Hi all, I would appreciate any feedback on this stealth cab design.

This has been rolling around in my head for a few years now, and I finally decided to get it out on paper and start building. In fact, back when I started thinking about this there were no commercially available turn-key grow boxes!

The idea for this cabinet was to have a perpetual harvest, and as efficient a use of space as possible. It is designed around a clone-fed SWC SoG, basically a main cola grow, using a strain that is main-cola dominant, with a short finishing height (i.e. around 20 inches), for a crop of 2-liter bottle sized nugs, one per plant.

The cabinet itself has six chambers. First, in the bottom left, we have little momma's house. 24"w x 24"d x 30"h, this chamber would have a 150w MH in base up configuration installed on the ceiling of the chamber, with the mom trained around the outside of the chamber using a wire cage, the kind they use for training tomatoes etc. This would give the mom tons of light exposure, while keeping her a safe distance from the bulb. This chamber has an intake vent in the upper left corner (the square with the criss-cross marks), and an exhaust vent in the lower right corner (the rectangle with the same criss-cross marks).

Second is the flowering chamber, in the lower right. The idea here is two different sets of clones of the same strain, overlapping by 1/2 a flowering cycle. So for a strain with a 10 week flowering cycle, one set is always 10/2 = 5 weeks ahead of the other. The bubbler tubs are propped up by wooden blocks or something to keep the plants as close to the lights above as possible, and as the plants grow the blocks are removed as needed. One of the reasons to have two separate tubs is you can slide a divider between then, and use a flip-flop to alternate your flowering across the two chambers, defeating any ability for the power company to detect the 12-12 cycle. With the small 250w HPS that's not really a concern, but this is just a demo box I would like to work out the kinks before doing it on a bigger scale. The air intake for this chamber is the exhaust of the previous chamber, the mom chamber. The exhaust for this chamber is the cut-outs that let the light in from the lighting chamber which is detailed below.

Thirdly directly above the flowering chamber comes the lighting chamber. Two all-in-one style 250w HPS fixtures (ballast, bulb, reflector) sit on top of cut-outs that are the exact size of the opening in the bottoms of the fixtures. This needs to be an air-tight fit because these openings are not only serving as the intake to cool the lights, they are serving to refresh the air in the flowering chamber(s). So attached to the vents on the lights are computer slot-fan squirrel-cage type fans. The reason for these is a) to conserve height; b) my understanding is that sq fans are better for higher static pressure applications, and these would be pulling air all the way in from the mom chamber, through the flowering chamber, through the fixture, and out into the lighting cabinet.

Fourthly above the lighting chamber is a dual-purpose cloning/drying chamber. Intake is the criss-crossed square in the upper left corner. Exhaust into the lighting chamber via a hole in the floor, in the lower right.

The fifth chamber is directly above the mom chamber and to the left of the lighting chamber, it is the air scrubber and exhaust. There are two sets of air flows in this box, mom -> flower -> lights -> air cleaner, and cloning/drying -> lighting -> air cleaner. There will be fans drawing air from the lighting chamber into the air scrubber box. These fans will be installed on the partition between these two chambers, as illustrated. They will be installed towards the back 2/3 of the box. The front 1/3 of the box will be packed with a carbon-impregnated poly material, this stuff comes in 5/8" thick rolls that you can cut to size. I would need to cut a few 24" x 8" pads, stack 'em, and stuff 'em in there.

The final chamber is the water reservoir. The idea is to use the "simple, cheap way to maintain water levels" (if you haven't already seen it, google it) to keep the flowering boxes topped up, thus requiring minimal maintenance, maybe a spot-check every day, and then flushing and refilling once a week with fresh water and nutes.

The process would be: 10-14 days before the completion of one flowering cycle, you take as many cuttings as you will need for one flowering tub, around 20. You clone them in the cloning chamber (which at that time is not being used for drying, since it has been at least three weeks since the last harvest) and veg them under fluorescent tubes for a week or so, enough to pick 12 or so solid plants of the same size for flowering. By then it's harvest time, so you cut down the pop bottles, and they hang upside-down in the drying chamber, while the clones go in the flowering chamber and it gets propped up by blocks all the way up to the top. Every day you spot-check, and make sure the reservoir is full, every week you refresh the water in the tubs, and every few weeks you cut, clone, veg, harvest.

Thoughts?

Attached Images

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It can work - I have a sort of a similar setup though with organic soil.

The trouble is getting all the timings right - time to clone, time to veg, time to flower. plants don't always behave.

I seem to get my grow all tweeked up and running smooth. Then I get lazy for a week or so and the whole thing de-rails. It really takes work to keep a perpetual harvest going - even a small one.

__________________
Even monkeys fall from trees -- Japanese proverb
Check out my Super Steath Perpetual Harvest

Thats a tight system i'm sure it would work good

I agree, that's one of the things i'm pretty nervous about. The timing of each thing depends on the timing of the one right before and right after lol! So you gave it up because it was too high maintenance? I was actually hoping this would be somewhat low maintenance, with the reservoir and stuff you could possibly go for a few days up to a week without checking in on things, assuming you're not in the middle of a cloning cycle or a drying cycle.

Any suggestions on a good logging format that would help keep track of the timings to make this easier?

Thanks

What are everyone's thoughts on the whole two SWC tubs in the flowering chamber, and two 250w HPS thing? There are a couple of reasons I went this route:

1. As I mentioned in the original post, I wanted to see how it would work to alternate flowering chambers so that the power draw is consistent over a 24 hour period, hoping defeating the power company's ability to detect the large surge of a 12/12 cycle. Obviously for this small a grow it doesn't matter, I just wanted to prove it out in case I go bigger in the future, let's say a bigger version of the same cabinet.

2. With the smaller lights, you need to get the plants as close as possible to the lights to maximize penetration (hehe) but due to the rectangular nature of the chamber (3'w x 2'd) if you went with one big light then you couldn't get too close because the plants in the middle would get way more light and the plants on the sides would get way less. So if you're going two lights, might as well go two tubs and go perpetual, no?

3. The size of the mom chamber might not support a mom big enough to donate the 35 or so cuttings I would need to fill the entire 2'x3' space. I am assuming 6"x6" for each plant, for a total of 24 plants in the flowering chamber. If I stagger them by 1/2 cycle, the mom will only need to donate 15-20 cutting in order to end up with 12 similar sized rooted clones.

4. The design calls for propping up the tub(s) and lowering them as the plants grow, in order to keep them as close to the lights as possible, as opposed to raising the lights. A single tub would be pretty big, and hard to manage.

I can already spot one of the hiccups in splitting the chamber. How does the sub-chamber on the right get air intake?

No - I haven't given up! I've been puling out over an oz every 2 weeks. Not gonna give up on that LOL!

I'm just saying that if you want the best yield, you need to stay on top of things all the time. Still works it you don't, just won't get the best yield...
On a small grow like this, your margin for error is very small.

Best thing I've found to keep track - write the date on the pot itself. I write the date the plant went into flower on a piece of tape on each one. No mixups then.

__________________
Even monkeys fall from trees -- Japanese proverb
Check out my Super Steath Perpetual Harvest

Right, I was basically thinking that I would log the dates that I take the cuttings, how long they take to root, how long they take to veg, what the starting and finishing heights are in flowering, so that I can optimize over time. Same thing with nutes, start out conservative, log the yield, then make adjustments and compare the results. It's a long term process though!

Can anyone advise of good nutes and a good schedule in SWC to end up with nice fat main colas on this? I have about 6"x6" per plant, so I would love to finish off with colas that have a 5" diameter... or would that be extremely difficult?

Pullin' - do have a chamber that you alternate between cloning/veg and drying? Is your set up also a mom-fed clone main cola SoG?

Two things. Am I reading the drawing right? The water is over the MH light? Having water over electricity would make me very nervous.

Secondly, The more experienced growers here seems to agree that to do anything else in a box with flowering going on is a difficult thing to pull off for a first timer. Keeping the dark dark during the 12/12 is tough to do all in one box.