150w HPS Club and Resource Guide......

[labtec]

just weighed my last dry one and i ended up with 55 grams. not bad for my first grow, but i expect alot more now that ive singled out which clones im gonna keep as my mom plants. one ended up being a hermi which seeded up alot of my grow.i saved bagseed for a couple years and ended up growing them all out at once. i started with 12 seeds, and i got 4 good moms that im gonna keep. im gonna take the rest of the summer off for heat reasons ,and my landlord comes and checks the fire alarms once a year right around the end of august beginning of september. so ill get her started then. next time im scrogging my girls.

 

[the_man]

hehe. youre right tranerek this thread is huge. when i first found this thread i would read a few pages a day, sometimes 10-20 pages a day. good luck, hopefully you find the right fan for your setup. i would almost recommend a squirrel cage fan for the price and volume of air it pulls.

I realy whish they would put a page jump on this site

horticulturesource s having a sale on fans and alot of other items

fan sale

 

[the_man]

here is the invemtory there blowing out

some reflectors for 15.00

i realy want to grab one of the

SUN SYSTEM® DIGITAL FUSION™ - 1000 WATT

just don't know how there ballest is doing in these


INVENTORY BLOWOUT SALE

 

[labtec]

its been pretty quiet around here lately. smoke report is good. theyve been curing in jars for about a week and they taste medium. they taste smooth but dont have theyre definite taste yet. how long do you guys usually cure b4 the herb starts tasting really good. i flushed them all for atleast 10 days so i think i did it right. well see

 

[TraneRek]

labtec sup man? Glad to hear your bud's decent.. Hopefully I can pull 55g's my first grow. I dunno if I've asked u this before, but what size cab did you grow in?

-Rek

EDIT: Also, doesn't it suck not having 50 posts yet? We can't even PM people yet

 

[hoosierdaddy]

labtec, I have seen buds that took months and months to settle into their potential. I have also seen buds that you could pick from the stalk after the initial dry and it taste nice.
Also, one man can leave his buds in the jars just a few hours longer each time than the next guy does, and they will have differing cure times/results with the same weed.
The cure can be as diverse as the line up of genetics.

 

[Cozy Amnesia]

Hey all!

I'm going buy my first light soon and it shall be none other than the one you all know and love: 150 HPS. To buy anything else would be a waste of money, especially when they're so cheap at e-conolight.com!

Quick question: in a cab, how hot will these get? I got rubbermaids that I would guess to have a volume of around ~13 cu ft. I've been contemplating whether or not I can simply cool it buy blowing air on it and venting it out the air scrubber with the rest of the box, or if it needs to have it's own dedicated ventilation such as a cool-tube. Any help on this?

 

[growDaddy]

In my application of the 150w hps I find that the heat is not so great but I am still having problems keeping it cool. I have 42 cuft (2x3x7). You just have to keep the ventilation flowing.
Easy for me to say, I still do not have mine correct, but getting close (I think)

 

[Pipedream]

Cozy - I wish I could remember who did it successfully, but my old brain just ain't that good anymore. However if you search the back pages of our thread here, you'll find one member did have a nice grow inside 2 stacked rubbermaid totes. He used a 150 with proper ventilation and was well rewarded for his efforts. But keep in mind, the smaller the space the greater the heat build-up will be, and the greater the need for ventilation.

 

[Cozy Amnesia]

Yup, Red_Greenery did it. He had it behind some plexiglass, which I will do as well. I was originally going to have it set up like yours Pipedream, where there's just a fan blowing on it, but I thought I'd need better cooling in my conditions.

I figure it's better to have too much ventilation than not enough.

 

[BRNEYDBVR]

I figure it's better to have too much ventilation than not enough.

Yep....you got that right.

Always better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it!

 

[Cozy Amnesia]

Exactly.

I'm just not sure how...

 

[Indica Monkey]

For the past couple of days I have been trying to post you some pictures of how I vent my 150, after 15 attempts I have just found out there is a problem with the gallery upload function so the images will have to follow later.

My cab is 2 x 2 x 5 and I find it very easy to cool my lamp, I have a large pc fan hanging from the reflector and blowing air just under the lamp itself to displace the hotspot which could appear there if nothing was done to prevent it. The cab itself is vented by a 130cfm inline fan connected to a carbon filter and hooked upto a speed controller turned down to the half way mark. This setup is almost silent running thanks to the speed controller and insulated ducting, the only noise you can hear is at the very end of the ducting run.

I am quite lucky in that I live in northern England and my cab is situated in my basement, but even if the temps here were 10 or 15 degrees C higher I would like to think that I could still keep it under control by just turning the speed of the vent fan up and increasing the passive intakes.

I'll get some pics up to show you how I'm running things when the upload issue is resolved.

 

[Cozy Amnesia]

Thanks for the help. What kind of fan is it?

I live in a really hot climate, plus I plan to put the cab in a closet. I'm probably going to need to vent outside of it somehow, but I'll worry about that later.

For comparison, do these get just as hot as a 150w incandescent?

 

[hoosierdaddy]

Worry about it now, Cozy. They get much hotter, and without the proper temps and airflow you have nada. Thinking you might just get lucky and get by is thinking wrong.
Figure out now how you are going to vent your air, because you will need to vent your air.

 

[Cozy Amnesia]

Worry about it now, Cozy. They get much hotter, and without the proper temps and airflow you have nada. Thinking you might just get lucky and get by is thinking wrong.
Figure out now how you are going to vent your air, because you will need to vent your air.

When I said I will worry about it later, I meant like tomorrow, lol.

You see, first I have to decide on what kind/size of fan I need and then I can decide on where to exhaust the hot air -- or should it be visa versa...I can't even decide on how to decide!

 

[hoosierdaddy]

A search here will net you hours of reading about the subject. Many closet and cab grows to give you the ideas you will need to fit your situation.

The size of your grow area, and how it is situated is your first concern, and things can be built to those parameters. The 150's put out quite a bit more energy than do incandescent bulbs, but in HID terms they are quite nice to work with and will produce a respectable harvest. And they are fairly easy to keep cool with very little effort.
There are just some guidelines that you need to learn from your searchings and reading. Good air flow and proper temps are essential, and everything else is gingerbread. Get those items sorted out straight away, and the rest of the journey will be more rewarding fun, than tedious work.

Best of luck!

 

[Indica Monkey]

Cozy Amnesia you really need to listen to hoosierdaddy with what he's saying about the ventilation, lighting requirements are easy to work out as we have the 50/75w per square foot rule. Venting however is different for every situation depending upon your variables, as far as I know there is no set of rules for setting up your cooling/venting system - it's more of an educated guess mixed with a bit of suck it and see. One thing I have come to realise is you're much better buying oversized fans and just turning down the speed the blades spin, this helps keep noise down aswell as giving you the option to increase your venting needs if required by simply speeding up your fans.

As for what type of fans I use, the fan blowing air around in the cab is situated under the lamp itself and this is just a large fan I have removed from a high end PC case. My exhaust fan is an RVK125, a 5 inch tube fan - I'm pretty sure this is a Europe only fan though so probably no good to you.


Now I have a question I hope one of you compost growers can help me with?!
I currently have five Blue Cheese vegging in my cab, they will be leaving their six inch pots anytime soon and being potted up into 11litre (11.6quart) square pots with one of them being killed as the cab will only hold four of these final pots. The pots are 1 sq foot each (roughly) which is obviously outside the scope of my 150w lamp, when I pot them up I will be placing a scrog screen over each of the pots and shaping the canopy into a v shape around the lamp to make sure the buds are within the useable range of the light source. I'm wondering if after enough veg time for the roots to fill the 11litre pots are the plants going to be too large for the area of a 150w lamp? I'm wondering about this as they're looking pretty large already and I don't really wanna run any more lighting than a 150w lamp to keep the power bills down, also wanna keep the vent noise down as Mrs Monkey doesn't know what I'm upto in my little "project room" in the basement (well we don't talk about it anyway, so keeping it silent is a must).

RVK125 in action

 

[growDaddy]

Ventilation.
It's taken me 3 months to get the ventilation right. (I think I have it right, only time will tell).
I've got a 2x3x7 ft space. It is in my garage and gets hot. I have a 240cfm in the attic connected to a carbon filter sucking air from the cab. I have a 185cfm in the cab blowing air into the same 6" hose to the attic. There is about 20' between fans.
I have 24 pc fans inside the cab blowing up a small hurricane. I have 21 40mm and 3 120mm all powered from the same power supply. This seems to keep my space cool enough. It will do better once I go 12/12.
ventilation is important!

 

[Cozy Amnesia]

Thanks for the help everybody!