Hello Everyone!! My 1st grow: 150W HPS semi-stealth micro cabinet

Hello everyone. I've been lurking for months just reading up and decided to build a cabinet and start some bagseed under a few CFLs about a month ago. Things got a little out of hand and here my setup...

Cabinet dimensions: 24"lx24"wx30"h
Lighting: 150w htgsupply HPS/ballast relocated to outside box
Ventilation: 90mm 80CFM computer case fan at light level, 3 3" passive intake holes
Temp: usually 5-8 degrees F warmer with cab closed
Humidity: CO is so f-ing dry...can't get it above 50% even with humidifier blowing right in
Odor Control: DIY 4" cone carbon filter
Soil: FFOF straight out of the bag
Nutes: Fox Farm lineup

And here's what I'm growing....
6x unknown bagseed from alright headies
1x Afghan Kush Ryder
1x AK47 x Lowryder
1x G13 White Widow
1x DNA sour cream in shot glass for shits and giggles (it was free from attitude)

Obviously, I don't really much room to work with vertically, so I have already started LSTing the bigger bagseed plants. I might try experimenting with FIM'ing on some of the plants as well. I see the bagseed as a learning experience, so I'll fuck around in order to get it right when I'm actually paying for the seeds.

The bigger bagseed plants are 26 days old in the pictures and the smaller ones are 20 days old. The autoflowers, ww, and shot glass are all sprouting from soil right now.

Please offer any feedback, criticism, or hate. I'll keep this thread updated as my ladies get bigger.

Here's the pictures:

first off, i love the incubus sn!
but really, very cool design for the box, looking great. definetly subscribed.

phreakygoat said:

first off, i love the incubus sn!
but really, very cool design for the box, looking great. definetly subscribed.

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Thanks!!

Incubus is one of my favorite bands. Glad you like my setup. Beautiful plants you've got yourself.

and that is also my favorite song of theirs... anyways...
i use foxfarm, i would cut back on the feeding a bit. feed, water, water schedule has worked well for me with it. how often do you water, how often do you feed?
btw, the light setup is great, hows the heat at canopy?

Lol, nice. Great song for sure! They have too many great songs for me to pick a favorite.

Yeah, I scorched the bottom leaves when I first started using the nutes because my noob mistake was to use it every watering. I'm watering every other to every two days since it is so dry here and the pots are so small. I always check the soil a few inches down with my finger to make sure they need water. Now, I'm using 1/4 strength grow big every other watering and the nute burn has stopped advancing, so I'll go with that for now. If it comes back, I'll use your suggestion and back off even further.

I also forgot to mention that a few days ago, I accidentally unplugged the fan and the lights heated the cab up to 108 degrees. Luckily, I caught the problem two hours after the lights went on when I woke up. Everything recovered within 24 hours but it did stunt the growth a little and burn some of the leaves.

The canopy temperature is in the low to mid-80's at the current height and high 80's/low 90's at 4-6" from the light where they were burned. I moved them down for a little more of a margin for error against heat damage. It is funny that this HPS is cooler in the cab than the 4 42 w CFL's I was previously running. Yeah, CFL's may run cool to the touch but the built-in ballast gets hot as shit. I don't regret switching over to HPS at all and I think it is a perfect fit for the size of the cabinet. A 250 watter may have worked too but I would have had to move to a cooltube setup.

Thanks for your feedback so far.

glad to hear you know what you are doing! and learning by doing, I did the same thing exactly. cool tube is a definate plus
maybe give em a flush at the 1 month mark, should relieve any nute stress... and hey a little early stress just makes her crazier when she grows up... like a weed stripper!

Yeah, I was looking into a DIY cooltube but since winter is coming up and this light isn't that hot, I don't need it. They do look like a great idea and the cab is almost a perfect size for it using almost no ducting.

I'll take your advice with flushing. Good to get a clean slate to know where you stand with nutes in the soil. I haven't read much on the procedure. Do you just pour water through the soil until...? Just a shitload? Does it have to be distilled or will tap work?

tap water is fine, it doesn't necessarily need to be ph'd either, and distilled is also fine. just gently water the soil in your tub(!!!) until the runoff stops being yellow. it usually take about twice the volume of water as the container is, sometimes less or more.
just water gently in general, i've had issues with overly compacted soil.
you'v got those nice big containers, you are so set!

come on by my journal, check out my scene...

phreakygoat said:

tap water is fine, it doesn't necessarily need to be ph'd either, and distilled is also fine. just gently water the soil in your tub(!!!) until the runoff stops being yellow. it usually take about twice the volume of water as the container is, sometimes less or more.
just water gently in general, i've had issues with overly compacted soil.
you'v got those nice big containers, you are so set!

come on by my journal, check out my scene...

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Thanks for your advice. Sounds easy enough. I've been watering very lightly since I have to do it so often and they are responding well. There is no drooping and the soil is still aerated while wet. The containers may look big but the bagseed is in 6" diameter pots and the autoflower seeds are sprouting in 8" diameter pots.

Yes, I will check out your grow. Looks like you have some tasty stuff growing. And you can't deny the awesomeness of Purple Kush.

**UPDATE 10-10-09**

Since I last updated this thread, I finished my carbon scrubber exhaust system and added another identical 80 CFM PC fan for my main cabinet (this cabinet will become my flowering cabinet very soon). I also built a small veg cabinet for small plants and clones that uses all the CFL's I bought before I purchased the HPS. I currently have 8 26w bulbs in there (208 watts total) with 6 being 6500k and 2 being 2700k. Both cabs are currently on 20/4 light cycle until I get ready for flowering the bagseed.

Anyways, 3 of the 6 bagseed have already sprouted preflowers at 33 days old and are confirmed female. One plant I am pretty sure is a male and the other two are very close to showing. I am pretty sure that the other two are female but I am going to wait another day just to make sure. I hope I didn't jinx anything. I am going to keep a mother plant LST'ed in my veg cabinet along with clones for the first two weeks. The grow should be perpetual at that point.

I also have some autoflowers thrown into the mix. My Afghan Kush Ryder is growing like crazy. The sprout is 7 days old in the pic. Another week and I expect it to reveal sex (should be female since seeds are feminized). My other sprout is an AK47 x Lowryder that has been pretty sickly since it first sprouted from the soil but it has slowly started to thrive. Ironically, the AK47 sprouted before the Afghan Kush but you wouldn't know by looking at the two plants right now. I also germinated another AK47 Lowryder seed just in case the other one doesn't take but this seed was slow to germinate and is three days in soil with no sign of cotyledons reaching for sunlight.

The last update is that the sour cream and white widow seeds both didn't germinate, so I am growing the free LA confidential seed I got from attitude in the shotglass.

And now for the pictures...

Flowering cab completed with door closed


Inside flowering cabinet

Exhaust system (2 fans, DIY carbon scrubber)


Veg cabinet door closed


Veg cabinet door open


The plants...

Bagseeds (3 are LSTed, 1 FIM'ed, 2 natural)










Shot Glass Sprout (2 days old)


Afghan Kush Ryder sprout

Very nice, love the DIY exhaust setup you've got there. I'm a FF OF/Nutes person myself but I'm able to use a 270w in a bigger cab. I don't have much height either and use a mix of finning, topping, supercropping and LST to keep them short. The good thing is that weed is pretty resilient and can survive even if you mess up.

cool setup it looks good for veg i guess but seems kinda small.. i would worry about heat. are you gonna run full cycles in there?. im not doubting you i just know none of mine would have made it in a box that small good luck keep posting

Looks great! I'll be watching.

TechnoMage said:

Very nice, love the DIY exhaust setup you've got there. I'm a FF OF/Nutes person myself but I'm able to use a 270w in a bigger cab. I don't have much height either and use a mix of finning, topping, supercropping and LST to keep them short. The good thing is that weed is pretty resilient and can survive even if you mess up.

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Thanks. I have yet to test the effectiveness of the carbon filter but it pushes a lot of air so regulating the temperature isn't going to be hard. What are the dimensions of your cab? I was debating between a 150 and 250 watter but since I was concerned with heat, I opted for the 150. I could have run a 250 with a cooltube but I really need more vertical space to make better use of it.

Since I'm growing a bunch of bag seed plants I am experimenting with topping, LST, and FIMing to see what yields the best results.

noilivap1 said:

cool setup it looks good for veg i guess but seems kinda small.. i would worry about heat. are you gonna run full cycles in there?. im not doubting you i just know none of mine would have made it in a box that small good luck keep posting

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Thanks. Yeah, it is pretty small. I've got 22" from the bottom to the bulb. Since they are in smallish pots, they aren't going to get huge and I plan on LST'ing them once they start stretching during the first week of flowering. I am learning as I go, so I'll deal with the height issue when it becomes a problem.

I'm not worried about heat at all. The HPS cabinet stays cooler than the CFL cabinet. With the fans on and door closed, it gets maybe 2-5 degrees warmer than ambient room temperature.

maxwelljr said:

Looks great! I'll be watching.

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Thanks. I'll keep this updated as much as possible with pictures weekly.

everything you are doing with this grow looks well thought out. you already have inspired the engineer part of me with the exhaust and the cab in general. you are doing great

in such a small space, you might benefit from bushmasters, it prevents vertical growth and promotes side-branching. link

phreakygoat said:

everything you are doing with this grow looks well thought out. you already have inspired the engineer part of me with the exhaust and the cab in general. you are doing great

in such a small space, you might benefit from bushmasters, it prevents vertical growth and promotes side-branching. link

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Thanks a lot PG. I must admit that I did have a lot of fun designing and building the cabinets. We'll have to see how well everything works once the plants get further along. I am going to keep my healthiest female as a mother plant in my veg box and switch the other bagseed to 12/12 since they have shown preflowers. I'm still waiting for one of the plants to show sex but so far I've confirmed 4 females and one male so far. Pretty good ratio if you ask me.

Thanks for the link to that interesting product. I didn't know such a thing existed. Pretty crazy that is completely halts vertical growth if dosed high enough. Unfortunately, $100 a bottle is pretty steep for my budget.

Hey dude, you can buy an 8oz bottle of bushmaster for like 30 bucks shipped.. it is EXTREMELY potent, you only need a very very little bit.. especially for such small plants.

Awesome grow, amazed your able to keep temps low enough. I'm a little bigger than yours with a 150w and i had to run an ac line to it heh ;p

Kushalicious said:

Hey dude, you can buy an 8oz bottle of bushmaster for like 30 bucks shipped.. it is EXTREMELY potent, you only need a very very little bit.. especially for such small plants.

Awesome grow, amazed your able to keep temps low enough. I'm a little bigger than yours with a 150w and i had to run an ac line to it heh ;p

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Oh, I didn't really check the price out. The original post on the link mentioned the bottle cost him $100 and my jaw just dropped right there. I'll look into it if the LST and FIM is effective. I appreciate the advice +rep.

Thanks for checking out my grow and I'm glad you like it. I think the major reason my cab stays cool is the fan being right next to the bulb drawing all the hot air directly out.

Very nice. Love the stealth.

keep posting cant wait to see what happens ! good luck