Unsainted's 250W Cab w/Mother Chamber Diary

Hey all, so glad to be back on the icmag forums after such a long time. Used to frequent the forums as noexcuses back in 2008/09. Im in the process of getting my new 250W cab up and running.
I've done several grows over the last 15ish years but its been a good 4 years since me and the missus did our last grow. Super excited and stoked to be getting "back to work". Also any advice or help anyone wishes to offer is always appreciated here.
So design wise I wanted a very similar design to the NGB Marijuana Stealth Cabinet as seen on here and OG forums from back in the day.
I knocked this up in sketchup
https://www.icmag.com/ic/album.php?albumid=84768&pictureid=2091865
https://www.icmag.com/ic/album.php?albumid=84768&pictureid=2091866

So the bottom left chamber will be our mother chamber where im hoping to keep 3 healthy bonsai mothers of different breeds for clone cuttings which will then go into the right main chamber for veg and then flower. Probably gonna go with a Scrog grow in the main chamber.

I've built a very rough unfinished version of the cab above which I will be fixing up/upgrading as this first grow progresses.

https://www.icmag.com/ic/album.php?albumid=84768&pictureid=2091867
https://www.icmag.com/ic/album.php?albumid=84768&pictureid=2091868

Temps are running around 25-26C with 67% humidty. I got myself a fan speed controller and temp/hygro unit with probe and it seems to be holding the temp really well without having the fan on max nonstop. This also reduces the noise the box generates and although sound stealth isnt really much of an issue its nice to not have something too loud.
Fan
https://www.icmag.com/ic/album.php?albumid=84768&pictureid=2091875
Mother Chamber (unfinished)
https://www.icmag.com/ic/album.php?albumid=84768&pictureid=2091869
Main Chamber
https://www.icmag.com/ic/album.php?albumid=84768&pictureid=2091872
Main Chamber pic 2
https://www.icmag.com/ic/album.php?albumid=84768&pictureid=2091874
Main Chamber pic 3
https://www.icmag.com/ic/album.php?albumid=84768&pictureid=2091873
Light and Filter
Light will be lowerable, just need to sort that tomorrow.
https://www.icmag.com/ic/album.php?albumid=84768&pictureid=2091871

As I say this is a very rough unfinished version of the box, I'm hoping to get it fixed up better as we get some more money in over the next few months.
Ideally I'd like to box it in with better looking more expensive cabinetry down the line so it looks more like a piece of furniture in our room rather than just an obvious grow box hehe.

I've got some seeds popping just now and will hopefully get em in the soil shortly. This first run im gonna do 6 from seed and midway through I should hopefully have the mother chamber up and running and can start growing some decent mothers for clones for the future after this first grow in her.
Really looking forward to this first grow in the new box and to getting the box up to better standard and producing decent stuff outta her.

So pull up a chair, spark one and hopefully enjoy the show lads. More to come on this one. I will post further details and updates of the box soon.

Pulling up a seat.
What're the seeds you are trying?

Hey Blynx glad to have you on board buddy. This first run im throwing in 6 Super Bud. Grew Super Bud before and it was awesome but it was a totally different set up to what we have here now. Previously I did four in a 1.2m square tent with a 600W hps. This time things are a lot more "compact" with the new box. Hopefully should get some nice stuff off it. The super bud we had before was some of the nicest weed we've had.

__________________

Unsainted's 250W Cab w/MotherChamber
https://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?t=377930

Nice start!
Quite an approach - lights and a fan is enough to start to grow. Everything else may be sorted out by the way... Subbed!
What's the type of that HID lamp? It seems to be not as orange as hps are. Will there be any sort of cooltube later?
What kind of light for moms?

Nice box, good job on the sketchup model too.

grabbing up some unsalted peanuts for the show , looking good

Quick Update

We are just under two weeks from the start of germination and looking good so far.

NGB style! love it, subbed.

Got some upgrades for the box today. No pics yet as I still have to get everything rigged up properly and there was an item missing so I've got to go out today and get it someplace else. As soon as I have it all hooked up I'll get some pics up for you guys.

At first set up temps were alright in the box but as time has gone on the average temp that the box sits at is too high for my liking, up around 29-30 degrees C. Now I could reduce this by increasing the speed on our extraction system however I didn't want to have to do this for two reasons noise/security and also the fan would be taking way too much air out of thee box every hour, reducing the plants access to CO2 etc. Our solution was to get ourselves a maxibright air cooled hood reflector w/ toughened glass. I got v lucky with the size of the unit as it is just the right size to fit in the flowering chamber of the box. The downside is the outputs on the side of the hood are 6 inch and we have a 4 inch extraction system. We do actually have a 6 inch extraction unit as well from one of our previous 600w grows but I didn't want to use that system for this box as it is very loud and totally overkill for the size. So I had ordered 6 inch to 4inch reducers to go on the sides of the hood to connect to our extraction system however these items were missing from our delivered order so today I'm going to have to go out to hardware store and get a couple. Once hooked up I'll have our carbon scrubber in the box attached to one end of the hood and the other end of the hood will go to our extraction fan in the adjacent chamber and then output from the box. Air will be drawn from the box into and through the scrubber then over the light (inside the sealed hood) and out of the box through the fan system. This should reduce the temps at the plant level by enough to make the plants more comfortable. Fingers crossed I can get this all hooked up later tonight and get some pics for you guys.
I also picked up all the nutes we were needing as it had been so long since we last grew that I threw out all the old stuff. Grabbed the biobizz range for the light mix soil we are using. I've used the biobizz stuff in the past without any issues so hopefully that should be good enough for our small grow.
I also grabbed a 1.2x1.2m square netting to make a scrog screen for the plants however upon receiving the netting the squares on it are quite large and I don't know if its maybe just a bit too big for what we are after. I'll certainly rig it up and see what its like though before I decide to use it. Another issue with this may be the actually plants themselves as the strain I am using (Super Bud) is a very short, shrub style indica. The more they are progressing in Veg the more I'm thinking maybe they are not the best for scrogging as they are not stretching too much. I could always just grow them out as they are,without any training or topping but I had initially hoped to veg them out until they filed a scrog net. A few more weeks of veg will give me and idea of whether it can be done or not.
I got myself a new 250w bulb as well as the old one had been through a few grows and was past its best.This seems to be running great so far no issues and does outwardly appear brighter.
Got saucers for underneath the pots to catch run off from watering as I had forgotten to grab these when I bought the pots.Also grabbed 80m of garden twist tie which is always a God-send when growing and trying to train plants.
Hopefully these upgrades should stand us in good stead going forward. As I said previously I will get the reducers today for the hood and hopefully get that hooked up later tonight and get some pictures on here for you guys to have a look at. I was going to get a CFL light for the mother chamber and also some propagation stuff, propagator and rootcubes etc for doing the mother and clones however the cost of this was just becoming too much for me and the wife to afford this month and it would probably be near the end of December before we are cutting clones anyway so we decided to just hold off on that stuff til next month. So lots more upgrades coming to the cabinet in the future.
I have also been looking at kitchen/cupboard doors and structure parts so that I can make the box looks like a "sideboard" or normal cupboard but this is something I'm in no immediate rush to do and so can wait a bit.
Hope you guys are enjoying the grow so far. I decided it was probably best just to do weekly'ish updates rather than posting every single day with pics that hardly change. Thought it would be better to just show you each week at a time etc.
Pics to follow......
Have a great weekend buds.

Week 3 Veg Update
Got the new hood hooked up, started feeding em nutes and started topping and training them. Gonna carry on with veg for another couple weeks with some more training to get as many bud sites as we can in there before flipping em.
sorry the pics are poor quality ill get it sorted soon

Day 1 Flower
I had planned and hoped to veg these for another week on top of the four its already had from the 9th Nov however as you can see with some topping and training I am very quickly running out of space in this Cab. I am also conscious that there may be a bit of a stretch here once they start the first week or two of flowering. So today marks Day 1 in flowering for these Super Bud females. I will continue doing some LST into this first week or so whilst they stretch but I am already really happy with how they have spread and bushed out. A good number of tops on there.

Looks good! Interesting to see you're still using HPS in your small space. subbed

Thanks q3corn,I appreciate it bud. Love my HPS lights, will prob move over to LED eventually but for the moment Im happy enough with the 250W we got in the box and our 600w which we are not using at the moment but could rig up in minutes in our tent.

Flower Day 3 Update: Man this Super Bud loves a stretch once she gets flipped. I did know this could happen from previous grow sessions vids Ive seen on the strain. Glad I decided to go ahead and flip rather than waiting another week or two as the box woulda been completely packed by that point and it woulda made things a lot harder.
They have filled out really nice in the space we have. Sorry for he low quality pictures, I'm having to use an old webcam to take em as I don't have a mobile phone (yea I'm one of those guys lol, not for security I just hate phones and people getting a hold of me haha)
Will try get some better pics with the wife phone soon. In the meantime here's how shes looking just now. The colour is a really beautiful lush green but doesn't show too well with the light on in the pics.







They are all now on flowering nutes.

think i might take em out and give em a little tidy up tonight, not a lot of light if any will get through under that canopy.

I think if you take your plants out of the cabinet for pictures that flicker will go away. Looks like a difference in light frequency vs shutter speed. Happens with cheap LEDs too