My finished grow room

At last it's ready....

I'm running 2 x 600W Metal Halide (will change to HPS for flower) and 1 x 300W CFL Maxibright 6400k (will change to 2700k for flower) with a 6-pot Alien XL flood and drain system.

I have a 24,000 BTU aircon to keep the temperature and humidity right. 3 exhaust fans - but just running one.

I ran into a slight issue using MH/HPS - the power where I live in shit, we have outages about once a week. So we installed a 30KVA auto-start generator. The only issue is it takes 5 seconds to kick in - so the lights go off due to re-strike time. Luckily the Lumatek ballasts deal with this and won't fire up the lights until a certain amount of time has past, and until they're ready again - so won't damage them.

Anyway, I installed a 3000VA APC UPS, but that isn't enough to run the MH/HPS lights for more than 5 seconds, they simply draw too much power when they come back on, even for that crazy size UPS. The only thing I could do is install the 300W CFL which run fine on the UPS. It means the plants won't have any light black out during critical times.

I run a security cam with movement detection setup to email me pictures of any movement to my phone and SMS also. So if I ever get picture of the police in there, it's time to make a run for it..

My seedlings are a week old now, so will move to this room and in to the flood and drain in another two weeks.

I can't wait to see how they do with 1500W of light.

Hope you like the pics,
J.

I think the only reason for the police to come knocking would be the smell ... Where are your carbon filters ?

This place is in the middle of nowhere, on private land, with a security guard, dogs, etc. So nobody is coming near. The out-vent is about 10m in the air, I doubt anyone would smell anything.

Anyway, better safe than sorry, I'll order a set of carbon filters. Good call.

I ran that foil reflective stuff for a minute then I replaced it with orca film. The foil makes hotspots and gets all dirty when you spray or smear buds against it... Panda film is better then the foil but the orca film is way brighter! Nice room btw!

Way to much air conditioning you will have humidity problems not to mention it's hard on the equipment and power bill. You want to size an AC exactly to the area of space and btu's in the room so it runs all the time to draw as much moisture out of the room as possible. A 1 ton would have been better

What kind of fucking light is that?

That's just a large CFL grow bulb

Gonejha said:

That's just a large CFL grow bulb

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Dude. You spent all you did on that grow room and you skimped on the simplest, most important part. That bulb won't even net you an ounce. Get COBs from Cree, Bridgelux/Vero, or Citizen.

op said he has 2 x 600w MH for veg that will be replaced with HPS for flowering + the 300w CFL ... Looks like more than enough light for the space to me....

Freak brother said:

I ran that foil reflective stuff for a minute then I replaced it with orca film. The foil makes hotspots and gets all dirty when you spray or smear buds against it... Panda film is better then the foil but the orca film is way brighter! Nice room btw!

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Thanks Buddy, will check out orca film. The mylar is already dirty as hell - it messes with my OCD.

Gonejha said:

Way to much air conditioning you will have humidity problems not to mention it's hard on the equipment and power bill. You want to size an AC exactly to the area of space and btu's in the room so it runs all the time to draw as much moisture out of the room as possible. A 1 ton would have been better

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24K BTU is perfect for the size of this room (there's a bit more to it than you can see in picture), the amount of heat generated by all the lights on at once, the heat from the ballasts, the amount of windows and the average outside temperature (32 degrees) I'm also ducting a small amount of air in.

You definitely don't want an aircon to run all the time, or not enough, there's a nice balance. This is also a new style invertor aircon.

The humidity with the aircon set to 30 degrees is around 60% and when set to 27 degrees around 40% which is fine.

Best thing about this place, the electric is free from our landlord. Part of the rental agreement. In other rented space we have a several machine shops that are all air-conditioned. My little room wouldn't put a dent in their electric bill.

Olive Drab Green said:

What kind of fucking light is that?

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That's a maxibright 300W CFL which is only really being used to keep light on the plants during the time our generator takes to start up and the metal halides/hps take to restrike. Definitely don't want darkness stressing the plants.