Filing Cabinet Micro Grow

I think making the inside surface reflective should prevent the box itself from heat soaking. Just as long as you have good fans it shouldn't be any kind of a problem. As far as lighting goes I started with a homemade fixture that I didn't like very much, then I switched to the setup you have now with power strips and socket adapters. That setup was less bulky and is much safer than a homemade fixture if you don't know wiring. Now I am experimenting with a nice 3 armed lamp that I found that seems to work great. The biggest difference is easy of positioning your lights. You will have to move your plants up toward your light as distance definitely makes a huge difference with the cfl's.
Yeah, I'm hoping the paint acts as a small barrier but we'll see how it goes. I'm going to look locally for fans sometime this weekend and if I can't find anything I'm going to try and order the one you showed me. I think that fan would be enough for my box and if not I can always order another. I thought about trying to put together my own light fixture but this was the easier option. I already have a ton of lamps. I saw that 3 armed lamp you're working with and it looks stellar. I'm gunna have to look for one of those. Distance from plant will start at 2 inches from the bulb and I'll work from there.
 

Canocrpse86

Well-Known Member
Definitely. I got lucky finding that lamp as it was broke and on clearance at the hardware store. I think I paid 5 bucks for it. Keeping your bulbs close to the plants is important. I had a seed I sprouted that I thought was close enough to my bulbi left it overnight the first day and in the morning it had grown about 4 inches straight up and fallen over...
 
Not yet. I'm going to paint it tonight and get the fans installed then I'll start germinating. Sometime next week I should have a plant going. I picked up my soil a few days ago. Going to be using FFOF and I might pick up some happy frog if my local store has some, other wise just the FFOF. I have Age Old Organics for bloom nutes and some Neptunes Harvest fish fert so we'll see what I can do with that. I was going to go with all organic soil and no nutes but I have the nutes already and couldn't afford the amendments at the moment. Here's a picture of my journal though just to show something off.
 

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I got paint this weekend but I can't find fans ANYWHERE around here. Gotta order one offline so I don't know when I'll be able to start seeds but it will happen eventually.
 
Got everything sanded down and started painting then I realized I forgot painters tape. I was pretty stoned when I went to get the paint. I got the back of the box done and the bottom of the top drawer. I'll have to get some tape before I can finish but here's what it looks like today.
 

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chibzilla: Yeah, the other pictures give a weird perspective. It does get much smaller though once the drawers and lights go in. I'm thinking I may do away with the top drawer too. Even though it's nice to have to tuck my wires into I could get 3" of space from it. I may actually do away with all the drawers and put a bottom on it but I'd have to figure out how to attach the doors.

The BLaKsmith: Scrog is the plan but I've never done it so we'll see how that goes. Seems simple enough from what I've been reading.
 

The BLaKsmith

Active Member
I was gonna go with scrog as well but I found that just tying down a few plants is good practice and it's easier to take it step by step, I may well go for scrog next run
 
Sadly, not yet. I hit a snag with the location so I need to get that sorted before I proceed. Hopefully in the next few weeks I'll get it worked out but it's entirely possible that it may take until 2014 for this grow to really take off. I want to save up to make super soil anyway so that will give me some time. I'm really liking the idea of scrapping the stealth look also and just putting a door on the front so I need to sort that as well. It'll give me loads more room but there's the obvious draw back of it no longer being stealth. Keep an eye out though, as soon as things change I'll update! Thanks for your patronage!
 
UPDATE!!

2/3 Bubba Kush bag seeds have germinated and are in FFOF soil. They're roughly an inch tall. The other did nothing so it was discarded (it was a pretty lightly colored seed so may have been immature anyway). I don't have any fans inside yet but there is one blowing into the holes on the back. Light sealing will just be done with thick black duct tape each time I enter and exit the box. I plan on getting two 80mm fans for exhaust and just a passive intake. I have 8x23w cfl's in there currently (12,800 lumens) and the high is only reaching 80* so I think with those two 80mm fans I'll be golden.

Enough with the babble, onto the pictures!
 

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I put a small drop of Superthrive into the water and bubbled it for about 6 hours (7am-1pm) then I put them in paper towels and left them alone. By 7am the next morning they had 1-1.5cm taproots. So 24 hours and 2/3 success ratio for bagseed, I don't know if the aeration helped but it damn sure didn't hurt, I would certainly recommend it.
 
Tonight marks one week of 24/0 light. Starting tomorrow they will be getting 18/6 for one more week then I'll be switching to 12/12. I'm on a bit of a time schedule and space is limited.
 
Not really. I don't really plan on doing much else to it except putting the exhaust fan in, and I may build a SCRog screen soon. The area it's in stays 100% dark during the dark period and the ambient temp in the room stays around 55-60 so inside the box stays really cool as it is with the fan blowing from the outside. For a cheap ghetto box I think it will be fine. After this run maybe I'll button things up a bit more.
 
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