FAUX wardrobe- first time stealth with 400watt hps

Yarr. This be my first grow. which means please comment I need all the halp i can get

I have built, from a home depot style 72 tall by 48 wide wardrobe, a stealth cabinet with faux front doors and a velcro/latch style hidden rear entrance.

i am planning to grow 4-6x 3 foot tall plants under 400 watt hps cooltube. air sucked in through a hanging 3' carbon/charcoal filter by a 250cfm inline fan hanging from bungee cords. i used a pulley system to hang the lamp and reflector from the main support (a 2x3 drilled as a boom to hang things from.) That home depot particle board is not strong enough to support the cabinet structurally by itself. infact i strengthened the cabinet on 3 different levels and glued the front doors shut with construction adhesive. i then sprayed flat black "protestor plasticard?" cut and sized appropriately to cover the gap in the doors; for that REAL wardrobe appearance! It's also very important for the rear entrance type boxes to have castors as with the soil, plants, equipment, it all adds up in weight; i thought i would be able to pivot the cabinet with furniture sliding skids, HA. Was i ever wrong. castors are the best - a must for turning it around on the fly.

i wrapped the plant area with panda film. the whole cabinet is fairly lightproof but as of writing this, i can turn around and notice light through some obvious cracks. Noise level of the wardrobe is surprisingly quiet. During the day next to my already running 24/7 450watt computer it's nearly identical - with all the other noisy shit going on in teh neighbourhood/vicinity. Writing this now at 1am, it's really obvious like a refrigerator... :/

Back to the air, the expelled air reaches a chamber for fabric softener sheets that leave a clean clothes smell. The intake is a home made deviation between hard 6 inch intake pipe and an ac current mini fan taken from a generic oscillating fan. (some duct tape and perforated strapping later and it's an intake fan with 2 speed, and off, controller, also hanging from a bungee cord). The intake fan sucks through a gasket in the side of the wardrobe, all lightproof. That same piping on the exterior side can have a longer extension of dryer ducting attached, also home made. Right next to teh cabinet is a sliding patio glass door, to the outside! cold air intake

for the cuts i hope to have, and future seedlings, i put aside a 20x20" plot of space under cfls(currently i have 4 cool and 2 warm spectrum cfls)

hopefully with the hot bulbs and the cold air intake, ill run less than 80f. i havent run the 400watt and seedling chamber cfls and the fans to see the overall temp, but one can hope. I dont plan to run any co2 devices, as the whole unit refreshes air so quickly id figure the output of co2 would be moot.

got ph up and down, but my local tap water is ph'd at 6.2 so ill just leave it the way it is. I plan to use a standard soil medium with few nutes included, and ill gradually add a vegetative followed by a flowering nute, and ill use carbo load all teh way through. Added to teh soil will be perlite/small bit of sphagnum moss, and wormcastings. of course after i get the seedlings going in the jiffy things.


Well that's it for now. hope yall followed that,

ill try to update as soon as possible! indeed i will because this is such a great hobby. only needlepoint doesnt include jailtime in its risks..

april 15 - i purchased 10 seeds from a local seed bank and am currently plate on plate germinating them.

april 17 - 2 have 5mm long taproots and am putting them in jiffy things in a domed bin under my cfls in the seedling chamber. 18/6

Look up super cropping or scrog method. With that light your gonna get nice tall plants. With super cropping or scrog you can get them to be very bushy and max your yield. +rep great design. Goodluck bro. I have faith in you ;D

Madhadda said:

Look up super cropping or scrog method. With that light your gonna get nice tall plants. With super cropping or scrog you can get them to be very bushy and max your yield. +rep great design. Goodluck bro. I have faith in you ;D

Click to expand...

thanks so much madhadda! the only problem is our bane. i woke up fairly ripped and sewed 2 seeds from the 8 somewhere in the others' 8 spots...er save the 2 early sprouters which were in jiffys.

new update, i dont like jiffy pots. maybe i will ...grow... to like them..

i suppose if both seeds take off it will be too late to take one of them out and put it into a different pot? if not, and i must cut them, ouch.

by the way, if anyone with the answer reads this, is the plate method of germination really "better"? it may be easier, but it's such a pain in the arse. and i dont live in el tropica, warmish temperature for them to sit is hard to replicate - even inside my suite. I actually had the plate inside my cupboard right above a puck light that i had to consistantly moniter as it warmed the wood that the plate sat on. unfortunately it got pretty fricken hot to my surprise. What a pain. Id like to try sewing them from seed without taproot next time.

april 18

- put jiffy pots into biodegradable pots and 2 have sprouted! But none of the other biodegradable pots have yielded any sprouts yet...

- im cup style germinating some atomic haze right now.

give them time, they will sprout .. Good luck. Do you have larger pots ready for them? What size?

Madhadda said:

give them time, they will sprout .. Good luck. Do you have larger pots ready for them? What size?

Click to expand...

i need to buy some bigger pots, i was thinking about throwing them from these into something around the size of 3-4 gallon pots. Let them do their growing business for the rest of their life type of deal..

how soon do you think it will take for them to outgrow these pots?

Nice..I'll Be watching

april 22 - germinated 8 atomic haze seeds and have put them under the cfls as well.


Hoping out of 8 random seeds and 8 atomic haze ill get maybe 3 and 3 females? this is my game plan anyways. I hope i wont have too many females to accomodate...i only have room for maybe 7 plants on the high side. Else ill have to rent out a few pots in a friend's growspace for the extra females while i build another growcab to accomdate more on the whole


ninjaedit - check out the pic of my 2 allstars; theyre growing so much faster than the rest of the group, and one is starting to go bright green. However, i am starting to feed them nutes, superthrive and some organic vege stage additive. 1/4 str. wormcastings already added to the soil when mixed.

april 26 - im not quite sure what to do today, obviously, the plants have stretched to find more light, so i took them from my sprouting chamber and put into my main chamber under the 400w hps. Hopefully the plants will like it better than the 6 cfls.

2 of the plants have stretched to the point where they grew large leaves and fell over. Im thinking about cutting the leaves halfway to lessen the weight - amirite?

some have changed colour a bit, to a lighter green, i wonder if they yearn for some more nitrogen...

and onto the pics...

i made a help post in the plant problems section regarding the curling of leaves possibly from lack of humidity or too much heat?: https://www.rollitup.org/marijuana-plant-problems/193720-leaf-curl-heat-help-pics.html


may 13 - finally have the cabinet back up and running in the new apartment. 2 bedroom, one bedroom for us, one bedroom for them...and computers.

i have done some serious work on the cabinet since my last posting, the temperatures in the cabinet were reaching 113F and 20% humidity - so that was not going to work. The air flowing through the cooltube is no longer filtered first through the activated charcoal filter, my system simply couldnt move enough hot air AND filter. So i split the systems, cooltube, and filtering - they no longer are together on the same line.

the cabinet is now operating at 90F with about 35-45% humidity(wet towel hanging)

I think i will do SOG technique next, but this batch i will continue to hone my skills, maybe even try some topping/pruning - any input anyone? are they even old enough to start topping?

dam those are still hight temps. you neeed to extract more air from the vegg room. ideal temps are %75-85

your plants also look like they have sufferd from the heat. just try to lower the temps but if you cant try and mist the leaves frequently to try to get eveporation to cool down the plants.

also dont put the plants under the hps for vegg. they will just stretch.

best of luck. you seem to have a nice set up here, just need more ventalation

is that even a hps? the light from the pict looks like its a mh