Greetings RIU!
My brand new basement flowering room (the first of two) is nearly complete! I fired up two of the lights last night.
I created a post in my "Grow Journal", but I want a thread instead. I want to be able to have a conversation with folks that are interested in the project. Besides, I'm used to the forum/thread format anyway.
Below is the post from my "journal":
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I'm setting up a grow room in my basement. This is not my first grow ever, but it has been nearly two decades since I grew. Flower room 1, there are already plans for a second flowering room, is ~6'x12' (slightly bigger). I ordered seven strains from Herbie's and Attitude. I started 3 of each, plus a few of the freebie seeds I was sent, for a total of 24 seeds. I ended up with 9 different strains. I put each strain into its own wet paper towel and ziplock bag. I put them on a plate (don't use plastic as you want it to hold some heat) sitting on the Home Theater PC, in the living room, to warm them up. The next day, many had already begun growing their tap root. The next day, all of them had a root, or at least cracked, so I put them into small rockwool cubes. I put the rockwool under a dome in a small tray on a heating pad. 23/24 have developed into little sprouts. This is probably my favorite growth stage. I mostly use clones, so watching seedlings is a lot of fun. I'm already learning a lot about each strain. I keep detailed notes about each plant so I can keep track of each throughout their growth. This first batch is primarily to select some mothers. I'm hoping the genetic lottery is kind to me. I think I ordered some quality genetics, but we will see. I'm confident there will be at least one or two keepers in the group.
These babies will be transplanted into the Ebb & Grow as soon as I start seeing roots. They are currently about 10 days old, so some are just now starting to send out the second real leaf (not counting cotyledons). I will be vegging these plants for longer than normal to help my yield a little. Before flowering the plants, or sometime shortly after, I will take 2-3 clones from each. I don't trust feminized seeds, so 21 of the original 24 are regularseeds. I germinated 3 femmed freebies to fill in the remaining 3 buckets (it can't hurt to have 3 known females). Unless I'm really impressed by one of these 3 plants, I do not plan to choose a mother from one of the femmed strains. I'm assuming that ~50% of the remaining 20 plants will be males. I'm going to go ahead and flower those in a separate area to collect pollen. I don't use seeds often, so this is a rare opportunity for me to collect some.
The clones of the males will go into the compost pile. I will keep the healthiest clone from each of the female plants. Once I have harvested this first batch, I will make a selection for a couple mother plants.
I'm actually planning 2 batches of seeds back to back in this flowering room. Same plan essentially for both. After the room is cleaned a second time, my original mothers should be plenty big enough to supply enough clones to SOG the room. At that point I will be able to put a little more $$ into the basement for more buckets, and likely another reservoir and control bucket to let me run 2 different nute soups for different strains. I may also add another 750W HPS to the room, but I'll wait to see how well these 3 cover the 6x12 area. I just fired up the first light a couple nights ago, and those AAW reflectors are pretty impressive. Three may be enough.
I'll post a couple pics of the flowering room being built after I figure out how to remove the GPS data from the iphone pics
In the meantime, here is the list of strains I'm growing this run:
TGA Subcool - seeds Apollo 13 X Vortex
Nirvana seeds - AK 48
Nirvana seeds - Bubblelicious
Bomb seeds - Cheese Bomb
Bomb seeds - Bomb THC
Dutch Passion - Blueberry
Seedsman - White Widow
Hopefully I get a couple good mothers out of the batch.
Thanks for reading. Next time I'll see if I can get some pictures up. Should have the flowering room completely finished in the next couple days. Electrical is done, walls are nearly up, then I just need to install ventilation/filtration and setup the bucket system. Easy
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Here are a few pics of the room being built...
Here is where the first flowering room will be. In this picture you can see the door that leads outside and part of the stairs leading up into the house. You can also see the chimney (no longer used in the house) that I will be venting into. I just opened up that cover last night, and found that the chimney is sleeved. It's a 6" pipe heading up, but my blower and ducting are all 8".
Should I switch everything to 6"? Should I just use a reducer? I haven't opened or installed any of the ventilation materials or equipment yet, so I can exchange it all. I just noticed the problem last night, so I'm still mulling over my options.
Here is the basement looking the other away. Again, you can see the stairs leading into the house. The raised area at the end will be used for propagation (clones/seeds) on one side and drying/curing on the other. The area in the back left is where the mothers will live.
The first step was running all the electrical and plumbing and such. The plumbing, gas line, and electrical for other parts of the house all travel through the basement ceiling. We're planning some renovations (kitchen remodel) to the side of the house opposite the electrical panel, so I had to make sure I ran a couple extra home runs across the basement (I just left wire coiled in crawlspace under kitchen). After all the infrastructure was in place, I started sealing up the basement ceiling (ie house floor). I installed insulation, then a layer of plastic, then plywood and mold resistant drywall on top of that. My hope is this will cut down on noise. You can also see a piece of cardboard I was using as a template for a wall I built around the stairs.
Further along. You can see the completed wall around the stairs and the flowering room walls starting to go up..
Electrical for flowering room 1 is done and walls are going up. I'm not putting drywall on the walls yet. I will see how much noise the room is creating first. I can always add the drywall later. One of the main advantages of installing plywood first is, I can put screws into the drywall anywhere.
Room nearly ready. You can begin to see how I will give myself access to the room. The long wall is made of 3 sheets of 2" thick styrofoam board. I've done this in the past, and it worked out well. They are plenty rigid, light proof, and lightweight to move out of the way easily. I'm using Velcro to hold the panels to the 2x4's. It works pretty well. If there are any light leaks, I will just add a curtain over the panels.
And finally a picture of the babies. 23 of the 24 seeds I germinated came up.
One design aspect of this grow room you can't see in the pictures is, this room is not physically connected to the ceiling. All 4 walls stop about 1/2"-3/4" from the ceiling. I just used Great Stuff to seal up the gap. My hope is that this will reduce the vibrations sent into the rest of the house. I will be hanging all the fans on the walls. Since those are attached to the concrete basement wall, there should be no vibration.
You can see we're storing the fuel for our pellet stove in the basement. Eventually that area will be a flowering room as well. The pellets will be in the garage next winter. Basically, we're devoting the entire basement to this project.
Most of the babies are showing roots out the bottom of the cubes, so I'll be transplanting them in the next few days. I'll post more pics once I have all the buckets in place.
My brand new basement flowering room (the first of two) is nearly complete! I fired up two of the lights last night.
I created a post in my "Grow Journal", but I want a thread instead. I want to be able to have a conversation with folks that are interested in the project. Besides, I'm used to the forum/thread format anyway.
Below is the post from my "journal":
**************************************************************************************************************************************
I'm setting up a grow room in my basement. This is not my first grow ever, but it has been nearly two decades since I grew. Flower room 1, there are already plans for a second flowering room, is ~6'x12' (slightly bigger). I ordered seven strains from Herbie's and Attitude. I started 3 of each, plus a few of the freebie seeds I was sent, for a total of 24 seeds. I ended up with 9 different strains. I put each strain into its own wet paper towel and ziplock bag. I put them on a plate (don't use plastic as you want it to hold some heat) sitting on the Home Theater PC, in the living room, to warm them up. The next day, many had already begun growing their tap root. The next day, all of them had a root, or at least cracked, so I put them into small rockwool cubes. I put the rockwool under a dome in a small tray on a heating pad. 23/24 have developed into little sprouts. This is probably my favorite growth stage. I mostly use clones, so watching seedlings is a lot of fun. I'm already learning a lot about each strain. I keep detailed notes about each plant so I can keep track of each throughout their growth. This first batch is primarily to select some mothers. I'm hoping the genetic lottery is kind to me. I think I ordered some quality genetics, but we will see. I'm confident there will be at least one or two keepers in the group.
These babies will be transplanted into the Ebb & Grow as soon as I start seeing roots. They are currently about 10 days old, so some are just now starting to send out the second real leaf (not counting cotyledons). I will be vegging these plants for longer than normal to help my yield a little. Before flowering the plants, or sometime shortly after, I will take 2-3 clones from each. I don't trust feminized seeds, so 21 of the original 24 are regularseeds. I germinated 3 femmed freebies to fill in the remaining 3 buckets (it can't hurt to have 3 known females). Unless I'm really impressed by one of these 3 plants, I do not plan to choose a mother from one of the femmed strains. I'm assuming that ~50% of the remaining 20 plants will be males. I'm going to go ahead and flower those in a separate area to collect pollen. I don't use seeds often, so this is a rare opportunity for me to collect some.
I'm actually planning 2 batches of seeds back to back in this flowering room. Same plan essentially for both. After the room is cleaned a second time, my original mothers should be plenty big enough to supply enough clones to SOG the room. At that point I will be able to put a little more $$ into the basement for more buckets, and likely another reservoir and control bucket to let me run 2 different nute soups for different strains. I may also add another 750W HPS to the room, but I'll wait to see how well these 3 cover the 6x12 area. I just fired up the first light a couple nights ago, and those AAW reflectors are pretty impressive. Three may be enough.
I'll post a couple pics of the flowering room being built after I figure out how to remove the GPS data from the iphone pics
In the meantime, here is the list of strains I'm growing this run:
TGA Subcool - seeds Apollo 13 X Vortex
Nirvana seeds - AK 48
Nirvana seeds - Bubblelicious
Bomb seeds - Cheese Bomb
Bomb seeds - Bomb THC
Dutch Passion - Blueberry
Seedsman - White Widow
Hopefully I get a couple good mothers out of the batch.
Thanks for reading. Next time I'll see if I can get some pictures up. Should have the flowering room completely finished in the next couple days. Electrical is done, walls are nearly up, then I just need to install ventilation/filtration and setup the bucket system. Easy
*******************************************************************************************************************************************************************
Here are a few pics of the room being built...
Here is where the first flowering room will be. In this picture you can see the door that leads outside and part of the stairs leading up into the house. You can also see the chimney (no longer used in the house) that I will be venting into. I just opened up that cover last night, and found that the chimney is sleeved. It's a 6" pipe heading up, but my blower and ducting are all 8".
Should I switch everything to 6"? Should I just use a reducer? I haven't opened or installed any of the ventilation materials or equipment yet, so I can exchange it all. I just noticed the problem last night, so I'm still mulling over my options.
Here is the basement looking the other away. Again, you can see the stairs leading into the house. The raised area at the end will be used for propagation (clones/seeds) on one side and drying/curing on the other. The area in the back left is where the mothers will live.
The first step was running all the electrical and plumbing and such. The plumbing, gas line, and electrical for other parts of the house all travel through the basement ceiling. We're planning some renovations (kitchen remodel) to the side of the house opposite the electrical panel, so I had to make sure I ran a couple extra home runs across the basement (I just left wire coiled in crawlspace under kitchen). After all the infrastructure was in place, I started sealing up the basement ceiling (ie house floor). I installed insulation, then a layer of plastic, then plywood and mold resistant drywall on top of that. My hope is this will cut down on noise. You can also see a piece of cardboard I was using as a template for a wall I built around the stairs.
Further along. You can see the completed wall around the stairs and the flowering room walls starting to go up..
Electrical for flowering room 1 is done and walls are going up. I'm not putting drywall on the walls yet. I will see how much noise the room is creating first. I can always add the drywall later. One of the main advantages of installing plywood first is, I can put screws into the drywall anywhere.
Room nearly ready. You can begin to see how I will give myself access to the room. The long wall is made of 3 sheets of 2" thick styrofoam board. I've done this in the past, and it worked out well. They are plenty rigid, light proof, and lightweight to move out of the way easily. I'm using Velcro to hold the panels to the 2x4's. It works pretty well. If there are any light leaks, I will just add a curtain over the panels.
And finally a picture of the babies. 23 of the 24 seeds I germinated came up.
One design aspect of this grow room you can't see in the pictures is, this room is not physically connected to the ceiling. All 4 walls stop about 1/2"-3/4" from the ceiling. I just used Great Stuff to seal up the gap. My hope is that this will reduce the vibrations sent into the rest of the house. I will be hanging all the fans on the walls. Since those are attached to the concrete basement wall, there should be no vibration.
You can see we're storing the fuel for our pellet stove in the basement. Eventually that area will be a flowering room as well. The pellets will be in the garage next winter. Basically, we're devoting the entire basement to this project.
Most of the babies are showing roots out the bottom of the cubes, so I'll be transplanting them in the next few days. I'll post more pics once I have all the buckets in place.
