Grow room build round three: Full environment control and no compromises

[SmokeyMcFly]

It is good to see plants moving into the space!

Thanks bud

And the real reward for all the hard work

 

[Graytail]

 

[SmokeyMcFly]

I had it up to 82 while still maintaining 70% rh today to see if it could keep up. Not sure how far I can push it yet I didn’t want to run it to warm before getting the co2 running. Hopefully once I have some nice big flowering plants in there the humidifier won’t need to work so hard. Considering I couldn’t really crack 50% during lights out in my old room I’m pretty stoked to be able to run any setting combo I want.

The bigger plants got their first dunk soak and drain today since I don’t have to worry about mucking up the bedroom carpet anymore. They got a plop of tea and thirty ml of growth in three gallons of water. They took about half for the six plants and the rose bush out front got the rest. I’m going to Brix them before calling it quits for the night. I figure I’ll give them a week of good environment in the new room and then flip the first batch which gives me another week to get the other tent setup and find somewhere to fill the co2 bottle. Once this gets wrapped up I’ll start a grow journal for these.

Thanks for following along and the help everyone this is he house we plan on keeping until retirement at least (god willing) so there should be many killer grows in this rooms future

Oh yea this is just a normal humidifier too I’m so over the hydrofogger or whatever it’s called. What a mess that thing was. I mean if you’re trying to condition a barn it would be awesome but in small rooms they just don’t have the space for al the mist to evaporate.

 

[SmokeyMcFly]

Got the door finished, well other than the decorative molding my buddy wants to put on once the outside mud work is done but we got a handle and weatherstripping

 

[SmokeyMcFly]

Thanks GT, I have seen you lurking and liking my posts . Glad to have your approval you were one of the very first people I started following on here way back and are a big part of why I started running Doc’s kit

 

[Graytail]

Glad to hear I got you started with the Kit!

I'm jonseing on your growroom.

 

[Neiko]

I'm jonseing on your growroom.

Me too! I'd have it running like a jungle in Vietnam, sativa heaven in the middle of the desert.
Great job Smokey, you must be getting excited.

 

[SmokeyMcFly]

Glad to hear I got you started with the Kit!

I'm jonseing on your growroom.

Thanks bud I’m super glad you got me started on it too at this point I’m convinced it’s unbeatable as far as growing top notch herb and it’s probably the easiest method to grow top quality bud with and it’s very affordable which is just well awesome. Anyone reading this that hasn’t tried a grow with Docs kit you’re really missing out and should give it a try for a run I promise there will be no going back to the other methods after you try high Brix bud

Me too! I'd have it running like a jungle in Vietnam, sativa heaven in the middle of the desert.
Great job Smokey, you must be getting excited.

Me three

It already is like a jungle in there I came out after about ten minutes yesterday and it felt like I just left a steam bath or sauna The Sativas will be super happy just hoping I can find a good balance between keeping them humid enough without wrecking the indicas in the process...

 

[Graytail]

at this point I’m convinced it’s unbeatable as far as growing top notch herb and it’s probably the easiest method to grow top quality bud with and it’s very affordable which is just well awesome. Anyone reading this that hasn’t tried a grow with Docs kit you’re really missing out and should give it a try for a run I promise there will be no going back to the other methods after you try high Brix bud

And it's really hard to screw up!

 

[SmokeyMcFly]

And it's really hard to screw up!

So true and even when we do screw up and have less than perfect leaves / plant the final smoke still ends up being great somehow. I haven’t had a single plant where the bud wasn’t smokable even towards the end when I was really lazy and or away from home for weeks at a time during their flower phase and I’m picky enough with my smoke that I have thrown several batches of dispensary bud away because it wasn’t worth my lung capacity

 

[SmokeyMcFly]

Now that I know I don't need to run the rain machine to keep my humidity up in the new room I decided on my lighting upgrade. I ordered a Horticulture Lighting Group 550V2 3000k spectrum to run in the main flower tent. From what info I could find it sounds like it should be a pretty decent upgrade over the platinum p600 + 2 p300s I currently have in there even though they both pull roughly the same amount of watts. If the intensity at the edges is too low with just the HLG I have enough platinums I could run a couple of them along with it to give more even coverage for the entire 5x5 tent. Actually now that i'm thinking about it maybe i'll just run the platinums that are currently in there along two of the edges and fill the rest with the HLG that would give me a true 1k watts of LED in a 5x5 Assuming the HLG outperforms the platinums i'll phase the other lights out over time or as they die out. For now they will be running my veg and second flower areas.

I have a par meter so i'll do some comparisons and post the results. HLG advertises around 1k par? umol? whatever the par meter's readout at 24" and I was only getting around 650 when I checked the platinums tonight at that distance.

HLG 550V2 Overview
The Horticulture Lighting Group's HLG 550 is an indoor horticulture LED grow lamp designed to replace a single ended 1000W HID. Each lamp uses 4 of HLG's custom designed High-efficiency white light Quantum Boards made by Samsung. With a total of 1152 Top Bin Samsung LM301B LED's, this fixture produces 1178 PPF with just 500 Watts. Comes in either 3000K (Flowering and Full Cycle) or 4000K (Veg only) spectrums.

 

[SmokeyMcFly]

I got the co2 bottle filled today and was all excited to hook it up. After reading the directions on my controller I all of a sudden realized why I was unable to get it to show me a ppm reading for the c02. The controller I got only has a on / off timer for co2 no actual meter or way to program in a co2 setting other than fiddling with the timer and this is a no fiddle aloud room! It seems I needed to buy the next one better (Saturn 6) to get what I was really looking for but had no idea back then. Thats the bad news, the good news is I now have a valid excuse to get a new controller with all the cool new shit that's come out since then

After looking at the current options I decided I wanted something that would let me control / monitor and get alerts remotely if something gets out of whack. No point in going through all of this to go away for a weekend to come home to dead plants I ordered a Link4 Iponic 614 controller that hooks up to your network allowing remote monitoring / control and data logs params so you can see charts of what the actual params were in a past period. It also lets you create custom grow schedules and save them so you can have a custom cycle per strain or w/e that adjusts all the params depending on exactly where you are in the growing phase for that run. You could even program a seed to harvest schedule that adjusted everything the entire way if you wanted to. It also has a thermostat built in so it can be wired into control a central AC system or w/e so hopefully I can wire my mini-split to it so i can also control hvac with it. Lots of geeky stuff for this geek to play with lol. Anyway it looks like fun and should be the last big purchase I need to make for a while. Not a bad piece of gear to finish off the room

Gonna be putting the mom tent up tonight or tomorrow and get some of these up-potted and flipped.

Have a great weekend everyone


Neiko do you know anything about wiring up a mini split to a remote thermostat? Is that something they are typically able to do? I’ll bust out the manual but it’s pretty lacking in info. For example it says auto mode keeps it at ex-factory settings but doesn’t say what they really are other than 68 degrees or if / how you can change them...

Thanks bud!

 

[SmokeyMcFly]

Got the mom tent mostly setup. Need to order a few more hangers so I can put the other two or three lights in there and it will be finished. I had enough co2 tubing that I ran a bit of it in there. I assume it doesn’t really matter most of the square footage of the room will be filled with plants so I’m not trying to keep each tent sealed except to let heat out or anything the air will all be mixed for the room so after a few hours it should all be the same regardless of which tent the co2 gets injected to anyway. I was able to up can three of the plants two Malawi x pck and one of the I think face on fire og into seven gal pots and started the 12/12 cycle on them before running out of soil so making a new batch of soil is next on my todo list.

Couple pictures of the progress

Humidifier is going to go where the bucket is once the new controller gets hooked up. I

Last pieces of empty wall this is where the 2x4 flower tent and drying cabinet are going to be going. Tetris champ of the world right here

Working in there is a nightmare now that it’s like a sauna... time for a well earned

 

[Graytail]

I want a garden with a chair in it! Damn!

 

[SmokeyMcFly]

I want a garden with a chair in it! Damn!

That was actually my ladder for the night but it is nice to have in there if there ends up being enough room it will def be staying

 

[Graytail]

Hmm, but you can't hang out in there with elevated CO2 ...

 

[SmokeyMcFly]

Hmm, but you can't hang out in there with elevated CO2 ...

Yea that’s probably not a great idea

After being used to no humidity from living in the desert 70% rh at 75 degrees or so gets painful quickly so I spend as little time as possible in there. Thank god im past the needing to look at them 100 times a day just to make sure they’re still ok phase

 

[Neiko]

Neiko do you know anything about wiring up a mini split to a remote thermostat? Is that something they are typically able to do? I’ll bust out the manual but it’s pretty lacking in info. For example it says auto mode keeps it at ex-factory settings but doesn’t say what they really are other than 68 degrees or if / how you can change them...

Thanks bud!

All mini splits do things a little differently but yes you should be able to connect a remote wired thermostat. There are connections for a thermostat in the electrical portion of the indoor head. You should have gotten a hand held remote with your AC to set what temp you want. The hand held is NOT a thermostat as in it doesn't sense temperature, it sets the temperature for the unit. The temp sensor is in the return air side of the indoor unit. Is it a heat pump or only cooling? Auto mode should mean it will switch to heat or cooling to hold your setpoint. Mini splits try to run all the time to hold an average temperature. It should seem like they are running all the time, they do this to keep as tight of a control as they can by ramping up/down the compressor capacity. If you want to program the unit to change temp automatically then you will need a wired thermostat. The wired stats are sold as accessories from the unit's manufacturer. I'm not sure about using an aftermarket thermostat though, you'll probably need to go back to the manufacturer of your unit. Be warned though they tend to really over price them.

 

[Amy Gardner]

valid excuse to get a new controller with all the cool new shit that's come out since then

Not a bad piece of gear to finish off the room

 

[SmokeyMcFly]

All mini splits do things a little differently but yes you should be able to connect a remote wired thermostat. There are connections for a thermostat in the electrical portion of the indoor head. You should have gotten a hand held remote with your AC to set what temp you want. The hand held is NOT a thermostat as in it doesn't sense temperature, it sets the temperature for the unit. The temp sensor is in the return air side of the indoor unit. Is it a heat pump or only cooling? Auto mode should mean it will switch to heat or cooling to hold your setpoint. Mini splits try to run all the time to hold an average temperature. It should seem like they are running all the time, they do this to keep as tight of a control as they can by ramping up/down the compressor capacity. If you want to program the unit to change temp automatically then you will need a wired thermostat. The wired stats are sold as accessories from the unit's manufacturer. I'm not sure about using an aftermarket thermostat though, you'll probably need to go back to the manufacturer of your unit. Be warned though they tend to really over price them.

Nice thanks. I do have a remote control for the mini split and you're right it doesn't seem to matter where I put it the unit acts the same and seems to always be blowing at least a little bit of air and I can't tell when it kicks on unless im watching my monitor I'll see a ~2 degree temp drop along with ~8% humidity drop happen for a few min until the humidifier gets the level back up. The unit I got has a heat mode, a cooling mode, a dehumidify mode and an auto mode which is supposed to switch between the first three modes as needed to keep the temp and humidity at the setpoint. At least I think it includes the dehumidify mode in auto the manual sucks the D. The problem is I haven't found anyway to adjust the setpoints the auto mode uses, the manual says it uses "ex-factory settings" and doesn't tell you how to change them so I can't really use it. The controller I got is made to act as a wired thermostat with 24V wires (I think anyway it was late last night when I was researching) for at least heating cooling and fan mode and i'm hoping I can get the dehumidify mode wired into it also as I currently have no way to use the built in dehumidifier. After watching all the setup videos and realizing just how awesome this controller is I emailed the place I ordered it from and asked them to switch my order to the 624 model which is the same thing but it comes with a second sensor and is made to run two rooms at the same time. I figure it will come in handy for either one of the other tents or the room itself. Between it and the old controller I could control all three tents independently or I may use the second zone to run the main room itself, eitherway I will be able to have over temp protection on all tents and turn the lights off if the AC ever fails

Here is a video of them connecting a mini-split to the controller I got and setting it up to act as the thermostat. Think this will work?

Thanks for the help bud!

Thanks Amy!