 watts if I remember correctly, so they're pretty darn close in energy consumption. The light output looks almost identical. Never used an HID for veg. Can't really remember why I bought the MH lamps. I'm glad I did though.



600W metal halide burning at 60% power. Air cooled and vented to the outside louver. I topped the girls and tied them all down to form a bush. GSC, critical mass, moonshine, and 1 jager.



And the 2nd nursery with the 8 lamp 4' hydrofarm high output T5. You see that leggy fucking Jager? Not a fan of how much space it's taking up. I fear I may have gotten regular seeds from my friend and there may be a couple males in the mix. 1 Jager has very tight nodes and appears to be growing in a structure that looks female. The 3 others are very leggy with incredibly long branching. It's quite annoying, but as long as they're female I'm happy to have them.



Up close shots:
Critical mass:


Girl scout cookies



Moonshine haze #1 x Ghost train haze #1



I'll snap pics of Jager tomorrow. I forgot.

Almost all 24 maui clones have beautiful white roots. 5 or so clones were taken 4 days after the initial batch. Some that I had taken were very small and poorly chosen. I got tired of looking at the sad little cuttings, so I clipped nicer clones and replaced the small scraggly ones. The stragglers should be rooted in a day or so. I changed the water today and rinsed the res with soap and water. Filled with 950PPM fertilizer and a dose of southern AG biological friendly fungicide. PH to 5.8 as usual. So far BFF is working great as a replacement for 35% H202. I probably apply a bit more than I need to, but still well under the recommended rate of application. 5ML/30 Gallon res does the job just fine. It'll take me nearly a year to burn down a $26 bottle of BFF. Far cheaper than hydro guard or 35% H202. I believe the bottle recommends 1tsp/gallon which is far more than necessary to replicate the concentration of hydro guard. 2 res fills at that rate would kill the whole bottle and be a waste of product. By the way, that empty tote they are sitting in is just a holding container while I change the water in the actual res.

And the revamped HVAC. 1 inline fan pushes air into tent A with the T5. This soler and palau unit is over 13 years old still running like a champ from when I first started growing. I actually disassembled and cleaned all of the blades recently. I have been so impressed with the performance that I bought another fan from them that pulls air from tent A into tent B.



Inside of tent A showing the ducting



6" metal mesh vent screen prevents anything from being sucked into the fan causing a fire, equipment failure, or both. Got them from ventmyhouse.com for $12 for a 2 pack if I remember right. Great product to protect your equipment on the cheap without reducing air flow.



This is the soler and palau TD-150 inline fan that pulls air into tent B from tent A.



Ducting coming out of the top of the tent supported via screw in hooks and zip ties all the way to the 6" inline fan and louver going to the outside.



The inline fan going outside at the end of the HVAC run for tent A and B. It was a bitch, but it's done. As a note to others that may have to drill a 6" hole through aluminum siding - wear fucking pants when you're sawing the hole. My dumbass wore basketball shorts and got to know the pleasure of having shards of metal shrapnel flying at and embedding into my legs. Sometimes I think I'm just a few sandwiches short of a picnic. It was all good by the next day, but I poorly planned. I did wear eye protection. Safety first

And an update on the flower room beginning week #2. The 2 1000W HPS hortilux lamps have been increased from 75% to full power. Both LED units are at full power. The AC is keeping up without issue. The plants show no signs of heat or light stress. Temps stable at a daily max of 82. I feel like I need to run more plants in the room. I have a lot of plants in veg presently. I think I'll run 24 each cycle moving forward. 19 in there now, but several are very small plants that weren't intended to be flowered. I decided I was done with hash plant and flowered 4 clones that were supposed to enter their veg cycle. If I get a couple ounces off each one I'll be more than satisfied. I also flowered the hash plant mother. Done and done.

It all looks great. Great advice about the pants.

I know it takes a lot of time and mistakes to get a high power hid grow running. Especially with multiple tents.
It's taken me over a year's worth of work to, just recently, feel like I finally have things setup correctly. I also changed to a 10wk veg/flower cycle with just 2 plants in a 4'x8' flower tent.
The plan is to see if I can pull 1000 grams a plant every 5ish week offset harvest cycle, running white widow, granddaddy purple, blue dream and gorilla glue.
I'll also have a couple random autos I'll be running along side my 2 vegging photos in my other 4'x8' .
Currently have a white widow around week 3 in flower right now that's the "start" of this new setup.
She only had a 5 week veg, but she's taking up some decent space so I have high hopes of packing the tent when they're all 10 week vegged. Link in my signature if you're interested.

I'm excited to see how your strains grow out. I've never run any of them. I will definitely be keeping an eye on the progress.

Oh yeah, get a drying room setup asap and quit pissing off the Ms. too!

Looks great . I've found and I'm by no means the king of aero cloning that bunched together the clones will create moisture and fungus . Add a small breeze no more fungus but now you have humidity problems and may need a dome . To little heat and they don't want to root to much stem rot. To much light and they eat them selfs quick and die . To much water stem rot under the neoprene / root riot to little stem closes above .
If you found a way to keep them healthy while making them thrive for food and water slightly keep at it. A few ML of bleach / pool shock has really helped me out.
Liking that phantom hid you have , I have a solistek my self. I grabbed a few cool tube and am able to drop them 12 inches above the canooy . It really increased my growth. Beautiful setup though.

It's been 2 or 3 days since I added the 600W MH lamp to tent B of my nursery at 60% reduced power. I feel like the plants are not having an overall positive response to the MH lamp. I'm not sure if it's too intense or just a poor light spectrum. I may also be overly critical of what I'm seeing and perhaps I'm making a mountain of a molehill. I tend to do that. I have a very special batch of plants in that tent and I'm being extra cautious with lighting changes. I'll take pictures and see if anybody can offer insight. What I'm considering doing is installing the 600w at full power with a hortilux HPS lamp in my flower room and placing the 450W spider farmer unit in the nursery.






After looking at the pictures I guess I don't see any major issues. It may just be too soon to make a judgment call on the effectiveness of the MH lamp. I'll wait another couple days to see how things shape up before I move any lighting around. I think my biggest concern is that I saw some mangled new growth in a couple of locations on critical mass that I recently topped and fimmed heavily. The other new growth appears to be okay on all plants. Maybe just a bad pinch off causing the new growth to be deformed? I went ahead and just topped those locations again to eliminate the ugly growth and get a couple more flower sites out of them. If I get anymore mangled new growth after cleanly topping these locations I will definitely swap the light. Wait and see until then.

Update today. Found nuts growing on one of my 5 jager plants that I already suspected was male. I have never seen a plant sex this quickly. They were planted maybe 3 or 4 weeks ago. I think the stress of all the topping and training pushed the bananas out a little sooner than would occur normally. 4 more look to be male as well. 1 of my girl scout cookies has been growing horribly slow since germination. I almost pulled it a couple weeks back but I thought I'd see if it would pop out of the funk it was in. It didn't. Today I removed the jager with bananas and the under performing GSC. I replaced those 2 with 5 maui waui's from my cloner. I will wait to sex the remaining jager plants. If they start spitting out bananas they're gone baby gone. I have 20 remaining cuts of black widow and maui waui in my cloner growing a swath of roots awaiting transplant. I will transplant them in another 7-10 days. I'm in no hurry. I want thick luscious roots before they take their next step. There's simply no benefit in rushing the process. Roots will grow faster in the cloner than they will in a dutch bucket.

Here's the flower room filling out. I think I'm just rounding week 2 of flower. My calendar is down stairs. I'll update later with the correct number of days into flower. All plants are doing fantastic. No burn or weird issues of any kind anywhere. The humidity is hitting 70-80% during lights off. To address this I moved in a dehumidifier that runs on a timer. 30 minutes after lights off it kicks on and runs at full blast until the timer shuts it off 30 minutes before lights on. Back to good. I've never had this many plants in the flower room before and the humidity gets high very fast.








And the 600w MH nursery



T5 nursery with all the fresh maui waui clones keeping the jager's and girl scout cookies company. Oh and one pineapple express in the middle.



Baby flowers forming everywhere. It's a beautiful site to see my friends.

Not what you want to see in your nursery. Gone baby gone. Replaced with maui waui.




What a shame. It was a pretty plant...



Beautiful roots gone to waste...



Maui waui to save the day!



Great looking roots on the maui waui courtesy of my clone tote 2.0



Maui waui in her new home



Clone tote 2.0 chilling doing it's thing with the remaining black widow's and maui waui's.



All 3 blue dreams popped and are looking good. I will be growing one in dirt using the GH flora trio as I did years ago with great success.



I walked into my flower room tonight at lights on to discover my HVAC flexible tubing disconnected from my vortex power fan. There is no substitution for worm clamps. I used gorilla tape only and I still have no idea why I did that. If that had occurred in the middle of the night while I was sleeping I would have had some serious issues. This is a perfect example as to why you should always have a redundant backup fan to cool your HID's / grow room. If one fails you're not facing a total loss. Perhaps some heat stressed plants due to higher than usual temps, but you won't be facing a catastrophe. Worm clamped. Gorilla taped over the worm clamp. Done.

Damn thats a nice grow..

Gorillabilly said:

Damn thats a nice grow..

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Thank you for the compliment. It's an immense amount of work. I spent 9 hours straight working today watering, transplanting, cleanup, staking in the flower room, and relocating the dehumidifier. Drank 4 of those little starbucks doubleshot expressos to get through it all. Watering every other day is a 2 hour process alone. The larger my garden gets the more I'm thinking out a long term game plan on a method of automating my watering process. I don't want to move away from dutch / hempie buckets, because they rock and they're simple. What I'm thinking will work is getting some cinder blocks and elevating the plants maybe 12" off of the ground on boards in 4 rows with 5 plants in each row with grommets at the run off hole feeding to maybe 2 separate drain totes. That would be much easier to then pump out the water from those 2 totes to my sewer drain via an electric pump rather than suctioning out each drip tray individually. It's no fun. When I had 12 plants it wasn't such a big deal. Now it's getting hard to walk around the perimeter of the room and logistics is getting much more complicated to just get from point A to point B in the room. It's a work in progress

Gotta love MNS black widow, I have some going too. Looks good!

As a side note I attempted to save, clean, and store my hydroton from the culled plants. There isn't a snowball's chance in fiery hell I will ever do that to my entire flower room, and I give kudos to the individuals that have the willpower and determination to do so. I did two dollar store trash cans worth of hydroton and it was a messy time consuming total bitch of a process. I'll go back to #4 chunky perlite after this run. Cheap enough to throw away and very easy to work with.

Coal Train said:

Gotta love MNS black widow, I have some going too. Looks good!

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It's been awhile since I've had a new strain in the grow room and I'm really excited to see how this turns out. I think I've got 3 of them in there. They all smell old school funky and the flower structure is looking very promising. I thought so highly of them I took 4 or 5 clones to keep for the next cycle. I grew hash plant the last 2 runs and I have nothing good to say about the strain. I am flowering out the mother this cycle and I'm done with that one. Not a great producer and nothing special about the smoke. I was running gg4 for about a year before that with outstanding results. I made a huge error in judgment getting rid of that. Strain selection is very important

jonnynobody said:

Thank you for the compliment. It's an immense amount of work. I spent 9 hours straight working today watering, transplanting, cleanup, staking in the flower room, and relocating the dehumidifier. Drank 4 of those little starbucks doubleshot expressos to get through it all. Watering every other day is a 2 hour process alone. The larger my garden gets the more I'm thinking out a long term game plan on a method of automating my watering process. I don't want to move away from dutch / hempie buckets, because they rock and they're simple. What I'm thinking will work is getting some cinder blocks and elevating the plants maybe 12" off of the ground on boards in 4 rows with 5 plants in each row with grommets at the run off hole feeding to maybe 2 separate drain totes. That would be much easier to then pump out the water from those 2 totes to my sewer drain via an electric pump rather than suctioning out each drip tray individually. It's no fun. When I had 12 plants it wasn't such a big deal. Now it's getting hard to walk around the perimeter of the room and logistics is getting much more complicated to just get from point A to point B in the room. It's a work in progress

Click to expand...

Lol, I use fabric pots and dont sweat the drip pans.

Day 17 from the 12/12 flip. Flower sites are developing everywhere nicely. 950PPM with RO water PH adjusted to 5.8. All foliage is lush looking good. I think I'm going to run a 1-2 gallons of RO water through each bucket at the next water cycle to keep residual salt buildup in check. I'll water the usual feed after the rinse. It will be a lot of work dealing with all of the waste water, especially after the regular watering withe fertilizer. I'm running a garden hose into a holder on the wall in the flower room that will wrap the wall on it's way to dumping into the sewer drain. I've got a spare mighty pump I'm going to attach to the other end inside the flower room that I will operate on a remote key chain on / off switch to move the large volume of waste water from the flower room into the sewer drain without disrupting the plants. It's getting harder and harder to water, but it's manageable. The plants are just getting large everywhere. Some of the perimeter walk way are very tight. Growing pains. What can you do? Grow on brother!

and the rest. this one is directly under one of the LED boards. you can see how bright it is in the center foliage.

jonnynobody said:

My new nozzles arrived for my clone tote 2.0 redesign. I can't recommend Drip Depot more highly. Look at the threads on the nozzles. There are a lot of threads to ensure the nozzles secure to the PVC manifold nicely. Almost every option I could find on Amazon or Ebay were those garbage nozzles that have 2 or 3 threads on them that are total junk. I got 50 high quality nozzles from DD for under $20 delivered. I ordered a mix of 180 degree spray nozzles and 360 degree spray nozzles for the manifold redesign. I'll post pics of the clone tote 2.0 when it's complete in a day or two.

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@jonnynobody Do you have a link to those nozzles? I've been looking for some with good threads like that! Clone king has the 360 but they are on back order and I would like to try some of the 180's as well. Did the 180 work out for you? Are they 3/32 like others? Did you need to tap the pvc?
I looked and looked on Drip depot but didn't see them... So a link or tip on where to look would be greatly appreciated!! Your setup and plants look fantastic btw!

Oxyrhina said:

@jonnynobody Do you have a link to those nozzles? I've been looking for some with good threads like that! Clone king has the 360 but they are on back order and I would like to try some of the 180's as well. Did the 180 work out for you? Are they 3/32 like others? Did you need to tap the pvc?
I looked and looked on Drip depot but didn't see them... So a link or tip on where to look would be greatly appreciated!! Your setup and plants look fantastic btw!

Click to expand...

Thanks for the kind words. They both worked well.
https://www.dripdepot.com/product/global-unibody-spray-jet-on-threads
10-32 Threads