ReikoX's Workshop Rebuild 2020

[ReikoX]

Last night I got two coats of flat white exterior paint in the veg room. I had just enough paint left over from the flower room to finish the veg room perfectly. No pictures because they look almost identical to the ones I posted yesterday. I don't know how much longer I can keep up this pace, but I sure do like how fast the progress is, relative to the previous rate of progress anyway.

I still have quite a few tasks left to complete the rebuild. Next I need to finish the tape and mud in the lung room. Then I need to cover everything in the lung room in plastic. After that, I'll sand everything and apply the texture. Finally, I'll prime and paint the lung room. From there, I need to get the doors installed and painted. With the doors in place, I'll be able to finish the trim and baseboard. That should finish up the lung room with the exception of a few little things like wall plates for the switches and outlets.

If my timing works out, I'll be just finishing the lung room when my tent is ready to harvest (sometime in the middle of July). From there I can begin building my lights and installing the remote driver board. I need to sew my custom flowerbeds and mix up about 90 gallons of soil too. I'm sure there are a few little things I'm not thinking about that I'll need to take care of, but I'm hoping to begin growing in there by the beginning of August.

 

[overbudjet]

Nicest build tread IMHO very details sketch/ build pic's.. I really like this room .

 

[Fixer]

Nice work! You'll get there. It took me most of last summer to complete my build out. It was worth the wait.

 

[Chevy cHaze]

Great work and effort you're putting into that room, respect.
Maybe it hold for ever!!!
CC

 

[ReikoX]

I've been trying to do something in the workshop every night. Today, it was a simple thing. I got the outlet face plates installed.

 

[ReikoX]

Got the lung room taped and mudded except for the wall above the window. My plan is to finish that last edge tonight after the kiddo goes to sleep. Then tomorrow night I'll finish covering everything in plastic, and sand the joints. Shoot texture Saturday night and prime and paint on Sunday. Provided I dont get a case of the fuckits.

 

[ReikoX]

More progress is getting made this weekend while the kiddo is with her mother. On saturday, I got everything covered in plastic and sanded all the joints. The palm sander with the shop vacuum made the job a bit easier and cleaner. The ceiling was the worst of it, my shoulders are still sore.

Sunday my dad came over and shot the texture. It took us longer to clean up than anything else. I was hoping to get the texture up Saturday and paint Sunday, but that didn't happen.

Here is a close up of the texture.

I decided on colors for paint. I am going with the lighter blue, Blue Arrow, on the walls and Bistro White for the ceiling and trim. I am debating the white or blue on the concrete on the bottom half, leaning towards white. Finally, I'm going to use the Deep Twilight Blue for the doors. I really like the darker blue, but thought it would be too dark for the walls.

 

[ReikoX]

Got a couple hours after work to get two coats of primer in the lung room. I also got two coats of paint on the ceiling. Nice part about painting the ceiling is I can put the light fixture back up. Sometimes it's the little things. I wont have more time to work on it until Sunday.

 

[Oddity]

Slowly but surely! Going to be a truly kickass space.

 

[Chevy cHaze]

R, I'm going to fall off my chair on the day that plants are entering this thread.
But I'm looking forward to it ;-)
Keep it up, you growroom will stand for all eternity I think
CC

 

[ReikoX]

Now that I have the rooms pretty well built, it is time to work on the lighting. The plan for the veg room has has always been to have a wire shelf with LED strips on it. I would use two shelves for my bonsai mothers, a shelf for seedlings/clones, and maybe a shelf with a couple of autos. With the low price of the Bridgelux EB Gen2 strips, the choice there easy. I settled on twoBXEB-L0560Z-50E2000-C-B3 per shelf. I could match those eight strips with a XLG-150-L-AB driver and for about $75 USD (not including tax or shipping) be done with it.

But wait a minute, I'm an engineer! let's over engineer this a little bit. First off, this driver will allow me to dim the lights, but all the shelves will have the same intensity. Clones only need a little light, while bonsai mothers need a moderate amount of light, and autos can use a lot more light. The simple solution is to buy four XLG-25-AB and run one driver on each shelf with a potentiometer (a bit under driven, but within specs). This setup is around $160 USD (not including tax or shipping).

Now it is time to really over engineer this thing! Let's add an LED controller! The simplest method would be to do the previous build (with four drivers) and connect them to a Bluefish LED Controller. This controller costs about $200 USD bringing the total cost up to $360. That's a lot of money for 100 Watts. They sell a smaller version for only $100 USD, but it wont work with the 10V PWM of the XLG drivers. They will, however, work with the LDD-700H drivers. These take a DC input and give a CC output. I can run four of these off of a single LRS-150-48 AC DC converter. This setup is about $185 USD. Rapid LED sells a board that sells a LDD-H-4S board that happens to hold four LDD drivers as well as a SCW05B-12 to provide 12V power to PC fans! This brings my total up to around $220 USD.

Now, the nice thing about the LDD drivers is they work on a lower voltage PWM than the XLG drivers. I could, in theory, use an Arduino I have laying around to give provide the PWM signal to the LDD drivers. This saves $100 USD and brings the build down to $120. That's cheaper than the simple build using XLG four drivers and has slightly more wattage. Granted, for that $100 you get the ability to control your lights from your phone, setup presets, simulate weather, and much more. Not to mention the time it would take me to program the Arduino, I could program for my job and make that $100 in far less time.

 

[ReikoX]

Spent most of Sunday painting in the workshop. I should have finished cleaning my house, doing groceries, etc., but I can clean in the evenings this week. I got the walls painted and pulled all the tape and plastic. Then I moved the workbench cabinets around [insert Tetris theme here] then taped off and painted the concrete.

I also got a couple of doors and some trim. I went with some hollow core doors, but I'm a little nervous about cutting a hole for the darkroom louvers. The solid core doors were all six panel and I couldn't see that working. The other solid core door was well over $200 so I decided to try these first.


My digikey order shipped, so I should be getting the stuff for my lights by Wednesday. I took off this Thursday and Friday from work to celebrate my 44th trip around the sun.

 

[bsgospel]

Rapid LED sells a board that sells a LDD-H-4S board that happens to hold four LDD drivers as well as a SCW05B-12 to provide 12V power to PC fans! This brings my total up to around $220 USD.

So am I understanding this correctly- The LDD-H-4S board plus four XLG drivers, with four potentiometers, operating eight C-B3 strips?

C-B3 (8): $38
XLG (4): $145
LDD-H-4S (SE power cord): $114
(unknown potentiometers): $???

I'm at $297...Where did I go wrong?

I love where this is all going though. Love the guts of the build. I come for the dry wall but I stay for the specs

 

[ReikoX]

I'm not surprised someone got confused. There were three or four different build options.

So the build I went with was (some rounding but about right with tax and shipping)

8 strips, $40 (digikey)
4 LDD-700H, $25 (digikey)
1 SCW05B-12, $10 (digikey)
1 LRS-150-48, $25 (digikey)
1 LDD-H4S, $20 (Rapid LED)
1 Bluefish Mini Gen2, $100 (aquarium-led-controller)

Roughly $220 when all was said and done.

 

[ReikoX]

I got my order with the last of the parts I needed for this build today. I decided I would build a breadboard just to make sure everything was going to work as I had designed it. The first thing I did was unpack everything and, carefully, populate the board with the LDD drivers. The power supply had a big sticker on it that said to check the voltage switch before plugging in. Good thing I did, it was set to 220 VAC. Next I wired each group of two strips in series. Each group of two was then wired to the a channel on the board. Finally I set the jumpers so that the PWM is disabled and the boards run at full power. I plugged the light in and everything worked. I nearly went blind taking this picture.

My Bluefish Mini hasn't shipped yet, but I decided to go ahead and use my standard Bluefish controller for the time being. If you do this, be sure to switch the jumpers on the Bluefish controller to run at 5 V instead of the default which is 10 V. Once I hooked up the PWM outputs and changed the jumpers on the boards, I started to play around. I was only able to get three channels to work at one time no matter what level I set them to. Unless one channel was at 0, the other channels would dim. Turns out the negative terminal of the PWM needed to be grounded on the DC side of the power supply. Once I did that, everything worked as expected. When I plugged in my Kill-a-Watt meter, I was reading about 224 Watts from the wall, 109 Watts at the strips.

 

[ReikoX]

I had a few hours Friday to work on the workshop, so I decided to install the doors. First I trimmed the bottom of the door jam because these are cut for carpet. Then I got the flower room door shimmed and nailed in place. The door was just barely scraping the floor, nothing my hand planer wont make short work of.


Feeling confident, I started to put the veg room door in place. First the top of the door slid in place, but the bottom wouldnt fit! I took out my tape measure, and sure enough the top was correct, but the bottom was off by 1.5". After removing the screws in the drywall, I was able to break free the 2x4 in the door jam. I couldn't, however, break the stud free.


I decided to cut a scrap piece of 2x4 to the correct length and tried to pound the stud over. Well, I had the flower room door open and the whole wall scooted over 1". When I tried to close the flower room door, it wouldnt shut. I figured it would probably still fit if I removed the shims, so I chiseled out the shims and pulled the nails. The two doors barely fit this way and I called it a day without finishing.


That night, I was talking with my dad about my predicament and he gave me an orbital cutting tool with a metal cutting bit. The next day, I pushed the wall back, so the flower room door was square again.
Then I was able to cut the nails that were holding the stud in place and move it to where it belonged. I screwed the sheetrock back down and trimmed it square. Finally I trimmed the extra 1.5" off the 2x4 on the concrete with a sawzall.

 

[ReikoX]

Got the doors fit last night. It was a lot easier now that the rough opening is correct.

I also fixed my trim screws, they are all vertical now. Thanks to everyone who set me straight on trim screws.

 

[ReikoX]

Busy day in the workshop today. I started my day by taking down the curtains and blinds, then taping around the window trim. Interestingly, the tape worked much better now that the humidity is up around 65% RH. It's our monsoon season, and has been raining daily for the last week or so.

After taping everything off, I was able to get the window trim painted. I spent a bunch of time debating painting underneath the shelf. I mean, I didn't even notice it wasn't painted until a couple of days ago. In the end, I decided to put one quick coat on it and leave it be. After the paint dried, I pulled the tape and put back up the blinds and curtains.

I spent the rest of the afternoon cutting the baseboard that goes behind the workbench. I cut the pieces to length, then painted them before installing them. This baseboard is against a concrete wall, so I had to use some liquid nails to attach it. Finally, I caulked the seams and touched up any paint.

With the baseboard complete, I was able to put the workbench back together where it goes. I'm happy to say, I still had room for the workbench, and the door opens completely. There is even enough room between the door casing and the flower exhaust vent, that was a close measurement. Workbench needs a good cleaning and to replace that front melamine.

 

[ReikoX]

Gave the workbench a good cleaning, then installed a power strip. To test it out, I setup my rosin press and made a bit of RQS NL Auto rosin.

 

[ReikoX]

Had a couple of hours to work on the workshop Saturday afternoon. I didnt get a whole lot done, but I did foam in the rough opening of the doors. My dad suggested I shim the door so it doesnt now and get stuck. Worked out great.