Help Design New Grow Room - Coliseum/Vertical Setup?

trep

Member
I'm finishing up my 2nd grow and am looking to plan out my eventual setup better.

Here's a little background.

Room Equipment
7'x12' room
4'x4' grow tent placed inside (vegging room?)
2* 8" in line fans pulling air out of the room through the ceiling
Currently using soil going from 1 gallon -> 5 gallon pots between veg and flower

Grow equipment-
4 600w HPS/MH Setups with Air cooled hoods
GH/FF/AN nuts with FF Ocean Forest as medium
1 gallon and 5 gallon round pots

Electrical concerns-
I only have 2 10 AMP breakers for this room so my max is ~ 3-4 600w Lights. I was using 1000W beforehand but they were more finicky with my electric and heat. I know this is something I might have an electrician come play with after I finish harvesting my current batch this weekend.

My existing setup was 4 600W lights (one in the veg, 3 outside for flowering) set up in the attached picture. I will outline my main problems so far.
room.png

1) My vegging time is taking months instead of weeks to get to 2'-3' so I'm considering switching over to hydro, but I don't have the experience to do so yet. I have two 8" holes drilled into the ceiling to pull air out, but I might need to install an intake fan as well or do CO2. I don't really know why my vegging is so slow.

2) Lack of space to hand water the back plants (I'm clumsy as well) thus the desire to switch over to a coliseum/vertical setup so I can reach around and use my lighting and space efficiently. I was thinking of two 600w stationed vertically and doing a colliseum type layout so I can walk behind both sides.

NEW SETUP/DESIGN
All spacing below is done in around 1' increments as my 5 gallon pots are around 10" (I'll space them out slightly). According to the plan I should be able to fit ~ 36 plants here. I plan to grow them to around 2'-2.5'. Green plants are raised on stands about 1-1.5' above the ground. Brown plants are at ground level or a little higher. Lights will be in cool tubes and should around 3-3.5' off the ground as well. I'm debating what kind of netting or support to use to make sure the plants don't grow too close to the tubes and get burned.

vertical.png

I really appreciate and welcome any feedback or help as there's no 100% accurate way to do any of this.
 

collective gardener

Well-Known Member
A common problem with slow veg is wet soil. When I used FF Ocean Forest I'd add 30% perlite. Otherwise, plants early in veg cannot use up enough water to dry up the soil and introduce air to the roots.

May I suggest an alternative to going full hydro: Go soiless. As fas as I'm concerned soiless is the easiest and most forgiving way to grow. And, done right, it can produce explosive growth. The easiest soiless mix to use is Sunshine #4 with 30% added perlite. Another option would be coco and perlite. The most high performance soiless is rockwool, which is what we use. It takes some experience to get rockwool dialed in, but when you do it is fantastic. We love the ease of labor and lack of mess using rockwool blocks. We hand water the rockwool once per day.

If you PM me a pic of your circuit breaker box I may be able to help you with your power problems. Remove the trim plate so I can see everything in the box. I put a sub panel in every grow I build. Once I see a pic of your electrical box I can probably walk you through installing a sub panel and never having another power issue.
 

trep

Member
That really might be why the slow veg is happening. It's often taking around 4-5 days between watering (for the soil to dry up).

I'm seriously considering going with coco/perlite or mixing perlite into my FFOC (I actually have 4 bags of perlite in my warehouse right now). I'm just worried that during my busy days I won't have time to go water daily so until I set up some kind of timered/drip/irrigation system I potentially won't be able to monitor every single day so I wanted to leave myself some leeway.
 
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