KevinSpencer
Member
First of all hay everyone, its my first post!
As a bit of introduction, i dont really smoke pot on a regular basis. Im a perpetually broke aerospace engineering student, i spend my free time crunching numbers and working matlab. However i have a friend who's devotion to pot is simply too much for words to describe. He had grown outdoor before but he always wanted to setup an indoor hydroponic system. So together we decided to combine our passions for pot and technology, making it our mission to create the most inconspicuous and efficient system we can manage on a minimal budget. My (long term)objective for this project is to build a completely automated system that would function with minimal human input(as in you leave it running for a week and its fine). His is to grow as much pot as you could possibly fit into a 150ft2 room.
So finally after months of talking i figured that we wont get anywhere unless we actually start something. So when he dropped by this morning, i said: dude, lets go get the gear! Our first stop was sensi coffeeshop where we picked up 10 white label rhino seeds for 36 euros. Our next stop was the hardware store where we picked up 6 cheapo 23 watt 2700K cfl bulbs, fittings, wires, a timer and some tooling, 45 euros all in total. The trip itself was quite disappointing. Reading numerous DIY guides, the equipment mentioned is mostly *available at any hardware store for under 10 bucks*. We went to the biggest hardware store in vicinity and the assortiment of plumbing and lighting products relevant to our objectives was extremely poor. Fluorescent fixtures were all ridiculously priced and there were no warm bulbs anywhere in sight. But easy way is not very fun anyway, so we just grabbed what we could and made a note to do some searching for specialized gardening equipment suppliers and bigger hardware stores.
Now what we did with the cfls was the following: we took a plank out of an old ikea book shelf, glued some reflective foil on it and screwed all our lame cfls onto it such that all the bulbs are arranged in parallel across it. The thing actually has these handy holes on the sides that allow adjusting our panel position quite nicely. Later the insides of the book shelf will be covered with some white growing foil my comrade had conveniently stashed.We took some pics and once i get em from him ill post em for everyone to laugh at. We also started germinating our seeds Altogether i think were off to a good start!
Next week should be more fun. I know a few specialized electronic component stores so we will make a little trip, pick up some long warm fl bulbs and some cheap fixtures. In addition we will get some orange and some red chipsets (something like 630-660nm???). Fluorescents will be placed on the sides of our growing bookshelf, the leds will be placed onto our cfl panel. I also got a cheap chinese cpu watercooling unit laying around, im gona try to come up with some sort of a heatsink design and use it to keep the leds nice and cool.
Now here i got a few questions:
1. What are the good LED chips nowadays? im thinkin lumiled k2s. But ive read some positive feedback on kessil magenta's, does anyone know whats inside of these things?
2. Should i add any blue leds or will my fluorescent bulbs cover that part?
3. What would be the best orange-to-red ratio in your opinion?
4. Does anyone have any experience soldering fluorescent ballasts? I think 30 euros for a piece of aluminum and a bunch of capacitors is quite ridiculous.
5.Whats better: flood&drain or aeroponic?
6. Any nice gardening stores in holland? Apart from *normal* growshops.
And to get discussion rolling:
Do you think its possible to *emulate* good ol hps by using a bunch of different low-power light sources? Im sure there will be people tellin me not to waste any time on leds. We probably gona end up buying an HID unit for flowering anyway. But as my friend puts it, we got this cellar to play with and we gotto keep it low profile, so it has to be Anne Frank sort of stealth. No IR signature, no powerbills, no smell and no noise. Which i think is an interesting challenge.
Any comments or feedback is appreciated! Cheers!
As a bit of introduction, i dont really smoke pot on a regular basis. Im a perpetually broke aerospace engineering student, i spend my free time crunching numbers and working matlab. However i have a friend who's devotion to pot is simply too much for words to describe. He had grown outdoor before but he always wanted to setup an indoor hydroponic system. So together we decided to combine our passions for pot and technology, making it our mission to create the most inconspicuous and efficient system we can manage on a minimal budget. My (long term)objective for this project is to build a completely automated system that would function with minimal human input(as in you leave it running for a week and its fine). His is to grow as much pot as you could possibly fit into a 150ft2 room.
So finally after months of talking i figured that we wont get anywhere unless we actually start something. So when he dropped by this morning, i said: dude, lets go get the gear! Our first stop was sensi coffeeshop where we picked up 10 white label rhino seeds for 36 euros. Our next stop was the hardware store where we picked up 6 cheapo 23 watt 2700K cfl bulbs, fittings, wires, a timer and some tooling, 45 euros all in total. The trip itself was quite disappointing. Reading numerous DIY guides, the equipment mentioned is mostly *available at any hardware store for under 10 bucks*. We went to the biggest hardware store in vicinity and the assortiment of plumbing and lighting products relevant to our objectives was extremely poor. Fluorescent fixtures were all ridiculously priced and there were no warm bulbs anywhere in sight. But easy way is not very fun anyway, so we just grabbed what we could and made a note to do some searching for specialized gardening equipment suppliers and bigger hardware stores.
Now what we did with the cfls was the following: we took a plank out of an old ikea book shelf, glued some reflective foil on it and screwed all our lame cfls onto it such that all the bulbs are arranged in parallel across it. The thing actually has these handy holes on the sides that allow adjusting our panel position quite nicely. Later the insides of the book shelf will be covered with some white growing foil my comrade had conveniently stashed.We took some pics and once i get em from him ill post em for everyone to laugh at. We also started germinating our seeds Altogether i think were off to a good start!
Next week should be more fun. I know a few specialized electronic component stores so we will make a little trip, pick up some long warm fl bulbs and some cheap fixtures. In addition we will get some orange and some red chipsets (something like 630-660nm???). Fluorescents will be placed on the sides of our growing bookshelf, the leds will be placed onto our cfl panel. I also got a cheap chinese cpu watercooling unit laying around, im gona try to come up with some sort of a heatsink design and use it to keep the leds nice and cool.
Now here i got a few questions:
1. What are the good LED chips nowadays? im thinkin lumiled k2s. But ive read some positive feedback on kessil magenta's, does anyone know whats inside of these things?
2. Should i add any blue leds or will my fluorescent bulbs cover that part?
3. What would be the best orange-to-red ratio in your opinion?
4. Does anyone have any experience soldering fluorescent ballasts? I think 30 euros for a piece of aluminum and a bunch of capacitors is quite ridiculous.
5.Whats better: flood&drain or aeroponic?
6. Any nice gardening stores in holland? Apart from *normal* growshops.
And to get discussion rolling:
Do you think its possible to *emulate* good ol hps by using a bunch of different low-power light sources? Im sure there will be people tellin me not to waste any time on leds. We probably gona end up buying an HID unit for flowering anyway. But as my friend puts it, we got this cellar to play with and we gotto keep it low profile, so it has to be Anne Frank sort of stealth. No IR signature, no powerbills, no smell and no noise. Which i think is an interesting challenge.
Any comments or feedback is appreciated! Cheers!
