Vertical in narrow tent?

My tent is 2'x3'x5 feet. I don't see a way to go vertical.

What haven't I seen?

Lol with such a tent, I don't see any options Besides vertical!

ttystikk said:

Lol with such a tent, I don't see any options Besides vertical!

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I have one, 150w hps and a couple of fixtures that hold CFLs.

I use a tub that holds 8 pots in a top feed system and there isn't much room in between those pots.

Straight up you go, then!

ttystikk said:

Straight up you go, then!

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LOL, I'm still not seeing it. I don't have enough room in between my plants to use that HPS. It will burn my leaves.

I guess I could take off the reflectors and let those CFL's hang down in between the plants. Is that what you mean?

I don;t think I have enough room in between my plants. I took a photo of my grow tub. Help me think this through please.

I only have 12" from stem to stem. I'm not sure I have enough room without the leaves being too close to the light no matter how tight i prune back.

What do you think?

I think you should invest in a good LED light. With the space you could run a P300 (One of the lights I use, which covers 3x2 for bloom btw) and just do a normal scrog. If maximizing your space is what you're going for that's what I'd do. Wouldn't have to worry about that leaf burning either.

Destroth_LED said:

I think you should invest in a good LED light. With the space you could run a P300 (One of the lights I use, which covers 3x2 for bloom btw) and just do a normal scrog. If maximizing your space is what you're going for that's what I'd do. Wouldn't have to worry about that leaf burning either.

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I may have to move to another water system if I went vertical with HPS and I'm not sure I want to give up my Dutch buckets.

I think I will look at adding CFL's down low. I have plenty of CFL's and that way I could keep my top canopy and my dutch buckets. CFL side lighting might accomplish much of the same thing as going vertical with HPS and I think I can get those CFL's in between my plants without burning them.

It's hard to justify spending money on lights when you have lights. This is only my second grow and I haven't' got much use out of anything I have already bought or made.

I know its been about a week since you last posted so im not sure if your still interested but yeah I have a little vert grow in a narrow tent and youd definitely just need a different watering system, if you want to keep your dutch buckets you could use them for veg and then find an alternative like single autopots or something for flower. Its not a bad thing either I really like having a veg space separate from flower, it gives me a lot more control over my flowering schedule as you can leave some plants to just veg for a while if they arent as big as you want without holding the whole harvest back. But essentially so long as you can train your plants behind 3 screens that are along the walls of your tent you should have no problems running a vert in that space

rnint said:

I know its been about a week since you last posted so im not sure if your still interested but yeah I have a little vert grow in a narrow tent and youd definitely just need a different watering system, if you want to keep your dutch buckets you could use them for veg and then find an alternative like single autopots or something for flower. Its not a bad thing either I really like having a veg space separate from flower, it gives me a lot more control over my flowering schedule as you can leave some plants to just veg for a while if they arent as big as you want without holding the whole harvest back. But essentially so long as you can train your plants behind 3 screens that are along the walls of your tent you should have no problems running a vert in that space

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Hi Rnint. I have all my plants now in those 14" tree pots and all are in their final destination. Growing a vertical canopy makes a lot of sense but not enough sense to make me give up my dutch buckets.

Yeah that makes a lot of sense, as im looking at the pics of your dutch buckets though I feel like if you had took two plants out of the middle next time and just grew 6 instead of 8 you could probably run an hps vertically over the space where the two plants would be missing if you wanted, just for future reference incase you come back to the vertical idea. My 250W bulb is about 3-4 inches from the plants on the sides and I havent seen any burn from it on the leaves so your 150W should be totally fine.

Really 3 or 4 "? I can't get my 150w closer than 8" or I get leaf curl. I just tried it and had to back off.

Here is what my tent looked like last run. We have a great hobby.

Earlyriser76 said:

Really 3 or 4 "? I can't get my 150w closer than 8" or I get leaf curl. I just tried it and had to back off.

Here is what my tent looked like last run. We have a great hobby.

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Haha indeed we do! And yeah its weird, my first plant I put in already had leaf curl like a motherfucker so there wasnt much I could do and it did burn a bit despite being about 7 inches away from the bulb or so, the second one I put in I had the light further away maybe 10 inches and have been moving it closer day by day to where I am now and still no burn or leaf curl, looks damn strange seeing the plant further from the bulb with mad leaf curl just everywhere and then this plant only 3-4 inches away doing fine. Nature is weird sometimes haha.

I had some leaf curl last time and the leaves never opened up. No worries as I defoliated them shortly after. I grew about 12 oz of leaves last grow. I'm trying to grow 12 oz of bud this time.

I have been thinking about ways to add cfls in between those rows of plants. It's time to get more serious about doing that.

I'm also trying to run 12/12 from everything now. 12/12 from seed right now and as soon as I can 12/12 from clone. I really don't know how they will grow or what kind of room I will have between plants if I don't top.

I killed many plants before I figured out one way that works for me. Watering systems are tough for me. My current system uses an external rez outside the tent so nutes and PH hold stable for a week or more. To water 8 plants. I place water in one 5 gallon rez once a week. The pump and timers do the rest.

Soil did ok, DWC or bubbleponics or anything that held water in the tent didn't work well because of the heat. The external rez fixed all the heat/light/air/rot/sludge/ph shift issues.

I didn't buy the system. I built it. I went to Home depot, bought the parts, then figured out the rest. It's actually pretty cool. I should post some pics. It's a top feed bato dutch bucket type system but the pots are Hempy styled with a 2" rez in each tree pot. It's still a drain to recycle system. It's setup to have each pot use it's own waterfall aeration system but if it doesn't splash over the top of the plant, it's a fairly closed system.

My fastest growth comes from constant watering. I top feed 24/7 even though the roots are sitting in the rez. The 2" rez is getting refreshed constantly and so are the roots out of the rez in the perlite/vermiculite surrounding them. My plants grew very fast last time with a low level of effort on my part. I just talked to them, added nutes to the rez once a week and moved the lights as needed.

It would be hard to give up my system because it worked and I can never go back to watering by hand after this method. I think I will just look at adding some CFL's for now.

You can put the HPS in a corner and use 3/4 of the tent. Basically a vertical colosseum sorta setup. I've thought pretty long and hard about this problem, except using significantly brighter lights than that. You still gain a lot of real estate.

Alternately, you can replace the HPS with T5's. You can get ballasts that don't have reflectors but just wires running between the ends so that you can get 360 coverage. I saw some guy setup a grow in some big water drums using those and a vertical SOG with rockwool slabs. I didn't ever see how it turned out, it was posted here. But it was a very neat concept and I'd bet his yields were stellar per watt. Also stackable.

Look an old build I did.. It might help.. Yields pretty good. .9GPW average. With good genetics I think I could easily get past 1gpw.

https://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?p=1296861#post1296861

I was thinking of doing something like this again but with 2015 technology.

Here is what I setup today. I'm trying to run these 12/12 from seed. There are 4 x 2700k cfls in the 2 reflectors and 3 x 2700k CFL down the center.

How could I improve this?

GrowerGoneWild said:

Look an old build I did.. It might help.. Yields pretty good. .9GPW average. With good genetics I think I could easily get past 1gpw.

https://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?p=1296861#post1296861

I was thinking of doing something like this again but with 2015 technology.

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Smart way to do it for sure.

Do you keep the side facing the lights trimmed? Remove fan leaves etc and try to grow clean stems with just bud sites?

Earlyriser76 said:

Smart way to do it for sure.

Do you keep the side facing the lights trimmed? Remove fan leaves etc and try to grow clean stems with just bud sites?

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I tuck leaves to the other side of the screen till it becomes a problem.. problems with airflow, bleaching, necrotic, those get pruned. Because the light does not evenly light a plant like in nature, there will be some manipulation and pruning involved because of the limited direction of light however the practice of cleaning stems to expose flowering sites IMHO is not recommended.

GrowerGoneWild said:

I tuck leaves to the other side of the screen till it becomes a problem.. problems with airflow, bleaching, necrotic, those get pruned. Because the light does not evenly light a plant like in nature, there will be some manipulation and pruning involved because of the limited direction of light however the practice of cleaning stems to expose flowering sites IMHO is not recommended.

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How would you improve what I show?