10000 square foot Grow!

K11ng

Member
Ok well I'm sure the title has got your attention and i just had a few questions on the best way to fulfill a 10000 sq/ft facility?

Basically I'm gonna keep it short and simple and hope all of you knowledgeable ppl can give me some great ideas.

I have set up some investors to do a facility in Colorado and my job is to give them a blue print of the grow setup. I have ideas of where I'm gonna go with it and have a few mentors in as well , but i would love to hear some of your guys ideas.

I have 6 rooms of a total of 10000 sq/ft.
I have 230+ lights

obviously I'm looking to get maximum yield so with this in mind what would you consider the best scenario for this facility scenario?

questions for best possible way to run this size facility:
how many plants per light?
how big should the pots be?
should i use coco/perlite? soil?
best way to feed this big of a grow?
should i consider a custom hydro system? ( leaning towards this way )

I am just looking for your guys opinions on how you would do it if you had this space?
any info is highly appreciated.
 

kadajett

Active Member
I will be back to help, I am interested and jealous of your situation. As I have no room to grow :) Hope I can help a bit. After work tomorrow lol
 

Dr.Grower

Member
40 lights per room perpetual harvest high density growing in a custom ebb and flow shove as many plants as you can under each light
step 2 grow
step 3 ???
step 4 PROFIT / put the mexican cartels out of buissness
 

kadajett

Active Member
230+ is not a typo? I was thinking 23 was a lot lol. That is way to large scale for me o_O like a multimillion dollar project with such a high chance of being caught it's crazy. Again, I will give you any advice I can because this is intense!
 

kadajett

Active Member
How many hands do you have? If you have a small group of dedicated people, you can pull off a soil grow. and if you are up to the work, you can mix a few thousand gallons of subcools super soil :P As far as how many plants per light, I have no idea but the more light they have the faster they will grow. You also have to think about keeping everything cool and at the perfect humidity. and generating co2 for the whole grow. Have you done a small grow first? I would recommend this greatly
 

K11ng

Member
230+ is not a typo? I was thinking 23 was a lot lol. That is way to large scale for me o_O like a multimillion dollar project with such a high chance of being caught it's crazy. Again, I will give you any advice I can because this is intense!
Our concerns are not being caught , its making the facility run efficiently. We have a team of lawyers to deal with law enforcment. The state of colorado allows us to do so and as far as the other guyes well they have to go thru obama first and by that time ill have jonny cokran on speeddial
 

K11ng

Member
How many hands do you have? If you have a small group of dedicated people, you can pull off a soil grow. and if you are up to the work, you can mix a few thousand gallons of subcools super soil :P As far as how many plants per light, I have no idea but the more light they have the faster they will grow. You also have to think about keeping everything cool and at the perfect humidity. and generating co2 for the whole grow. Have you done a small grow first? I would recommend this greatly
Yes i have a experience with my personal grow. Im running a perpetual grow ebb and flow. The thing is i am running leds and all my experience and knowledge is based on my specific grow which is not to common, for example i use glass marbles as my medium!
So im actually looking for advice from you guyes who know hids, soil, and more commercial grow knowledge. I was thinking a soil grow with a custom hydroponic feed system? I need some advice lot of ideas floating around.
 

Murfy

Well-Known Member
shouldn't you know more about this-

before getting investors involved. hire one person with more experience and risk your neck to them.
 

K11ng

Member
shouldn't you know more about this-

before getting investors involved. hire one person with more experience and risk your neck to them.
You make a great point, i am talking with alot of ppl at the moment and trust me the ppl involved are not going in this without making sure every aspect is not looked over and over again. Im just looking for any info at the moment, from the public.

Thankyou for your concerns i would love to hear your thoughts as well!
 

kadajett

Active Member
This has to be your full time job, and it is awesome that this is legal, speaking of Colorado, the lady and I are going up there this summer to see if we like it enough to move out there. :P

The size of this setup withh return your income literally after your first harvest. But with the amount of space you have, I would recommend a perpetual grow with about 4 rooms. maybe one room for seedlings. Each room you will have a giant garbage can reservoir with the specific solution for that stage of the plants life.

The first room which will be the beginning veg room will be mostly water. the nest room will have like half strength nute solution. With slight flowering solution in it. Seriously trace amounts.
the third room will have flowering solution in it half strength. and the last room will be the flush room :P say they are all in 2 month cycles and you always have more plants in the rotation. Easy perpetual grow.

How you decide to water is up to you. I would just get a hose with a nozzle but you would have to water by hand obviously. Or you can use your experience with ebb&flow to make a drip system. Soil is much easier to take care of a large numbe rof plants so that should stay. You would have to really carefully measure the feeding schedule. Somehow lol
 

mccumcumber

Well-Known Member
If you're actually being serious... this is what you could do:

First, get solar pannels. It's not even an option for 230+ lights, if you don't get them, you will go bankrupt within a month. I'm assuming you already know how to take care of climate, so I won't elaborate on that.

room 1: mom and dad room
room 2: veg room
room 3: breeding room
room 4-5: flower room
room 6: dry and cure room

You are going to want to keep moms and dads for breeding, and use cuttings from the mom to supply your flower room. You will have twice as many moms as you do dads. Take cuttings your from half of moms once a week, let veg for a month, switch to harvest room. You will harvest once a week. Take cuttings from your other moms and your dads once a month, put into your breeding room. Your initial cuttings should be taken on month after you veg your starting seeds, unless your hellbent on starting from clone, starting from seed is a way better option in your circumstance.

Your breeding room will be under 12/12 the whole time and will be split into as many sections as you desire. Say you want to try to cross six different strains, get six different sections and put each parent in their respective rooms for a cross.

9 plants per 1k hid if you have experience with growing, and if you are using horizontal lighting. You may want to look into vertical lighting and light movers. It will greatly reduce the cost of air conditioning, and you get way larger yields. Light movers can be used with horizontal lighting as well, and I highly suggest you do so.

Ebb and flow is fine for small set ups. You are not using a small set up, DWC is the way to go for big time hydro.

Good luck with your big ass grow.
 

MrEDuck

Well-Known Member
How much electricity do you have available? You'd need 500kW to light that space at 50W/sqft. That's over 2,000amps running 240V current. You have 230kW of light available, or just under 1,000amps at 240V. I suppose you could stagger it so half the lights are on at one time to lower your draw but that's still a crazy amount of draw.
As far as the method I would go with some sort of hydro system with a central res to cut down on the workload of watering. Make sure to have a drain in every room. You'll need a big AC and a way to control humidity. I'm not sure what size you would need and how much electricity they would use but I'm sure it's not trivial. Even the pumps and fans you would be running would add up.
 

tommyo3000

Well-Known Member
If you're actually being serious... this is what you could do:

First, get solar pannels. It's not even an option for 230+ lights, if you don't get them, you will go bankrupt within a month. I'm assuming you already know how to take care of climate, so I won't elaborate on that.
Ummm, solar panels to run 230,000 Watts of lighting and 805,000BTUs of cooling for those lights?
and you advocate for DADS in the million dollar room?? R U NUTZ??


It's the blind leading the blind here..


To the OP - Is this space already broken up into rooms? Or can you just use it as two?


You can do it like this bunker in BC:[video=youtube;fA1gHnE2r6M]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA1gHnE2r6M&feature=related[/video]

You need something along the lines of this 20 Shipping COntainer Grow in BC:

[video=youtube;A5rvldFoAo8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5rvldFoAo8[/video]
 

mccumcumber

Well-Known Member
Dads would be in a seperate room buddy, and would be in constant veg. Have you ever bred before, or are you just quick to criticize? He also already said that there are 6 rooms.
Do you really advocate using the same moms over and over again for a grow of that quantity. Especially considering that he's going to have ridiculous amounts of bud being pumped out, the same strain over and over again would result in a shit ton of surplus.
Also, I didn't say power the whole fucking place with solar panels, but he's going to need to get as many as possible. You want to pay the whole electric bill for 230+ lights?
 

COmmjGUY

Member
I have set up a few grows of that size or bigger here in CO. If you want some help PM me your info and maybe we can talk. Personally I have seen the best operations consist of rows of 600w over 1000w (more efficient) and a SOG method.
 

tommyo3000

Well-Known Member
Dads would be in a seperate room buddy, and would be in constant veg. Have you ever bred before, or are you just quick to criticize?
Do you really advocate using the same moms over and over again for a grow of that quantity. Especially considering that he's going to have ridiculous amounts of bud being pumped out, the same strain over and over again would result in a shit ton of surplus.
Also, I didn't say power the whole fucking place with solar panels, but he's going to need to get as many as possible. You want to pay the whole electric bill for 230+ lights?
I don't recall the OP asking for breeding advice. Of course, breeding would necessitate males. But why breed?

Why not take cuttings or, more easily use plant tissue culture to propagate all of those plants?

I'm not an advocate of monoculture. I would advise a mother room with various mothers of various strains. They can be easily cloned or their tissues cultured. You can fit 10,000 tissue culture plantlets on a few shelves...

For the sake of argument, how much money should they spend on solar panels?
Why would spending a few hundred thousand dollars on solar power equipment upfront be better than paying a power bill that's going to run $100K for the first two months?

tommy
 

COmmjGUY

Member
ladies and gents, the solar thing is a huge cost, esp given that a company wants to be profitable asap. This person will be spending tons of dough on electrical construction, carpentry, mechanical, and other little loose ends. Spending cash on solar is a nice idea, but it could be a while before this dispensary has cash for solar. Our mandatory video systems required by CO are over 10k installed ( and a must by July 1). A greenhouse would be proper, but indoors basically needs a talented SOG grower, good genetics, automated irrigation and proactive vs. reactive pest and disease mitigation. automated irrigation cuts your labor down too. We run the whole joint on 2 people and we have ~1000 plants in nutrifield coco.
BTW the power bill is not 50k a month. Even the most wasteful warehouse of 100k watts is not over 10k mo. Its not all about watt, but figure load as well. Example: Grower has 40k watts of bloom light ( 4 rooms 10k a piece, 2 week perpetual harvest). All on for 12hrs equals 40k watt base load. Switch that up to 2 rooms at 00:00-12:00 and the other two rooms at 12:01- 23:59 and that's a base load of 20k watts. The savings on your bill are very noticeable.
 

mccumcumber

Well-Known Member
Well, I highly suggest breeding in a large scale grow up for a few reason. First, you have the room. Second, you become more familiar with what makes up a strain. Third, you always have the chance of coming across an extremely rare pheno that works amazing well under your growing conditions. Make that plant your new mom, and bam, you have a strain that grows best under your conditions and becomes extremely well known as great bud. Like GDP was for Humboldt or OG Kush LA area.

Solar pannels greatly reduce your electric mark on the grid. The feds will very easily notice a dude who is taking up a shit ton of energy from burning fuel. They will check out who the fuck it is taking up all of the energy. If you are not a company that is federally legal, well they will have some problems with that.
Also, I don't know how long he plans on running this for, but you get insane tax breaks after buying solar panels (to the point where you only actually pay for 13% of the panel) after the end of the year. Solar panels pay for themselves after the first year of use anyway, you got to think long term, not short term.
 
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