BruceLeeroy's 432 watt t5 aeroflo ScrOGlog - afgooey

First off, thank you for reading this, and thank you ICMag! I should have included in the title that this is a retrospective diary, it's all over but the harvest and smoking!

The Cast
Afgooey (so I was told, more on this later)
SunBlaze 8 – T5 HO Florescent fixture – 432 watts
7 – 4000k T5 bulbs
1 – 3000k T5 bulb (what’s life without a little experimentation)
General Hydroponics Aeroflo 18 w/ pump, res, pots etc etc


The Props
½” PVC pieces and couplings
5’ x 100’ Mylar Canvas
1” x 2” Alder
Cotton String
Can Filter 18”
4” Vortex fan 175 CFM
Various power cords and ducting
Other miscellaneous paraphernalia and idiosyncratic knickknacks.

Miscelaneous Crew
General Hydroponics Flora Series
1” Grodan Rockwool cubes
Hydroton clay pellets
Various power cords and ducting

The Backstory
I am a medical Patient that has been growing on and off for more than a decade (where has the time gone!) and I’ve spent the last 7 or so years growing trees.


Due to developments that occurred last spring, my tree room had to be torn down and became a haven for a mistreated teenager (my nephew) that my wife and I essentially adopted. Needless to say this was a sad occasion but a sacrifice I was willing to make. I managed to make my last harvest last for about a year before I was once again faced with the harsh realities of the marketplace.

I found myself longingly eyeing every bedroom of the house with images of sugar buds dancing in my head. Then one morning, as I was standing in my closet seeking accoutrement in a morning fog, I thought to myself… Damn… That’s a really big closet!

I knew my wife would never give it up. It’s a large walk in closet, around 8 feet deep, a little over 5 feet wide. The only thing keeping it from being perfect was that it had shelving limiting my available height to 5 feet and a perpetual heat issue in the room it’s located in. So I spent a few days and weeks sucking up to the wife and dropped the bomb.

“Babe, can I have the back 2 feet of the closet?” From her rapid agreement I can only assume she wanted the pot back as much as I did, and we set out to rearrange the closet. While rearranging I realized some things.

The first thing I had to come to grips with was that due to bolted in and painted over shelving, unless I wanted to tear the entire closet apart and remodel it, I was going to be very limited in space. I also was going to have to take into consideration that the air being pulled into the space would be roughly 80-85 degrees in the height of the summer. I mulled over repeatedly what my options were. I settled on doing something crazy that I had never personally tried before, though I know others have, and locked onto growing with an 8 bulb t5 fixture and doing either a SOG or ScrOG. I also prefer Hydro just because 80% of my experience is with hydro. I also live in Mite heaven any time I fire up the dirt.

I started figuring what my hydro options were. I could have cheaply built my own setup, but had a bit of cash laying around and figured what the hell I’ll do it the lazy way. I am after all an American. I needed a system that I was familiar with and that could be versatile… useful as both a SOG and ScrOG as the occasion warranted. Because I had previous aeroflo experience, and because they had put out a new 18 site model that literally fit into my space perfectly with 2 inches to spare, I went with that.

The florescent fixture I settled on was the Sunblaze 8 bulb t5 setup. Nice light, has switches that control groups of 4 bulbs. I like the light. Upon reflection, due to the high summer heat I should have gone with a model that had air cooling options, but if heat isn’t a problem it is a very nice light. Don’t let the florescent part fool you… 432 watts of ANY kind of light puts off heat!

I should mention here that I had a lot of reasons for doing this closet setup. One reason is that as a patient, I’m allowed to . Another reason is that as I am sure many of you have realized, growing of any sort, not just Marijuana, is an addiction. Nurturing growing living things is a reward all its own, even if it’s not covered in crystallized goodness that makes your mouth water! This was an opportunity to explore, experiment, and do things (ScrOG, Floro flowering) that I’ve never really had the space, time, effort or money to do. As such, much of what I did was not optimum and I’m well aware of that. For me, for this setup… to wildly paraphrase Persig… It’s as much about the journey as the destination.

I digress; man this will be a wall of text when I’m done. Anyway once I decided on the aeroflo, I realized due to the height of the unit, I was only going to have about 20 inches of space. That was the final selling point on the Floro system, and after that system (sunblaze) was installed I was left with roughly 16 inches of growable space.

I searched high. I searched low. Nowhere could I find a grow tent that fit the dimensions I had. So with pothead like inventiveness, my wife and I set out to build our own. We used ½” PVC, and if I did it over again I’d use ¾” just because the ½” is a little too bendy for comfort once you start hanging can filters and light fixtures from it.



Then with some magic from my wife and her sewing machine, we put together the tent. Queue 2001 theme song please…


We ran the intake in from the top left and the exhaust out of the far right side as seen in this pic after it was installed into the closet.

We then used sleeves to blackout the intake and exhaust holes, connected the exhaust to a 4” Vortex blower and vented it into the ceiling.


The inside of the exhaust hose got connected to a 12 inch can filter. God I love those things, and after years of using the giant 36” once…. The 12” is SO CUTE!. As a medical patient It wasn’t totally necessary to rid ourselves of all smell, but due to being in my closet the last thing we needed was work clothes reeking like fresh herb!(The light in this pic is just a shop light hung for lighting purposes)

At this point things kind of hit a fast forward. A friend had some clones of an amazingly dank strain that he was told was Afgooey. I’ve heard it called Gallatin Green as well. He agreed to make a few cuttings for me. We were after 6 to ScrOG in a 2’x4’ area, but he ran into problems in the process of cloning and was able to give us 3 very sickly clones. Two of the three were suffering from various levels of stem rot and stress. He was using an aerocloner and it wasn’t working too well. I told him of my rockwool method and how I’ve never had less than 97% success with clones and talked him into giving me 8 fresh cuts to make my own clones, which I took home and promptly killed 5/8 of them by frying them with a too hot seedling pad. Which goes to show the wisdom of Quentin Terantino’s line in Four Rooms “The less one makes declarative statements, the less likely one is to look foolish in retrospect.” Ted was right. It was quite profound.
I got home with the clones and luckily enough my aeroflo had arrived, so I set that up, put the three sickly clones into it, and started the others rooting. The ScrOG screen I built was just a frame of 1x2’s with holes drilled and threaded with cotton twine every 2”.

Here you can really see the stem rot and sad shape of these cuttings


With the installation of the SunBlaze when it arrived 2 days later, it was game on. Now I had to get these three to survive and try my first ever ScrOG!

Day 7 AL (After Light)
Ok, so already can see a problem coming. 2/3 of these clones are hideously bad, and 1 is healthy. PPMs will be around 600 for now, PH of between 5.6-5.8. The Healthy clone has exploded and is rapidly growing up, with shockingly fast growth under the T5’s! The other two have done almost nothing as they strain to cling to life and recover.

Day 14 AL
The babies have their own legs! The clones I took and didn’t cook (future poet?) have now rooted and are ready to join the table. The others are looking good enough now that I don’t want to start over so I rearranged to make room for them on one end. The largest plant received its first tie down today; the other two are recovering nicely though you can see the damage to their stems from the rot. PPM’s have been bumped up to 1000. Watching for signs of burn but these girls seem to like it heavy!

Day 21 AL* (lights put into 12/12 today)
These sexy ladies are really starting to stretch their limbs! All signs of damage have disappeared, I’ve been tying and defoliating like crazy… 10-20 leaves each day and tying between 4-7 shoots over each day. At this point the discussion of defoliation being good or bad is irrelevant, if I don’t do it they’ll choke themselves out. The growth on an aeroflo is always impressive! I’ve now bumped up the PPM to 1800… If I see any damage I’ll step it back quick.



Day 28 AL – 1 week into transition
The amount of defoliation is getting ridiculous. I’m falling behind…. It could get ugly. Every day when I’m done the tying and pruning the poor girls look trampled, and every time the next day they explode into a new wave of bushy growth. Space is getting limited now, hope I didn’t cut the timing too late or I may run out of space.

Day 35 AL – 2nd week of transition
The first signs of flowering are just now starting to show. I’m still tying over and defoliating regularly. I’ve never really defoliated before so I’m worried I’m taking too much but don’t think so. Now it’s all about trying to keep the bud sites from getting too shaded. Man did I not understand the amount of work involved with ScrOG!



Day 42 AL – 1st week of flowering
These girls don’t seem to want to rush into puberty, but we’re finally starting to get some Q-tip action. Looks like I may have not quite filled the screen to its fullest potential but part of the trouble I’ve been having is that due to their supercrop-esque early growth, the center of each plant is getting so thick I am having trouble keeping them thinned. Oh well, next time I’ll start with better clones and we should have a bit more luck at filling up the screen.

Day 49 AL – 2nd week of flowering
At risk of sounding like a dirty old perv…. These girls are really filling in! (cackle). They had a little bit of stretch to them yet, most likely due to high heat. It’s now late June and looking like a spicy summer ahead. Temps are running in the 85-90’s both lights out and lights on. I knew this would be a problem going in… there is no way to get cool air into the room short of buying another air conditioner, but our poor little house is already running at capacity, our breakers have banded together and declared no more work on their circuit! Too much juice already running from aquariums, TV's, cable boxes, computers, lights, guitar amps… not much I can do.

Day 56 AL – 3 week flowering
Should now be finished tying up. If I had filled the screen as much as I had originally hoped and they weren’t so think I would have been finished a week ago but it’s my first ScrOG!

Day 63 AL - 4 week of flowering
Crystal production is under way and these girls are working double shifts! This strain is very resinous, no way to know if it’s truly Afgooey or not but such is life! Bud’s are starting to form up and looking nice, they filled the screen better than I thought they would. There are a few shoots rising above the rest I’ll have to consider tying over to keep them even. Slight burn on the tips of the leaves from PPM’s around 1800, I’ve stepped them down to about 1300. I’m starting to up the PH to right about 6 to make N less available and P and K more available.





Day 70- 5th week flowering
Is there anything greater than flowering pot? I don’t think so. There is just a visceral, primal stirring that grabs ahold of me when I stick my head in and take a deep breath while perusing my babies! One thing I’m really enjoying about this experience is that doing a grow like this really takes you on to a more personal level with your girls. Trees will always have a large spot in my heart but it really is a significantly different experience for me doing something like this. No matter what the results I’m lovin it!

Day 77 - 6th week flowering
The worst part of any grow is watching them finish up… they are so delicious! And of course the market in my area is currently very sad… green bud, very leafy and poorly cared for. Makes it tough! Starting to see some foxtailing, my guess is from the heat… 85-90 constantly, these poor ladies haven’t cooled off in months. I can already tell the quality will be there under floro… the question is will the weight?



Day 84 -7th week flowering
Coming to a close now, couple weeks left. The resin production is yummy, the smell is heavenly… The thick nugs of yesteryear don’t seem to be in the cards. They just don’t seem to be thickening up nearly what they would under MH. I expected that, still somewhat disappointing. I guess it’s not the size that matters, it’s the potency right? 

Day 92 -8th week flowering
Starting to flush now. New fox tails have appeared all over, either its strain related or more likely heat, After scoping today I don’t think I can wait for the fox tails to mature as I’m already at about 20% amber. Looks like I’ll have some immature foxtails on my buds! I don’t think the yield is going to be very good, the buds just aren’t very thick under floro. I’ll flush them for 7 days and then chop chop chop! I couldn’t bring myself to thin out the underbrush cause it’s all hash food! I also have to admit I’m eager to restart the table with lower fall temps and clones that start out healthy rather than looking like they’re about to die.

And now for the money shots. Some of these were actually a few weeks before harvest, some during the harvest. you can see the tips burnt in a few of the pics, I caught it quick but in the Aeroflo system even if you catch it quick the damage happens fast! You can also see some foxtailing on a few from the heat.

More of the final days. You can see on the picture of the under-screen that I didn't clear out under the screen. I know the arguments for clipping that all off... I couldn't bring myself to do it. the last is a pic of a bud from under the screen. They were surprisingly well developed... Made for some excellent hash food.

The Chop. So Sad to kill my girls I spent so much time carefully pruning and tying and guiding that it is hard to see them go Most of the above screen cola's were about the size of a 12 ounce soda bottle, the ones that got a bit more shade were about the size of a pocket watch as you can see. After growing trees for years it was kind of a shock/ego blow to not get liter soda bottle sized cola's but it all worked out in the end! Next time i should be able to do a bit better in getting all the cola's prime light, this time i had a few that were a bit bigger and made it hard to keep them all perfectly even.

Looks real nice Bruce.

I was wondering how far do you have your lights from the canopy?

Other than ambient temp, it sounds like that fan is doing a good job at ventilation if the temps are the same when the lights are off.

Have you seen the Solar Wind T5s? The 8 bulb has a 6" reflector. I was tinkering with the idea of slamming the t5 down right above the canopy. Also, Id prune the bottoms of the plant to focus on main cola production. SOG style 2x4.

Are you going to post up yield numbers ?

Hey BB thanks for checkIng it out and your kind words!

The fan did as well as expected.... Lights were on at night and ambient room temp was 80ish so with lights on the box ran around 85 at the canopy and 90 at the tops of the buds, lights off ambient was 85-90 and that's where the box stayed. This next run temps will be much better.

With fluoros I kept the lights as close to the tips as I could without touching them to the bulbs. This had my bulbs about 6 inches above the screen.

Yeah I warred with myself long and hard about trimming below screen... I didn't cause I figured it'd be more hash food. I think this next run I will just to see the difference firsthand.

Anyway I'm doing the bubble thang today but once that's finished I'll put up some harvest pics and finalish numbers!

Doing this type of grow (ScrOG w/Fluoro) has definitely been fun and educational! Thanks again for checking it out and offering feedback!

Also as far as the air cooled vho's... I thought about it and in the end went with the HO's cause of the 50% power draw... The circuit that setup is on won't handle a other 400 watts :/

Some stripped down goodies