How much effort should I put into this, really? First ever grow

Just a thought from a fellow newb...rather than squeezing in 19 plants, how about doing a smaller number and letting them get bigger? Beyond space concerns and growing strategies, IF you get busted, 19 plants sounds like a grow operation and will bring heavier charges than say 4 bigger plants, which can be pleaded out as a personal grow. The cops will hype the fact that they busted 19 plants and put it in the news, but if they find only 4, they will get laughed at and criticized for wasting taxpayer money going after little guys. Is there any validity to that logic?

You're right, and unfortunately even being legal isn't always good enough. I think I'm gonna have 10 plants in 5 gallon smartpots.

What are the thoughts on a 4 foot plant rotator? Like a giant motorized lazy susan. Too much? Unnecessary? Awesome?

sweetarded said:

Hoss, you seem to know a shitload of LED lights. Like a metric shit ton. I was really hoping those LED panels would be useful. Idk, do you think I could use them for clones? Are they worth keeping at all? Or should I definitely try to flip them

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If they were mine I would lose them. You'd be better off with CFLS for clones. Sorry man, but the wattage per diode on those pannel does not deliver the output you need to be effective. Don't get me wrong you can grow kick ass buds with leds but you'll need to go with a reputable company that offers a warranty and uses at least 3w chipsets from bridgelux, epistar, or cree. Those are the 3 main high end providers. I've heard good things about Xen-Lux too but don't own any so can't speak from personal experience.

Good led grow lights are hyper expensive but they do work. When making the investment look for a company offering at least a 3 year usa based warranty, this is of paramount importance. LED grow lights are supposed to last for at least 50,000 hours. Any company that doesn't stand behind their product for at least the first three years sounds extra shady to me.

kindnugz said:

Just a thought from a fellow newb...rather than squeezing in 19 plants, how about doing a smaller number and letting them get bigger? Beyond space concerns and growing strategies, IF you get busted, 19 plants sounds like a grow operation and will bring heavier charges than say 4 bigger plants, which can be pleaded out as a personal grow. The cops will hype the fact that they busted 19 plants and put it in the news, but if they find only 4, they will get laughed at and criticized for wasting taxpayer money going after little guys. Is there any validity to that logic?

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www.norml.org - check your states laws man.

sweetarded - saw you mentioned Smart Pots earlier. Switched to those a couple months back. IMO they are the tits! Best of luck on your grow bro. To they guy who shat on low-ryders earlier there are other auto strains out there that rock pretty f-n hard. My personal favs are MI-5, Auto-Assasin, and Onyx from Short Stuff Seeds and Speed Devil and Sweet Carmel Cream from Sweet Seeds. Haven't grown low-ryder but have heard dissapointing things too. Auto strains keep getting better and have made enormous leaps and bounds since the first gen low-ryders. I would put MI-5 on par with most (not all but most) of the photo period strains I've seen grown around my neck of the woods. I like autos cause I'm an impatient SOB who only grows for personal use

I hella like maui wowie, any experience?

I'm thinking of doing a scrog arena with a vertical 400w CMH. Some questions now about vertical grows.. do vertical bulbs shine any usable light directly downwards or only to the sides?

sweetarded said:

I've found out a lot of information, but I don't have the experience to know how much of it is applicable or which is the best for what situation.
I started this thread to find out if I was overthinking it, but "Grow some dope." is a little bit vaguer than I was hoping for.
It would be cool if I had the means to just do test runs, but before I actually having living things in my room I want to make sure I'm not wasting my money or time, or even not just getting the most out of it. I know it's my first grow, but I'd love for it to be as good as I can possibly make it without prior experience.

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Ok, I'll be more specific. Yes, you are way overthinking this. You are a clever guy with all sorts of ideas and your design is cool. I also think it's practical except for the number of plants in 3 ga pots.

[QUOTETHERE ARE SO MANY OPTIONS! I love doing this kind of shit and could spend literally forever perfecting a theoretical system, but.. on the other hand, I could just toss 36 clones and a 1000w light in there and let it go.][/QUOTE]

And details:

This is very familiar to me. I get excited about a project and overplan it. The planning part is fun but I've learned not to take it too seriously. Too often after actualy starting I find that there were things I didn't understand and my plans were not the best or even irrelevant. I also tend to turn simple projects into masterpieces and then find myself overwhelmed by the amount of work I have set myself.

It just struck me that you were doing the same thing. But if this is off the mark ignore it.

IMO the best designs are developed cyclicaly. Get going with something very simple. The minimum necessary. With that experience under your belt review your plan and advance it in this way your design keeps improving and if you have a bad idea, you have only lost one step not the whole development. This is not my idea. This is the modern method for developing software. Originaly a lot of time was spent up front for deep planning. Inevitable when it came time to write the code, details and factors that had been overlooked would surface and break the plan.

So I am saying, get pots, soil, nutes, a light , a timer and some seeds and grow some dope. Grow 4 plants. Don't scrog or sog. Do some simple pruning and LST. Watch the plants grow.

I don't want to start any wars but if you have the cash, get a 400W HID light. MH or HPS are both good. HID lamps just work. They produce very good yields with much fussing. To get good yields out of CFLs as the primary light source takes more work and skill. LEDs are a very novel technology. They are expensive and not simple either. HID lamps grow lots of dope even if you dont get the distance or the canopy just right. Whatever you end up with in the future a 400W HID lamp will always be useful. 400W is a good size because it will produce a nice sized harvest ( Skillful growers can get about 1lb!) and the heat is manageable.


Post pix on rollitup for feedback or just to brag. You will learn a lot about the plants and the whole cycle and will have much better judgement in applying your "book larnin'".

Best of all you will get a lot of nice dope. Even from a simple grow. You are obviously very interested in this project and will pay close attention which gives you a good chance at a nice yield - it wont set any records and it will only keep getting better as you develop more skill.

I hope this was enough detail

PS Check out this grow. I am planning do set up something similar

Awesome! much more helpful.
3 things I'm certain of at this point: soil medium, fabric pots and a 400w HID.
Something I'm almost certain of is going from 19 plants in 3 gallons each to 10 plants in 5 gallons each.

I'm deciding now on vertical or horizontal. Do vertical bulbs shine any light directly underneath?

sweetarded said:

3 things I'm certain of at this point: soil medium, fabric pots and a 400w HID.

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Great, that's enough to get started.

Something I'm almost certain of is going from 19 plants in 3 gallons each to 10 plants in 5 gallons each.

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It's your choice of course but I say that's way too many. A 400W lamp gives you about 9sq ft of canopy illumination. Six plants in 3ga pots can easily soak that up and you will find yourself with your hands full staying on top of them. Remember you will be learning as you go. Everything takes more time and effort the first go around.

I'm deciding now on vertical or horizontal. Do vertical bulbs shine any light directly underneath?

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If you go with a cool tube and a universal position bulb you can set it up either way and then switch to the other if you change your mind.

If the bulb is hanging nekkid without a cooling enclosure like a cool tube then yes. The fixtures at the ends of the cool tube will obscure the light. But its not much and shouldnt be a factor in your design choice.

My first grow was 6 5ga pots under a 600W hps. It went great and I got a lot of dope but it was pretty intense staying on top of everything. Three or four would have been smarter.

You really should check out that link I gave in a post above. It's very relevant to your plans.

Oh snap I didn't notice that link before, it's fucking AWESOME!

My closet has 19 square feet inside. Would two 400 watts and two 150 watts (all horizontal) be overkill? again, the electricity bill is not really a problem. That would make it 58 wpsf.

Or.. if I set up a vertical scrog like that guy, do you think I should go for a higher wattage?

Another thing, are bigger reflectors inherently better? Is there some kind of wattage to reflector size ratio thing?

sweetarded said:

Oh snap I didn't notice that link before, it's fucking AWESOME!

My closet has 19 square feet inside. Would two 400 watts and two 150 watts (all horizontal) be overkill? again, the electricity bill is not really a problem. That would make it 58 wpsf.

Or.. if I set up a vertical scrog like that guy, do you think I should go for a higher wattage?

Another thing, are bigger reflectors inherently better? Is there some kind of wattage to reflector size ratio thing?

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if you go with 2x400 and 2x150 thats 1100w , you'd be better doing 2x600w



J

Lose all 5-6 Lights and throw a 1k watter.

correction.. good post.

jondamon said:

if you go with 2x400 and 2x150 thats 1100w , you'd be better doing 2x600w



J

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RawBudzski said:

Lose all 5-6 Lights and throw a 1k watter.

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overall 1k's are ok but there are more lumens per watt with 600's, but greater penetration from 1000's, however most indoor grows dont go beyond 3ft tall.




J

400W 600W 1000W are all good. Each has its own advantages and drawbacks. IMO 400W is a good starting size. It's big enough to do a serious job but the heat is not overwhelming. Its a size that will always be useful as an auxilary or veg light if you buy more lights and it's not that expensive. IMO, if you have the room, multiple lamps give you a lot of flexibility in your setups. Try to make choices that dont lock you into a specific plan. You are still feeling your way.

There is only so much canopy a lamp can illuminate. At roughly 50W/sq yard a 400W gives you a 3' sq area. You could probably go 3.5' sq but that's not the point. Once your plants fill that canopy with bud sites you are maxed out and improvements can only come from cultivation techniques and genetics. You can fill this space with 40 small plants or 4 big ones. The yield will be about the same.

HID bulbs are not point sources. They are a strip or bar of light. Such sources are brightest in the middle of the strip and faintest at the ends. If you were to draw the light intensity contours of a horizontaly mounted HID on a table beneath it, they would form ovals or lemon shapes with the bulge at the center of the bar.

For a verticaly mounted HID, immediately above and below the lamp are dim spots. The intensity at these locations is only a fraction of the full intensity available when facing the strip. As you move outwards and further away from the center of the bulb one is exposed t o more of the bar which gives more intensity but at the same time the distance from the lamp increases which diminishes the intensity. How these two factors balance I dont exactly know. I havent done the math and I havent found the calculation on the net. It depends on the length of the bar. I suspect there is a peak, an optimal distance from the center where the light under the lamp is highest.

What all this shit means is that there is not that much light being lost in the vertical directions. When you take into account the fact that most lamp reflectors have about 50% - 70%efficiencey, the reflector is capturing about 2/3rds of a small fraction of the total light emitted by the lamp. I think it's worth putting in a reflector it but it's not worth going overboard trying to stop every last photon from hitting the cieling. The number 90% is often touted as the efficiency for aluminum reflectors. I don't believe it. My own professional experience is that such efficiencies are only possible with special coatings and if you are buying that kind of device, you will know it from the hole in your wallet! This is one of the reasons horizontal lamps are much less effective than vertical ones, half your light goes the wrong way and the reflector only captures part of that. If light hoods were kicking back 90% of the light impinging on them, no one would be much excited about vertical.

On a completely different subject. Think twice before you stuff your cab full of plants. You will need to work on your plants quite often. As the grow they get awkward to handle. It's easy bump or snag fragile stems and snap them. You also want to be able to examine all of the plant close up to catch any problems early. Give some thought to access and manouverability.

In an efficient production system, there is an overhead for organization and maintenance that you cant avoid. You don't make an efficient factory by stuffing it to the gills with machinery and raw material. If you do this, you will produce less than the guy who gave up space for walk ways and access points etc. This is not trivial. Think about the parking lot at your local supermarket. It's many times the size of the store. Inside the store, about half the floor space is devoted to walkways. IN the back there are offices and storage areas. As a business they would love not to have to 'waste' all that space but they cant sell without it.

Cultivation counts for a great deal. Perhaps as much as the basic resources. If your cab is too crowded, it will be hard to do much cultivation

you are a wellspring of good advice.

where i am now:
i want to do horizontal just because it seems easier
i want to go with the following bulbs:
for veg, a 250w and a 400w CMH. I researched CMH an assload, and it seems like they're better for veg than a regular metal halide or a hotrilux blue. another of the commonly mentioned selling points is that they're full spectrum, so you can use them for flower also. from a bunch of forums and some friends' experiences i've gathered that they produce better tasting and stronger buds, but they have a lower yield than the equivalent HPS.
i think maybe that's because CMH is full spectrum and has more UV, like the sun, but it doesn't shift to red like the sun does in autumn. plants have evolved to flower under a high percentage of red light. So CMH produces higher quality but HPS produce higher yield. Also, they dont make CMH over 400w.
SO, i found a site that sells CMH bulbs and has a deal where they'll toss in a free HPS of equivalent wattage. I already have a 150 HPS that a friend isn't using (only has two months of use in it so far). My plan- which has gotten much concrete since i started this thread (thanks zvuv)- is two use the two CMH bulbs for veg, positioned like a T so the 250 covers the 400's dark spot, then for flower i'll position the 400 CMH in the center, switch the 250 to an HPS, and put it and the 150 HPS around the 400w in an I shape. That way all my dark spots are always covered and i have an equal dosage of the quality and quantity lights.
The goal with indoor lighting is always to imitate the sun, and i think this setup does a very good job of that. Oh, and i'll put my little 28w LED panels in there if im not using them for sprouts.. why not.

I've also settled (probably) on 8 plants in 5 gallon soil smartpots, arranged in a ring. I think the best way for me to get access to all my plants is to put them on a rotating table, which shouldn't be hard to make. What will be hard is to make it spin at 15 RPH with an electric motor. I started learning a bunch of physics and then thought eff that, what if i just turn it once a day by hand? Rotating 54 degrees a day will give me a full rotation every week.
blueprints:

In general I like this plan. It seems a sensible approach. If implemented intelligently, it's flexible and can be modified or extended later. The number of plants is sane (well almost ).

I like the lazy susan idea. I think it would be simple to make and very useful. I might steal it for myself when I redo my cab. My cab is always evolving as I learn more about growing and about how I like to grow. Lol. Motorized. This is exactly what I would have thought of and you are quite right its a completely unecessary complication. Rotating the table once a day or every two days should be fine. Bear in mind that on your first grow you will be in the cab ever half hour You wont be able to stop yourself.

This idea needs solid construction. 8x5ga pots means 40 ga of soil + the weight of the plants and when they are in full flower you will be adding about 40ga of water! Heavy! It may be enough to put the table itself on castors.

I know nothing about LEDs. Nor have I ever looked at CMH bulbs. From your description they sound good. Take into consideration that HPS & MH are well understood by people on this forum. If you ask for advice about a somewhat exotic technology, there will be less help available.

I highly recommend a cool tube. I have a sheet metal vented hood and I am switching to cooltube. If you buy a long cool tube, you can mount two bulbs facing each other, one at either end. You might combine your 400W & your 250W this way.

I have concerns about your lighting pattern.

With about 700W total, you ought to be able to cover a 4'x4' area. Yet your blueprint shows a circle that is 2' in dia. Did I count right?

I think your idea is that the plants should be arranged in a ring and sweep under a succession of lights. The rotation will even out the differences in intensity from the various bulbs.

Think about your 400W sitting above one plant in the ring. This bulb is casting a circle of light about 3' in diameter all of which is prime growing strength. Yet a big chunk of this falls in the center and another outside of the ring where there are no plants. For the 250W bulb this problem is less severe since the useful area is much tighter.

Hole in the middle designs are best suited to vertical bulbs.

When I first started thinking about cab setups, I got confused between pots and canopy. You need to think primarily about the canopy. The goal is to match the canopy to the area covered by the light. In my current setup, a 600W horizontal HPS I train my plants so the canopy is a flat surface under the light about 3'x3' sq. (I could do more with that light but my closet is too narrow in one dimension and anyway that's plenty for me.)


Using 3ga pots, my plants each need between 1 - 2 sq ft of canopy space. The pots themselves are only 9" wide and I could stuff a lot more of them in under the light but I doubt I will get more dope.

For vertical grows the canopy is made to form a cylindrical surface facing the light.


This depends a lot on what cultivation style you go for and how much work you put into it. Some people just stick the plant under the light and let them grow as tall as they like. Plants grow taller and take up less floor space but the lower regions are not well lit. Others LST the plants to a wider flatter canopy, this requires more real estate but all the colas get evenly lit. The extreme end of this technique is scrog or sog.

You haven't mentioned what your goals are? Personal use? Selling? Obsessive hobby?

If you are selling then yield is a prime concern. However with those lights, even indifferent cultivation should produce 6-8 oz. With effort and attention I would expect at least 10oz , possibly 1lb of manicured harvest. Your next harvest will come 2-3 months after that. How much dope do you need every 10 weeks? So for personal use with a setup like yours, yield is not a prime concern. Sure it's important but things like quality of the high, ease of management and cultivation and the freedom to grow any strain you damn please whether it's a big yielder or not are just as important. If it's an obsessive hobby then practical considerations are irrelevant. If you decide you want to break all records and pull out 3gms/watt then that's what you want to do and there is no arguing about it


Added later:

OIC in your second drawing you do have the 400W in the center. But you have nothing underneath it. For a horizontaly mounted light, the area immediately beneath it is the best lit.

I think you should combine the 400W & 250W either end to end or side by side and have them together in the center. Then, if you are going horizontal, you need to think in terms of a disk of canopy not a ring or annulus.

The LED panels might be nice to illuminate the backsides of the plants on the outer edge.

zvuv said:

I have concerns about your lighting pattern.

With about 700W total, you ought to be able to cover a 4'x4' area. Yet your blueprint shows a circle that is 2' in dia. Did I count right?

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It's a 4' diameter circle (12.56 square feet). Each grid square is 2 inches by 2 inches, and each concentric ring is 2 inches apart. So for veg it'd be 650w of CMH plus the LEDs, and for flower it'd be 400w of CMH and HPS and the LEDs.
And what I forgot to mention about the hole in the middle- I want to do a scrog, so I'd be training the plants to fill a 4' diameter screen mounted to the lazy susan. I'd try to get them to fill out the middle during veg (I think I'm going to try a slightly longer veg than normal, maybe 6-8 weeks) and then for flower they should hopefully fill it the rest of the way out, especially with the 400w right overhead.
I'm probably going to actually be using the LEDs for clones or seedlings or something, they've been working really well with my single bubba kush from seed.

My goal is for my roommates and I to never have to buy weed from some dude ever again. It's a matter of principle and finances. I'm CAPABLE of growing my own, so why the hell aren't I? And I'm definitely into the obsessive hobby part of it. I love gardening and problem solving. So many reasons for this! Basically, I want a quantity of quality, which I'm sure no one's ever thought of before.
It would also be nice to provide high-quality shit to a legal dispensary. I met a dude once who had just for the first time sold his entire crop to legal patients, and he was so proud of it it inspired me. I forget that it really is ACTUAL MEDICINE for a lot of people, and I think it would feel pretty rewarding to say you grew a healing herb for legitimately sick people.
What I really want to get into is breeding, but that's a few years down the road. In an ideal world, I own a farm where we breed new types of dogs and buds.

Any ideas for which strain I should go with? General guidelines for scrog strains? I'm pretty sure I should go mostly indica.

Here's my test bubba kush grown from bagseed, 5 weeks old under a 28 watt LED panel. My cat FIM'ed her at like two weeks, so she was stunted for a minute. i'm pretty sure she's just starting to get overfertilized, the leaf tips are barely turning yellow and the young leaves are really springy and warping slightly (top of pics). i started using pure water every other feed a couple days ago.
I just recently FIM'ed the top, started pruning her side growth and training her over. I intend to mount a 1 foot net above her in a couple days and start scrogging. She responded really well to being bent; that slight upward bend in the first pic started showing after just a few hours.


Forgot to mention, a friend gave me a little T5 for supplemental, and I'm attempting to start a clone over there in the corner. I really don't know much about cloning beyond the basics.

I reallllly hope it's a female. Haha gaahhh. This is the second plant I've grown in my life. A few years ago I managed to grow a single plant in the backyard of the abandoned house next door, but it turned out to be male. I smoked it anyway, and it gave me a minor buzz like the first few times you try cigarettes. Fun but disappointing.