4kw flower room, overhauled

so here are some before shots. This is what you do when on a budget and trying to get back on your feet

4 1000 watt lights in various hoods. 2 were gifted to me many years ago and I always kept them. One was lent to me, the bat wing I bought.

No air cooling of the lights.

AC and DH were leftovers

Tables, reses, pumps, clone trays, T5, fluro were all left over. The T5 is banged up a bit and it had 2 bulbs broken/missing

Wiring was a complete mess. I had #10 romex stapled to the floor to my AC because I could not afford more wire and that was the shortest run....

Ballasts were messy. I think they were OK but I just hated how all the wiring could easily be bumped into. It just did not look safe


Basically for this I just bought some bulbs, wood, and a few odds and ends. Plus nutes etc. I did have to buy the filter and fan


here were the messy ballasts




here you can see the romex on the wall



here you can see the various hoods/reflectors

here you can see where I mounted my contactor and the orange romex running on the floor




Somehow I still spent 3500 getting this setup

so I am watching the news one night and it mentions a grow house fire. My ass puckers a little till I hear its in a different county. I decide I am going to redo all the electrical ASAP. Then I decided to air cool the lights as we are coming into summer and I am trying to keep the AC from running all day. The air cooling is creating another problem. more on that later.

Here is the new electrical

This panel is another leftover. It now has the cover on it. It has a #6 Romex connected to a 60A breaker on the main panel. The sub feeds pretty much everything grow related. The WH40 timer feeds the ballast outlets. The ballasts are now in the ceiling. I think this much cleaner and safer. Plus that closet got pretty hot


here are the ballasts in the ceiling. That pipe is a vent pipe, no water


I replaced all the romex with armored cable. I moved the contactor into an enlosure. I also put the transformer for the dampners in the enclosure. There are still a few cords but not really sure how to clean all tht up





I replaced all the hoods with radiant 6's.

You can see the clearance issue I had between the reflector and wall so I built a duct out of duct board to get the air flow I needed, but keep the depth shallow



here the lights dump into the attic






Co2 genny mounted across the room from filter. Thought is the filter will pull co2 across the room and then spread it back across the room



Intake for the lights. Hole in floor. Box has 2 shelves in it with 11" holes. One holes is covered with a window screen. The other hole I ripped apart an AC filter and stapled it to the shelve. So 2 filters. I also covered the dirt with cardboard and used old nute bottles with water to hold down the cardboard. The crawl space is only 12-18 high at this part of the house


Some plant shots. They took some abuse this go around as I was doing all this work in mid flower. I knew I was going to drop dust, and crap into the tables so when the res was low, I just dumped and filled with water. I did not want to waste nutes when I knew I would have to change the res after construction. Well the whole thing took a lot longer than I thought due to projects at work. The plants were getting burned from being so close to the lights, I dropped that duct on them, I dropped hot hoods on the plants. All sorts of problems.

I am revegging this plant. I had another reveg that I cut off all the old leaves after alot of new growth, and it dies. So I am leaving all the leaves on this one. It is doing better since I added all the bulbs to the T5 and changed the res. But the main branch seems a little weak where it comes out of the stalk. Nit sure what to do. I added silica







This picture sucks but you can see some leaf curling, burned leaves etc. I actually removed a huge portion of one of the plants in this table because it was so bad.



These plants are doing much better

I have 2 more items on my to do list.

install a drain line for the AC and DH to go into the crawl space and outside. Now it drains into a bin that needs to be emptied 2x a day

plumb a spigot and drain to each rez. right now I use a hose to the bathroom sink. The hose sucks, and the bathroom sink has smaller pipe so it does not have a lot of water flow. So it takes a while to fill the reses. Doing 2 flower reses, and my veg res can take 3 hours. I dont live there so that is a long time. There is only so much other stuff I can do.


E&F every 3 hours lights on, once during lights off
hydroton medial
GH nutes, lucas at 5/10
liquid and powder koolbloom at various times
hygrozyme
cal mag



My newest problem is the Co2 generator is running a LOT more. A tank could last me 10-14 days. I changed a tank a few days ago and 3 days later it was almost empty. So now this makes my AC run non stop.

I suspect I am introducing positive pressure from air cooling the lights since the fan pushes through the lights. I did not tape up the flex ducting because I wanted to make sure everything works. I can not imagine I have that much leakage that it is pushing out all the co2 that fast.

I was going to wait till harvest to seal it up but I may have to do i now

Good job.

damn thats how you do it!

i think my duct box is still leaking quite a bit. The problem is there is no way to fix the leaks against the wall or ceiling. So I sprayed a ton of expand a foam around the edges of the box to seal it to the ceiling and wall

But the co2 generator still runs a lot.

Bathroom gets warm, and clones suffer.

Summer heat sucks

this room kicked ass

final harvest was 6 lbs 11.75 oz of dried bud
I also had 4+ oz of very slightly moldy/mildewy bud that formed during drying. My bad for keeping it so thick on the screen.

so thats 7#

Then I dropped a light weeks ago and 2 plants died. These two plants covered a 4x4 area, half the table. These were big ass plants, kind of scrogged out. I have no doubt they would have produced another pound or more.

Plus I trimmed over July 4th weekend and just ran out of time. I trimmed the bigger solid bud first, then worked my way down the plants. I threw away all of the lower stuff on the bottoms. It wasn't small popcorn, but it wasn't large solid buds. It looked premature. I easily threw away several ounces, maybe a pound of bud.

Factor in the CO2 ran at 500 PPM most of the time because I had some type of room leak that drained it too quickly at 1200PPM.

This room was easily a 2# per light room


Now the bad part.

Its all coming down. Security issues. Nothing emergency, just some comments here and there from people mean it must come down

Epic yield. Sorry you had to rip it down, but better safe than sorry.

so what were your temps in that room, without aircooled hoods? what were dimensions...im tring to design my 4kw sealed room and dont want to run into problems with co2 leakage in the ducting, etc.....guess i gotta get some expand foam?

I had a 25k BTU AC and I kept the room at 85 lights on, 75 during lights off.

The leakage may have come from the central A/C. I had an intake/exhaust vent in this room, it was the master bedroom. I covered the vents with plastic but I suspect the intake vent leaked.

I didnt run the central A/C till it got really hot, then when I did I noticed the house started smelling.

So I think I was loosing Co2 through the central AC

Plus the ductboard vent sucked ass. I should have made it from wood or sheetmetal.

The room was roughly 12x16

it would be nice to see you do the next one a lot less half assed and safer. i hope that if you burn your shit down on accident that nobody else will be impacted :/

THUMBS UP

wow what a besutiful grow and set up sad to see it go best of luck and hope to see u producing like that again!!...what kind of blubs are u using in the ballast?

1971 said:

it would be nice to see you do the next one a lot less half assed and safer. i hope that if you burn your shit down on accident that nobody else will be impacted :/

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I hope you are never in my position, having a large op (well now not so large compared to a couple recent threads here) producing 25+ # a month, then having your world turned upside down and loosing almost everything you own.

Then having to start all over with the pieces that werent taken, new contacts, no strains etc. See what you do. But if you paid attention, I rewired everything as soon as I had the money. That op was 100% safe after it was rewired.

I have posted several grow logs here under different names and with the proper budget I am capable of alot better


All that equipment was transferred to a med friendly state and is mostly installed. by the end of today, one table will be running, and running some nice strains that have already been received


Bulbs were some old hortilux and then the cheapest ones the hydro store had, Ultra Sun I think. They were around 50 for 1000 HPS. I bought a light meter to do some comparison right before the decision to take it down.

I may take a few pics of the new op but no log

you wanna sell them Radiants? i need 4...

BTW, shit happens... good on you for rolling with the punches

that was an impressively constructed grow, my friend. loved how you vent the lights, very professional.

good call on not hesitating about tearing everything down at the slightest wind of trouble. people will tell you everything you need to hear if you only LISTEN

Marshall said:

All that equipment was transferred to a med friendly state and is mostly installed. by the end of today, one table will be running, and running some nice strains that have already been received

Click to expand...

Shcrews said:

you wanna sell them Radiants? i need 4...

Click to expand...

..

Good end to a Awesome thread.. glad you got out and back into a calm place .. peace your way Marshall

Glad you made it to a good place, and good luck on your new grow.