no wuckin' furries.
If I had to offer general suggestions to a noob, these would be the most significant:
* Build your room so it presents consistently correct conditions; 24-26C @ 30-50%RH with frequent ventilation.
* All locations for grow rooms are different but proper ventilation and thus keeping temps down is the hardest thing to accomplish in the spaces folx usually have available to use as grow ops. Cooltubes are an amazing helpmeet toward that end. There's some light intensity loss through the tube glass but you lose more yield through overtemp than through the 3-5% reduction in light intensity through the Pyrex. Also, when the vast majority of heat from lights is removed by the constant operation of cooltube fans during lights-on, you can significantly derate how much fan power you need for the room's main exhaust blower. Before I used cooltubes, my ~500cu ft flowering room struggled to stay under 26-27C (in summer in particular) even with a monster 250mm, 200W 650CFM exhaust blower assisted by 2x 150mm intake blowers. Could probably get by these days with a single 150mm or 200mm on exhaust and a 150mm on the intake.
* Shoot nutrient strength low rather than high. You will probably find that you get by just fine on half or less of the mfr's recommendations. You lose less yield from slight underfert than you do from nute burning.
* More is not always (in fact, usually not) better with growing plants. There's a bell curve to this- there's 'not enough,' 'just right' and 'dead.' The only exception is lighting, where there's no such thing as too much light, as long as you can maintain room air temps in the 24-26C range.
* Avoid magic sauces. They're mostly water and rarely justify their cost. If there's no solid botanical evidence supporting the use of an additive, skip it. If the mfr doesn't tell you what's in a magic sauce (which is common), you can't establish the scientific evidence necessary to justify the use of any given magic sauce. If you do want to mess with these things, the only way to establish efficacy is to run comparison grows; that means (at least) two crops side by side under the same lighting in the same room. Most grow rooms' conditions are not totally and perfectly climate controlled year-round. They usually vary significantly from crop to crop. Comparisons based on serial crops can be coloured by variations in room conditions. Only side-by-side comparisons eliminate the variations in conditions and give you a clear indication of the merit of any additive. As a rule, find out what works for you and keep doing it the same way. Don't change anything without being strongly convinced that the change is helpful.
* 'Organic' doesn't mean 'good' or even 'better.' In the case of reliable, repeatable, constant rotating harvest ops, inorganic nutes are superior as you can use H2O2 with them. Can't count the number of new growers who get sucked into organics and then have root rot problems they can't solve with 'organic' enzyme-based pathogen controls. Organic nutrients are composed of complex biomatters (e.g. bat guano, worm castings, etc) which the plants can't assimilate directly. You depend upon organic nutrients to break down into N, P & K in the rootzone (at not always well-known rates) before the plants can eat them. May as well use inorganic nutes which are already in that state and also have a solid idea of nutrient strength and bioavailability, as well as have the ability to use (regularly applied) H2O2, which is a sure-fire, every single time solution to root probs.
rotsaruck.
