just getting started

i have a 15 x12 cellar that i want to build a grow room in. it stays around 70 down there year round so i think it will be ideal for this application. i want to start with soil before moving to hydro, can i get some help on equipment recomendations from exhaust fans to lighting, etc. it already is vented to the outside with a 6" hole on one side of the room and a 6" hole on the other side, it actually was built as a bomb shelter in the late 60's. It has a hand crank air filtration system already installed, however i believe i will have to take it out. it also only has 1 outlet plug and 1 light in the ceiling..any information is appreciated and dont forget anything.
Let say the budget will be around $500 to $1000.

The best advice I can give is to read the growfaq, learn as much as you can before you start building. If I had done the research I did sooner, rather than later, I would have saved a lot of time and money upgrading lights and fans.
Look into perpetual harvest, there is a wait before your first harvest (not much more than any grow) but once you have it up and running you can harvest every two weeks, and pretty much never run out of bud! Al B. Fuct has a great thread on this https://www.rollitup.org/hydroponics-aeroponics/6592-get-harvest-every-2-weeks.html

im thinking about LED, so i was wondering if anyone has been using them?

i dont think led would work the bst lights to use is
Supplemental Growing Area3' x 3'4' x 4'6' x 6'8' x 8'1000 watts8' x 8'12' x 12'

notorious1 said:

im thinking about LED, so i was wondering if anyone has been using them?

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How many plants are you desiring to grow? You should need at least 50 watts per square foot of growing room. You have a total of 180Sq. Ft. Multiply Sq. foot by the height of your room and you'll get your Cubic Feet. If you wanted to use 100% of your room dedicated to canopy, then you could feasibly install 9 1000W bulbs in that room, depends on how much you want to grow? Keeping your budget at 500-1000$, I would recommend buying from HTGSupply.com, I ordered recently from them and got my order in 2 days. FAST shipping.
You probably should consider LED lighting due to high temperatures with traditional Metal Halide & High Pressure Sodium bulbs (HID Bulbs). Ventilation is expensive to maintain. Most people's Ventilation systems waste heat/cooling energy if not set up correctly.

I would recommend spending around 300-400$ on lighting. You could try to achieve 1-2 lbs per harvest (every 3-4 months) with a 1000W ballast. I recommend http://www.htgsupply.com/growlights.asp?categoryID=1&subcategoryID=101&typeID=83

The 1000W would cover an area of 20 - 25 Sq. Foot, 5x5 lighting space nicely.

LED's put off some different kind of light than HID Bulbs, and may not perform 100% as effective as HID Bulbs. 90% of HID lighting energy is lost/wasted and not absorbed by your plants. You could easily spend 350$ on LED Lights, but they produce 65% less heat. Prices are here http://www.htgsupply.com/growlighttypes.asp?categoryID=1&subcategoryID=168

Usually in a sealed room; temps will rise so much that it could easily kill your plants. Anything over 85 degrees is not recommended, but some ppl get away with 90-95 degrees. I would make sure that you have a passive intake (a non-official intake). Passive intakes are things like: drawing air in through the bottom of the door or air being pulled in through sheetrock cracks, etc. Depending on how tall/high your room is depends on how much exhaust CFM you would need to ventilate/cool that space properly.

People normally draw air in through a cooling system attached to their bulbs called CoolTubes or something. It generall looks like this.

Carbon scrubber Inline Fan
( )============|_|======(Bulb in Cooltube)===== Exhaust outside.

This ventilation system should be set up to turn on when temps reach 85 degrees in the room. The room is essentially cooled from cool air that is getting pulled into the room by your inline fan pushes so hard during it's exhaust. I recommend always ventilating out the dryer duct in your laundry room. Cops shouldn't be able to get a warrant for that (even if it was blowing out hott air 24/7 365). But if you're exhausting into your attic and running more than say 1000W, your heat signature might get picked up by your local/state/county law enforcement with their FLIR Helicopter system. There may not even be enough passive intake to keep your room cool with HID's though.

Soil medium is great; check out ways to enhance it with organics. They have some really great organic recipes here. Without hydroponics equipment, you should be able to stay under 1000$ with just lighting & ventilation.

I'm off work now yay! I'll be back on later if you need more advice, just ask.

theycallmeDragon said:

i dont think led would work the bst lights to use is

HID Light Output
Primary Growing Area​

Supplemental Growing Area

100 watts
2' x 2'​

3' x 3'

250 watts
3' x 3'​

4' x 4'

400 watts
4' x 4'​

6' x 6'

600 watts
6' x 6'​

8' x 8'1000 watts8' x 8'12' x 12'

HID Lighting Helpful Tips
go to a hardware stores and they sell pieces that let you have two bulbs one one light thats ok for i plant.​

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That's pretty optimistic. Plants require at least 3000 lumens per square foot to grow, optimum levels are 7-10,000 (for reference, the sun on a clear day gives about 10,000 lumens per sq ft). The footprint you propose for the primary growing area of say, a 600w is 36sq ft. A 600w hps gives out up to 90,000 lumens, making 2500 lumens per sq ft, not nearly enough to grow properly, and that's without even mentioning the secondary death, I mean grow area.
Spreading plants out that much under so little light will be fine for the few directly under the light, but everything outside of maybe 4x4 under a 600 will just be in the shade. Primary grow area for 600 should be 3x3, or 9sq ft, making 10,000 lumens per sq ft. Watts per sq ft is an ok guideline, but that assumes all lights are the same efficiency, lumens per sq ft removes that assumption.
Also I think the piece you are thinking of is a y splitter, they are used for cfls and shouldn't be used for hids (I'm pretty sure they don't make the correct fittings anyway) since each bulb requires it's own ballast to limit the current. A cfls ballast is small and built into the base of each bulb, which is why it's ok to use y adapters with them.

here is some more usefull information.
1. this grow room is underground in a bomb shelter 2ft of concrete on all side, also 24 inches of dirt on the top. the room measures 15x10 15 long and 10 wide and 8ft tall. we have a 1000w hps light we purchased friday, should be here this week. we checked the temp thursday when it was 106 degrees outside, it was 72 degrees in the shelter. i do anticipate it getting hotter when the light get going. I do have 2 6" air ducts already vented to the outside i was going to put the first light through and have 1 fan blowing an d1 fan sucking. we have 10 feminized plants that we are going to clone off of 1 and harvest the rest. so i thought the first crop would sit fine in 2 rows of five. basically 5 x 6 area.

im hoping the concrete will reduce any FBI exposure. Am i correct in that assumption?

i looked around for soil this weekend, and was pretty dissappointed that most every place i looked only carried miracle grow..i did however find some sungro sb 300, it is Formulated with bark, Canadian Sphagnum peat moss, perlite, vermiculite, Dolomitic lime, gypsum and our long-lasting wetting agent. i have ready here some caution with vermiculite...any reason there?

well thats all i can think about right now, i will check back in a couple of hours

oh btw, we also have a small ufo led light, we were thinking about using that in the beginning from seed to vegitation then go to the hps...any comment there?

any thoughts on my soil?
still waiting on white widow feminized seeds to come in, just want to make sure i have everything ready when they get here.

notorious1 said:

any thoughts on my soil?
still waiting on white widow feminized seeds to come in, just want to make sure i have everything ready when they get here.

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Well, we got this famous guy here on the forum called SubCool; he's got some great "super soil" that he creates, and he gave his recipe in the thread:
https://www.rollitup.org/subcools-old-school-organics/44686-subcools-super-soil.html

Anyway, i've been wanting to do it for a long time; but I haven't had the money to invest in it just yet. But hey if you figure out what he means by 5 bags of "roots soil", let me know; haha - i've never done much outdoor gardening.