Aquarium Grow Tank

Fish Tank Grow

I originally posted this in growroom design,but another member sent me here....so.....

I'm looking for advice for this set-up. It will be my first grow, as i'm planning to do a nice size outdoor grow next season,I figured i would start with a couple of potted "lowryders" this off-season indoors.I have 2 teens that i'm sure know what these plants are,so i was thinking of concealing them in the bottom of my wall unit in my living room.It has doors which i plan to keep locked. The space is 30" long x 22" deep x 23" high inside.If the tank idea IS ok, what else would i need to make this happen? lights,ventilation,etc.Any advice or suggestions are welcome.


Peace and stay....

DRE'

The idea is a very good one I think! Fishtanks themselves make a bit of noise from the air pump and other moving parts so it should mask any noise from your grow quite nicely. The lockable doors are a big plus too!
Basicly heres what you'll need to worry about...

Lighting, ventilation, reflectivity, light proofing, and odor control.

There are also other things to take into consideration, such as your method of cultivation. Do you want to do soil or hydro? If you want to do soil you could start the plants in 16oz Dixie cups (or something similar) and finish them in 1 gallon grow bags. If you want to do hydro all you have to do is find a short and wide rubbermaid or sterilite tub no more than 6 inches high and make it into an SWC unit. Just paint the outside with black krylon fusion paint, cut a couple holes in the top for 3" net cups make another little hole for the air pump to run through, and voila! Just insert the 3" net cups, fill em with hydrotron clay pellets, bury a small rockwool cube or Rapid Rooter plug in the middle of it, insert seed, fill the res with your water/nutrient solution, put in the air pump, and away you go!

Seed slection is really up to you here. In the space you have you arn't limited to just Lowryder really. If you flowered early (when the plants are 2" to 4" tall) you could grow pretty much any strain you like. If you want to stick with Lowryder thats cool, but anything other than pure sativas would work in this space. Most indica/sativa hybrids could easily be flowered early and LST'd and would work nicely in your space.

But cultivation method and seed selection aside, your main concerns here will be lighting, ventilation, reflectivity, light proofing, and odor control.

The reflectivity part is relatively easy. Just paint the inside walls flat white (mylar can be a real pain to work with in small cabs) or buy a 24" x 25' roll of this stuff called Reflectix insulation from your local hardware store. Its kind of like thin bubble wrap with a highly reflective coating that is extremely easy to cut and work with in small spaces. Just cut some off the roll to fit the size of your wall and secure it with hot glue and/or reflective foil tape.

Next up you have the lighting question... what kind of light do you want to use? In this kind of space I'd say your best options are remote ballasting two 70 watt hps lights from www.e-conolight.com (which is extremely easy, I'll walk you through it if you like) or you could use a bunch of 42 watt CFLs.

Your growing space is about 4.5 square feet so, personally, I think using CFLs might be your best option here. With HPS lighting you really want at least 50 watts per square foot, and for CFLs you should shoot for around 100 to 150 I believe. That would mean you would either need a 250 watt HPS or about ten 42 watt CFLs. And with a cabinet like yours that isn't very tall but is plenty wide and long, it would be really impossible to control the heat from a 250 watt HPS light in there. It wouldn't be optimum lighting, but I think you could get by with 8 CFLs if you wanted to keep the heat and costs down. You can easily find good CFLs that don't produce much heat right here ----> http://www.1000bulbs.com/products.php?cat=42-Watt-Compact-Fluorescents
You'll want to look at the kelvin temperature ratings on those CFLs too. The 6500k bulbs put out light in the blue spectrum and are best for early vegetative growth, while the 2700k bulbs put out light in the red spectrum that you will need for flowering. If you can afford it I'd pick up 8 of the 2700k bulbs for flowering and 4 of the 6500k that you can swap in to use for early growth. Ultimately the choice is yours, but it's good to be able to use at least some light in the blue spectrum for early growth. Your plants can get by on the 2700k bulbs alone, but for best results you should use some of the 6500k for the veg. time (even if you go 12/12 from seed).

Now for ventilation... your going to need around 1 cfm per watt of HID lighting or 1/3 cfm per watt of CFL lighting. Meaning that if you ran with eight 42 watt CFLs you would need about 112 cfm of cooling. Personally I'd take a look at Red Greenery's rubbermaid tub grow take some cues from his method. Use a sheet of tempered glass or acrylic to seperate the lights from the rest of the chamber and cool that section with a 100cfm or so 120mm PC fan from www.newegg.com . You can buy these 120mm fans for $10 or $15 and they can easily be wired up to a 12 volt DC adapter from Radioshack. Just trim a bit off the end of the red and black wires coming out of the fan and hook them up to the black and red/white wires on your 12 volt DC adapter using some wire nuts. Black to black, red to red or white. Very simple and highly effective! Use the fan for exhaust and cut a hole in the back of the unit roughly twice the size of your fan for a passive intake. The intake should always be twice the size of the exhaust I believe.

The bottom section can easily be cooled with another one of these 120mm fans for exhaust and a passive as well. Heat always rises so a good rule of thumb is to have your exhaust at the top of the cabinet and your intake at the bottom if you can.


Finally, you have light proofing and odor control. Light proofing the cracks in the cabinet can easily be done by using weather stripping from your local hardware store and some caulk. To light proof the intake and exhaust fans in the back you simply need to take a tissue box or some similarly sized box and cut it so that one of the small ends is open and the back pannel is removed. Just tape it down over your intake so that it will draw air in through the open part at the bottom but any light that shines out from the box will hit the back of the tissue box and be stopped. You could also use 4" PVC elbows for this purpose if you liked. Basicly you don't want to restrict any airflow to the fans or intakes, but you'll want to make a 90* angle bend so that no light can escape through the holes. Hopefully that made sense.

On a side note, to keep your plans from getting leaves or flowers caught in the fans, you can get a small sheet of window screen material and cut it to fit the size of your fan then attach it to the corners of the fan with stick backed velcro. This won't restrict airflow much, but it will help keep your plants from getting caught in the fans and also filter out a fair ammount of dust and pests that might try to infiltrate your cab. You can use this stuff over the intakes as well to help keep any pests out.

Last (but certainly not least) you have the matter of odor control... for this there are a number of options. Your best one is to build or buy a small carbon filter that all the air from your lower chamber will be exhausted through. There are many designs out there for carbon filters (Red Greenery's being the best, outside of expensive can filters IMHO) so you should serach around the forums and see what you can turn up. Worst case scenerio you can always buy a 94cfm Can 2600 Filter for around $60. I've tried making many designs that never quite worked for me, so I ultimately ended up using a Can filter, but Red's design certainly is the less expensive option.

There are many other ways to mask the smell such Ona blocks, incense, timed release Ozium units, etc. But to kill the smell your going to need a carbon filter of some kind. A good ionizer placed just outside of the growroom will work to some degree but should still be used alongside a carbon filter for good results.


And that... that concludes my advice to you for now DRE. I wish you the best of luck with your grow and I hope this helped! If you have any questions, never hesitate to ask. This forum is here to share knowledge and help other growers do what we're all here to do...grow!

Stay safe n' grow on.

Great advice Mr. Micro

I have two teens in my house also, aren't they just lovely humans to be around?

Good luck and I am looking forward to watching your progress.

Thanks for the info Mr. Micro,
Actually i was gonna do the lowryders in pots using orgainic soil and just keep them in the tank,and use it for drainage when i water.I figured i would start with LR's since this is my first grow,being they finish fast and i wouldnt feel as bad if i messed up in 2 months rather than the normal time it takes to grow other plants.Plus, I can make the corrections before i start my outdoor grow next season.I would love to try hydro... but this would be easier for me i think.I hope i inherited my grandfathers greenthumb.

So the tank is good,now i have to focus on lights and ventilation.Also,if i use reflective materials lining the tank,woulld that be sufficient?Now the lighting...i would need to have lights say on top(of course) and some lower on the sides to get all around lighting?I've been reading about lights that give off different spectrums (trying to make sense of that),if i understand it correctly...one would be for veg stage,but since LR's skip this,would it really matter?

Again,thanks Mr micro...you provided me with some good info to get started with...I appreciate it.

And thanks Piece, I look foward to this as well,just want to get it right the first time and reap the rewards

We're all looking forward to seeing those awesome steath-buds im sure!

Update*

Update*

here are pics of where i want this set-up to go, as an example of the space you can basically see i have alot of room to play with....






I'm thinking of not doing the tank and just make this area light-proof as the doors when closed arent going to keep it completely dark inside.I'm thinking of drilling brackets or light fixtures for the bulbs up top and since there is an adjustable for inside, I can lower the shelf as needed.As for ventilation, i can do cut-outs for intake/exhaust fans.

Any ideas and suggestions are always welcome....

23" in height is really , really cutting it, for a functional grow.
what lights are you gonna use?
cfl's may be good but tubes may be the best for this situation, as they are even cooler to the touch. also with tubes i think you could get more light in your space
and you can keep the plants lst'd to about 1 inch or so from the lights-growing horizontally.
another option would be to get several 35 or 70 watt hps each with its own dedicated ventilation .
you biggest problem will be restricted height , therefore you want your lights to
take up as little space as possible.

if you could post some better pics it will help

Here is a pic of a fishtank grow some guy did on OG. I saved it cause I thought it was pretty cool. I have some others but the cd theyr on is being a bitch. Maybe you can get some ideas from this.

man thats is a new ganja boi grow box there and a realy nice looking one at that

That aquarium grow box is really cool. I wonder if that was from the guy on OG that wrote his thread as if it was a log entry for the Starship Enterprise. It was really well done!

I had a 60 gal aquarium running until just recently when the glass cracked. I used the tank water for my plants and they just loved it.

Red_Greenery: lol actually it was. His name was like Jeanlucpicard. I believe he was growing sage in that thing. Really nice setup.

hahahaha, I knew it!