QuentinQuark
Well-Known Member
Hi all, I would appreciate any feedback on this stealth cab design.
This has been rolling around in my head for a few years now, and I finally decided to get it out on paper and start building. In fact, back when I started thinking about this there were no commercially available turn-key grow boxes!
The idea for this cabinet was to have a perpetual harvest, and as efficient a use of space as possible. It is designed around a clone-fed SWC SoG, basically a main cola grow, using a strain that is main-cola dominant, with a short finishing height (i.e. around 20 inches), for a crop of 2-liter bottle sized nugs, one per plant.
The cabinet itself has six chambers. First, in the bottom left, we have little momma's house. 24"w x 24"d x 30"h, this chamber would have a 150w MH in base up configuration installed on the ceiling of the chamber, with the mom trained around the outside of the chamber using a wire cage, the kind they use for training tomatoes etc. This would give the mom tons of light exposure, while keeping her a safe distance from the bulb. This chamber has an intake vent in the upper left corner (the square with the criss-cross marks), and an exhaust vent in the lower right corner (the rectangle with the same criss-cross marks).
Second is the flowering chamber, in the lower right. The idea here is two different sets of clones of the same strain, overlapping by 1/2 a flowering cycle. So for a strain with a 10 week flowering cycle, one set is always 10/2 = 5 weeks ahead of the other. The bubbler tubs are propped up by wooden blocks or something to keep the plants as close to the lights above as possible, and as the plants grow the blocks are removed as needed. One of the reasons to have two separate tubs is you can slide a divider between then, and use a flip-flop to alternate your flowering across the two chambers, defeating any ability for the power company to detect the 12-12 cycle. With the small 250w HPS that's not really a concern, but this is just a demo box I would like to work out the kinks before doing it on a bigger scale. The air intake for this chamber is the exhaust of the previous chamber, the mom chamber. The exhaust for this chamber is the cut-outs that let the light in from the lighting chamber which is detailed below.
Thirdly directly above the flowering chamber comes the lighting chamber. Two all-in-one style 250w HPS fixtures (ballast, bulb, reflector) sit on top of cut-outs that are the exact size of the opening in the bottoms of the fixtures. This needs to be an air-tight fit because these openings are not only serving as the intake to cool the lights, they are serving to refresh the air in the flowering chamber(s). So attached to the vents on the lights are computer slot-fan squirrel-cage type fans. The reason for these is a) to conserve height; b) my understanding is that sq fans are better for higher static pressure applications, and these would be pulling air all the way in from the mom chamber, through the flowering chamber, through the fixture, and out into the lighting cabinet.
Fourthly above the lighting chamber is a dual-purpose cloning/drying chamber. Intake is the criss-crossed square in the upper left corner. Exhaust into the lighting chamber via a hole in the floor, in the lower right.
The fifth chamber is directly above the mom chamber and to the left of the lighting chamber, it is the air scrubber and exhaust. There are two sets of air flows in this box, mom -> flower -> lights -> air cleaner, and cloning/drying -> lighting -> air cleaner. There will be fans drawing air from the lighting chamber into the air scrubber box. These fans will be installed on the partition between these two chambers, as illustrated. They will be installed towards the back 2/3 of the box. The front 1/3 of the box will be packed with a carbon-impregnated poly material, this stuff comes in 5/8" thick rolls that you can cut to size. I would need to cut a few 24" x 8" pads, stack 'em, and stuff 'em in there.
The final chamber is the water reservoir. The idea is to use the "simple, cheap way to maintain water levels" (if you haven't already seen it, google it) to keep the flowering boxes topped up, thus requiring minimal maintenance, maybe a spot-check every day, and then flushing and refilling once a week with fresh water and nutes.
The process would be: 10-14 days before the completion of one flowering cycle, you take as many cuttings as you will need for one flowering tub, around 20. You clone them in the cloning chamber (which at that time is not being used for drying, since it has been at least three weeks since the last harvest) and veg them under fluorescent tubes for a week or so, enough to pick 12 or so solid plants of the same size for flowering. By then it's harvest time, so you cut down the pop bottles, and they hang upside-down in the drying chamber, while the clones go in the flowering chamber and it gets propped up by blocks all the way up to the top. Every day you spot-check, and make sure the reservoir is full, every week you refresh the water in the tubs, and every few weeks you cut, clone, veg, harvest.
Thoughts?
This has been rolling around in my head for a few years now, and I finally decided to get it out on paper and start building. In fact, back when I started thinking about this there were no commercially available turn-key grow boxes!
The idea for this cabinet was to have a perpetual harvest, and as efficient a use of space as possible. It is designed around a clone-fed SWC SoG, basically a main cola grow, using a strain that is main-cola dominant, with a short finishing height (i.e. around 20 inches), for a crop of 2-liter bottle sized nugs, one per plant.
The cabinet itself has six chambers. First, in the bottom left, we have little momma's house. 24"w x 24"d x 30"h, this chamber would have a 150w MH in base up configuration installed on the ceiling of the chamber, with the mom trained around the outside of the chamber using a wire cage, the kind they use for training tomatoes etc. This would give the mom tons of light exposure, while keeping her a safe distance from the bulb. This chamber has an intake vent in the upper left corner (the square with the criss-cross marks), and an exhaust vent in the lower right corner (the rectangle with the same criss-cross marks).
Second is the flowering chamber, in the lower right. The idea here is two different sets of clones of the same strain, overlapping by 1/2 a flowering cycle. So for a strain with a 10 week flowering cycle, one set is always 10/2 = 5 weeks ahead of the other. The bubbler tubs are propped up by wooden blocks or something to keep the plants as close to the lights above as possible, and as the plants grow the blocks are removed as needed. One of the reasons to have two separate tubs is you can slide a divider between then, and use a flip-flop to alternate your flowering across the two chambers, defeating any ability for the power company to detect the 12-12 cycle. With the small 250w HPS that's not really a concern, but this is just a demo box I would like to work out the kinks before doing it on a bigger scale. The air intake for this chamber is the exhaust of the previous chamber, the mom chamber. The exhaust for this chamber is the cut-outs that let the light in from the lighting chamber which is detailed below.
Thirdly directly above the flowering chamber comes the lighting chamber. Two all-in-one style 250w HPS fixtures (ballast, bulb, reflector) sit on top of cut-outs that are the exact size of the opening in the bottoms of the fixtures. This needs to be an air-tight fit because these openings are not only serving as the intake to cool the lights, they are serving to refresh the air in the flowering chamber(s). So attached to the vents on the lights are computer slot-fan squirrel-cage type fans. The reason for these is a) to conserve height; b) my understanding is that sq fans are better for higher static pressure applications, and these would be pulling air all the way in from the mom chamber, through the flowering chamber, through the fixture, and out into the lighting cabinet.
Fourthly above the lighting chamber is a dual-purpose cloning/drying chamber. Intake is the criss-crossed square in the upper left corner. Exhaust into the lighting chamber via a hole in the floor, in the lower right.
The fifth chamber is directly above the mom chamber and to the left of the lighting chamber, it is the air scrubber and exhaust. There are two sets of air flows in this box, mom -> flower -> lights -> air cleaner, and cloning/drying -> lighting -> air cleaner. There will be fans drawing air from the lighting chamber into the air scrubber box. These fans will be installed on the partition between these two chambers, as illustrated. They will be installed towards the back 2/3 of the box. The front 1/3 of the box will be packed with a carbon-impregnated poly material, this stuff comes in 5/8" thick rolls that you can cut to size. I would need to cut a few 24" x 8" pads, stack 'em, and stuff 'em in there.
The final chamber is the water reservoir. The idea is to use the "simple, cheap way to maintain water levels" (if you haven't already seen it, google it) to keep the flowering boxes topped up, thus requiring minimal maintenance, maybe a spot-check every day, and then flushing and refilling once a week with fresh water and nutes.
The process would be: 10-14 days before the completion of one flowering cycle, you take as many cuttings as you will need for one flowering tub, around 20. You clone them in the cloning chamber (which at that time is not being used for drying, since it has been at least three weeks since the last harvest) and veg them under fluorescent tubes for a week or so, enough to pick 12 or so solid plants of the same size for flowering. By then it's harvest time, so you cut down the pop bottles, and they hang upside-down in the drying chamber, while the clones go in the flowering chamber and it gets propped up by blocks all the way up to the top. Every day you spot-check, and make sure the reservoir is full, every week you refresh the water in the tubs, and every few weeks you cut, clone, veg, harvest.
Thoughts?
