Twin Peaks

Hey RIU, been too long.
I just started another little grow and thought I'd share.
It's going to be a perpetual but doing that properly requires a good supply of new plants, so I'll start with my clone cab.

The cab itself is a midi pc case with a 20w LED floodlight up top and a 2w fan extracting through a passive intake, running 24/7.
For those counting the pennies that works out at 530w a day or 3.7Kw per week, so about 20p a day here in rip off Britain.

I'm starting out with a White Label NL fem that looked like this:



And after about 10 days she looked like this:

Now I have a mother plant it's time to break out the scissors.
I like to wait and take 2 cuttings from the top cola to start me off but that didn't quite go to plan this time round, so effectively I just topped her and put that cut in to root.

At the same time I take the rooted plant and repot that ready to move it into the flower room.
It's really helpful to flower the mum and root the cutting to be a new mum in a micro grow. The plant hormone Auxin is located at the top of the plant and tells it to grow, so to have that in a cutting will ensure a healthy progeny.
At the same time, removing much of the urge to grow from the rooted mother means it will be a bit less upwardly mobile when I send it to flower.
An ideal situation for a micro grow.

Doesn't look too pretty post op:



But give it a week and things are looking much more promising:

Time to move the first plant into the flower cab :



And mum is doing fine back in the clone cab:



So it's game on.

Spec on the flower cab is a 20 x 18 x 8.5in tower pc case.
I've got a new 130w LED in there that fits like a glove but would microwave chicken on full tilt, so that's dialled down to 40w.
There's a 4 inch bathroom fan exhausting into a rhino pro sat just outside the cab that draws another 11w, and while it usually just acts as a passive intake I do also have a 10w blower that can be turned on for hot days and acts as a lightproof intake the rest of the time.

Energy usage for this cab is therefore 40w for 12 hours per day + 11w for 24h, so 750w per day or 5.2Kw per week.
That's about 30p a day at today's prices and brings me up to a huge £3.50 per week.

Better produce some fire for that kind of investment!

I'm still building the foundations so nothing much to see just yet. The 3rd plant will be in there in around 5 weeks and that's when it should start to get interesting.

Both plants are still alive and there's a bunch of 9 finger leaves on the clone which suggests she's healthy enough. She's taken 2 weeks to root though which is a bit slow, so I only put the flower cab into 12/12 on Monday and I'm hoping that will be enough to keep everything in sync.
It's likely due to me turning the heating down in the house so I've taken to sitting the pot on top of the case for a few hours in the day to warm it up a bit. Seems to be helping.

Flower plant looks a bit pale too. I ran a test grow in the summer just to make sure the new light was working ok and found I had to add some lime to the nutes to keep that plant looking happy, so I've just started doing that again.

This was how that test grow in the summer turned out by the way:



But I can do better than that