Stealth speaker-grow setup.

Greetings fellow grow-entusiasts. This will be my first post, but i must warn you; I am going to get rather techinical, and being european, I use the metric system. I also have a tendansy to write very long and boring posts. Cant get the autospelling to work, so bear with me.
I am currently in the prosess of building a DWC-hydroponic (stealth) speaker growbox, and due to my plans being quite radical, I wish to share this experiense with everyone facing simular challenges when designing a stealth grow box. If all goes well, this will evolve to a grow-journal from the very beginning to the end, starting now!https://www.rollitup.org/images/attach/jpg.gif



Stuff like fans and carbon scrubber are not in the picture.


I have allready attemted one grow in this speaker, but it was not a huge success. I might be able to optain some pictures of the first grom sometime later. Before going in to the new setup, i´ll give you the rundown on my last grow and how the box is at the moment, and what needs to be improved.
It was my very first grow, and alot of things went wrong. Firstly, my 300 dollar, 50w led-panel failed after only two weeks, so Instead i got a 60w phillips tornado cfl. It dit a good job afterall. Aint gonna buy LED-lights again in the near future.
I then found that having two plants in one speaker is not a good idea. Which in retrospect was a rather stupid idea to begin with, but I didnt know any better at that time. The plants (AK-48 from Nirvana) grew alot bigger and faster than I expected, so I had to do a hell of alot of trimming and training. Probably way to much trimming for the wellbeing of the plants. I think it really did hurt them. Next time it will be a single plant.
I also came to realize that cooling was a huge issue aswell. Even though I had two (very noicy - non stealthy) 120mm, 230 volt fans (one for intake and one for extraction) the homemade carbon scrubber was to much of a resistanse for the fans to overcome, and the airflow was way to low in order to do any significant cooling. The daytime temps were 38 celsius at best, and at night it was about 22 C. This cooling problem is firstly an issue because its to hot for the plant to develope properly. But this also meant that the speaker was very warm to the touch, which is a considerable stealth problem. This means there are two obsticles to overcome regarding the cooling. Airflow and noise.
The cooling system will undergo some radical improvements for the next setup. Just wait and see what I got planned for this one!
After three weeks of flowering while I was sound asleep, the rope holding the cfl broke, and the hot tornado bulb burned away the entire top half on one of the plants. This needless to say was a huge dissapointment to me.
However, I managed to make it to harwest and i got what I would guess to be around 15 - 20 grams of decent smoke out of it. So I cant call the grow a total faillure, but there is deffinatly room for a lot of improvement. The only aspect of the grow that didnt fail at one point or another, was the homemade hydroponics system. Alltough i had to change the airpump, because there was way to much noise in the reservoir itself. The fact that the rez is made of stainless steel, only served to amplifie the noise. I found that the cheaper airpumps vil deliver the air in pulses, rather than a continious flow. This results in a pulsating banging noise that simply was way to obvious to ignore. A speaker is not supposed to emmit that kind of mechanical noise, and it does raise suspission that something is going on in there. The new more expensive pump performs alot better. I can explain this pulsating noise and how to deal with it in further detail, if asked to do so.
Another rather anoying problem to overcome was figuring out a way to change the water in the reservoir in the later stages of the grow. This particular problem was caused by the ever growing plant that simply got to tall inside the box, hindering me in lifting the lid of the reservoir and gaining access to the water. The lid has to be lifted far enough for the net-pot and roots to be clear of the rez, so that the rez can be dragged out of the box. In the end it became a tough two-man job to change the water, which is unaccepteble.
So, here is a list of the things I need to improve before the next grow:

• I want more ligthning wattage in there to increase the yield

• The cooling system must undergo some drastic changes, especially with more wattage

• noise from fans and pumps must be adressed. Otherwise its not stealth.

• The ease of plant- and reservoir- maintinense must be thought out properly this time

• Due to the lack of space, some serious training is a must

Keeping all this in mind, I am ready with a new design... Lets start with the most obvious aspect first - the speaker box itself. In order to make the overall maintinense easier, i will re-enginer the door in such a way that it will be attached to some heavyduty "drawer-slides" that i got laying around. Two slides (Idont even know if this is the correct word) will be laying flat on the bottom of the box, and two in the top. This means that I will be able to pull the door straight backwards, just as a drawer, about 1,5 half times the depth of the box.

Due to the severe lack of grow-space, some serious training and maintinense is a must. Therefore I want the reservoir and plant to be dragged out of the cramped box along with the door, leaving cooling and lighting still inside the speaker.

This will allow me to lift the lid of the reservoir (which holds the net-pot and plant) as high as i want, without worrying about squishing the plant against the top of the box - which was a serious problem before. Now the lid holds 3 pots, but it will be redused to just one. I will figure out some way to lock the lid in place after it has been lifted about 25 cm, leaving the reservoir resting on the slides outside the box. The reservoir and plant should now be easily acsessible for maintinense. I hope to find a way to detatch the door from the slides after it has been dragged out, increasing the acsessiblity. But that is at this point a low priority.

The second priority is cooling and lightning. Now, this being a low-budged project and all, I will make use of what components i allready have. The 60w tornado has proven itself, so it will be used again. In addition I will add a 70w hps. The reason being that I gott several of those bulbs lying around, and just need to purchase the ballast (without ignitor). This adds up to a total of 130 watts inside a very small space, and thus requireing even better cooling. The idea is to build a 50cm long cooltube and have the lights in-line. The cooltube will be placed vertically inside the speaker, farthest away from the door. And a 3-speed 140mm ultra low-noise fan will provide the nessisary airflow to remove most of the heat from the cooltube.
View attachment 1760671
View attachment 1760678
The cooltube is a vase i bought cheaply. I just need to cut the bottom of.
This airflow will never be in contact with the pungeant air inside the box, and thus there is no need to scrub this air. That would be inefficiant. This fan will turn on and of in accordanse to the lightning regime. I´m hoping that the lowest speed setting will be enough for this job. Thats only 9 db!
Another fan (same kind) will be in charge of of ventilating the speaker itself through a homemade carbon scrubber. This will run all the time. I might add a smaller fan to blow some air in the bottom, but we´ll see if that becomes nescisary. I doupt it, beacuse there is a passive intake in the bottom - the natural breathing holes in the bottom front of the speaker.

I should now have two seperate cooling systems with seperate controls, which should give me rather presice control over both fans, allowing me to always keep the RPM´s at the lowest possible setting for each individual fan, and thus redusing noise levels to a minimum. Remember, stealth is what this is all about. I got family members crashing through my door all day long just as they see fit, and they will be in close contact to the speaker when they are in here. i can therefore not afford to underestimate the power of stealth.
The idea is to build a cooling-unit that will be hanging on rubber straps in the top of the speaker. The idea of the unit hanging in rubber straps, is to elliminate noise convection from the unit to the speaker. 80 percent of all noise transmission is due to mechanical contact, especially when it comes to vibrating fans and airpumps.
This cooling unit will contain two seperate sound insulated rooms, one for each fan. Furthermore the airpump, the 12 volt powersuply, the ballast and airskrubber will also be integrated in this unit, minimizing the use of space, minimizing noise levels from the pump aswell as the fans, and at the same time cooling the electrics - and keeping it all nice and tidy.

Here is what i think is the most exiting part of the plan... I want to do a half-circle vertical scrog around the extra long vertical cooltube, thus maximizing the light exposure throughout the length of the plant. Having two bulbs will help to even out the light intensity across the length of the box. So those of you who wish to suggest uppgrading to a 150w, should now be able to see why I want two bulbs instead of one. I am however open to suggestions.
The problem I had before, when the lamp was above the plant, was surface area and penetration. Only the very top of the canopy got any light at all, resulting in a hell of alot of useless popcorn buds below the canopy. They should now get as much light as the rest, resulting in a bigger yield.
This is where I hope to get some real-time advise whilst the grow is in progress. I dont really have any doupts regarding the growbox design, but the training worries me a litle bit because of my lack of experiense.

I will continiu do develop this growbox and uppdate the progress. I hope to start the grow in about two weeks