Low $ Stealth Grow

Hi Everyone!

This is a thread for my throw-together low budget bagseed cabinet grow.

Late summer/early fall I had some real nice bagseed and threw a few of them into some large planters in my landscape just for fun. Out of 7-8 sprouts, I ended up with 3 females. As the weather started changing, I transplanted them into pots of their own, then decided to see them through.

It's been 6-7yrs since my last grow.

Simple Facts:
Seeds started outdoors during 'flowering season'.
Moved to cabinet one week ago.
Bagseed.
CFL lighting.


I'll start by saying that I had about 7 26w CFL's, an old dresser/chest-of-drawers, some plywood scraps, some unused house lamps and a few rolls of tape in the garage. (Garage needed cleaned out bad).

Lacking photo's of my initial construction, I will explain briefly. I 'hollowed' the dresser out, set 3 baby girls in there in pots of compost/soil. Spent about $10 at the hardware store on socket-splitters and hung 6 26w cfl's over them. One died from being too close to the bulbs and no air movement.

Made a few adjustments and have 2 fairly healthy plants cooking. I'll start here with photo's and document the cost, progress and whatever else comes about.

Ok. This is the dresser in use. A couple partial roles of foil and some tape made a temporart reflector. As I mentioned earlier. This is a real rickety set-up, but I thought it would be nice to document a true scavanger grow. I'll be spending as little cash as possible and I'm very interested to see what will happen after these girls having just spent the flowering season sprouting outdoors.



I have 8 total 26w cfl's in there now. This is a cluster of 6. there are 2 more to the right of this cluster.

Total watts = 208
Lumens = 13600



This is one of two flowering right now. Looking healthy but very small. Only been indoors for about a week.


Found some old aluminum angle metal from an old concrete project, I am going to use it to make a frame for my lights. I've decided to go with 18 26w cfl's because the wattage, lumens etc seem sufficient and the stuff is cheap. Three of my bulbs are odd sized as well as two sockets so I'll spend a few dollars on some uniform sockets and bulbs after I see what bulbs are in the house.


That's all for now. Sorry about the bad pics, some send well, some don't.

Just a few changes...

This is a 99cent socket.



I plan to 'daisy chain' 9-10 of them on two standard plugs. 4-5 per wire. Then clamp them inline with tension screws.



I will use these 'Y' socket adapters in each socket.



Here's what we have for now. 4 sockets, 2 cords going into one multi-plug. A 12V PC fan is also plugged into the power splitter.



And here we have the cause of all this! Doing OK considering...

Looking good dude. I like the frame you made for the lights! I thought about doing something similar but went with the chains instead. Looks like we have about the same growing space in our cabinets.

Yeah, it's a small space. I think it's 15" x 26" I replaced two of the 26w cfl's with two 40w cfl's and it made a huge defference. I was surprised how much brighter they are. I'd like to buy all 40w bulbs and I might eventually but I'm going to stick with the 'scrap' build just to see what comes of it.