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

[SmokeyMcFly]

Deff going to need to figure out how to get the dehumidifier to run when the flower lights flip off if possible. I had it set based on the flower tent at 65% lights on and 55% at lights off and now that the lights are actually off its at 75% in there which won't be good once there are some nice big buds to rot.. The other option is to run an exhaust fan out of the room and suck a bit of fresh air in when it needs to dehumidify which would require less electricity but I would need to cut a couple holes in my garage wall and I would prefer to go with getting the mini-split dehumidifier working if possible. I really don't want to run a stand alone dehumidifier I don't really have the floor space for it.

 

[Neiko]

Ok, I watched that video. It talks about wiring a conventional heat/cool system to it but not a ductless. The heat pump has a reversing valve that needs to be energized/de-energized when switching from heat to cool so that isn't going to work. Again all these mini splits are different but you have to use their wired controllers because they are usually a communicating system, meaning it will talk to the unit with 2 wires and a DC signal. Your unit doesn't really have a built in dehumidifier but what it does is slow the fan down to achieve a colder evaporator coil. The colder the coil the more moisture it takes out of the air. Really advance systems will use a hot gas by-pass system to re-heat the air so you don't overcool the space while dehumidifying. If you are worried about the humidity spike when lights go off you could exhaust the tents right into the room at lights out. The biggest spike will be in the tents so a passive intake pulling room air into the tent will stabilize the humidity faster while your system dehumidifies the room. I hope that makes sense.

 

[SmokeyMcFly]

Ok, I watched that video. It talks about wiring a conventional heat/cool system to it but not a ductless. The heat pump has a reversing valve that needs to be energized/de-energized when switching from heat to cool so that isn't going to work. Again all these mini splits are different but you have to use their wired controllers because they are usually a communicating system, meaning it will talk to the unit with 2 wires and a DC signal. Your unit doesn't really have a built in dehumidifier but what it does is slow the fan down to achieve a colder evaporator coil. The colder the coil the more moisture it takes out of the air. Really advance systems will use a hot gas by-pass system to re-heat the air so you don't overcool the space while dehumidifying. If you are worried about the humidity spike when lights go off you could exhaust the tents right into the room at lights out. The biggest spike will be in the tents so a passive intake pulling room air into the tent will stabilize the humidity faster while your system dehumidifies the room. I hope that makes sense.

Thanks for looking into that! What a bummer it would of been awesome to be able to control everything through a single device

There is a wired controller and a wifi module that lets you program the mini-split through an app or browser so I guess I may have to look into one of those if I want to do more than just have it set to AC all the time.

Part of the problem is I am constantly running the exhaust vents on the tents and the humidifier is in the room itself so the room RH is around 10% higher than what it reads inside of the flower tent that is warmer than the room. Yesterday I had it set at 65% in the flower tent light on so it was at least 75% in the room itself so no matter how much the exhaust ran once the lights went out the tent temp and rh matched the rooms. With nothing really to pull any of the extra moisture that was needed to keep the level high enough for lights on back out of the air it just stayed elevated all day until I left the door open for about a half an hour to get it dropped back down, it didn't help that it actually rained here today and I watered them last night too. I lowered it to 55% in the flower tent light on tonight to see what lights off params will look like tomorrow morning and I plan on testing the "dehumidify" mode to see if it's even worth trying to get working with a controller.

The Iponic controller has a ramping mode that lets you transition over time between a day and night setting like temp and or RH so you can have it at like 85F - 65% during the day and then two hours before lights out it would start transitioning to the night time setting of like 70f - 50% so it can help you minimize the spikes at transition time.

I just went and ran a test for 10 min of no vent fan on my flower tent to see what would happen and the results were kinda surprising. The temp raised from 78 to 80.5 which I expected but the RH also raised with it from 60 to 63.5%. I didn't think the three plants just getting flipped would put out enough humidity to have it be higher in the tent than the air coming from in the room but it was which should be really good news. This leads me to believe if I set the tents to vent on demand based on temp and rh instead of all the time and keep the room a nice cool even level with a decent humidity setting of like 40-50% I should be able to get them all dialed in without any issues when the lights go out, hopefully...

Thanks again

 

[Neiko]

It sounds like you're getting it worked out. I deal with the same issues. I condition a room with flowering tents in them with a veg area that is in the room (no tent). My room isn't truly sealed though. I have to open the tents with lights on just to keep them at an acceptable level. I'm run my little 4" exhaust 24/7 out of the tents into the room. In the spring/summer I have to run a dehumidifier. I was going to suggest lowering your humidity a couple of hours or so before your lights went off but it sounds like you got it worked out.

 

[SmokeyMcFly]

Ok I give up I’ll be ordering a dehumidifier tonight. The dehumidify mode on the mini split kinda sucks and there isn’t anyway to tell it a rh percentage to shoot for. It’s been in dehumidifier mode all day and it’s still over sixty percent in there. Luckily real dehumidifiers are smaller than I was thinking they were so I’m sure I can get it squeezed in there somewhere and it should only need to run when the flower lights are off so it shouldn’t compete with the elec to much the one I was looking at draws ~700 watts so it’s not an insignificant amount of electricity.

 

[TheGreenYeti]

Dehueys eat up electricity for sure. the good thing is they typically do not have to run for long periods of time at once.

 

[SmokeyMcFly]

Dehueys eat up electricity for sure. the good thing is they typically do not have to run for long periods of time at once.

Yea I was looking at 70pint models which can pull up to 9 gallons of water out in 24 hours. I have no idea how much water I need to pull out. I can’t imagine it’s much more than a gallon per day but I want it to be able to pull it out quickly when it needs to. I’m hoping it doesn’t need to run very much I’m guessing it won’t spend more than an hour a day running mostly when the lights first turn out but it’s just a guess for now. When the new controller gets here I’ll be able to log it and see how much and when it’s actually running. Not gonna lie I’m pretty geeked out over this thing it does so much cool shit

 

[Edzzed]

Pretty sweet set up. I thought I had a good set up but seeing that I have all of 17 days growing experience I too will ask for a seat at the table. I tried to get switches where I would only need one to do it all. I found I needed one switch for a heater. One for a humidity extractor fan based on humidity, One for a heat extractor fan based on temps, One for a cheapo home made humidifier and one for switching lights on and off. If life was that simple there would be no challenge. One thing I would have done differently is your door knob choice. Lever knobs allow you to open the door even while holding items with both hands.

 

[SmokeyMcFly]

Pretty sweet set up. I thought I had a good set up but seeing that I have all of 17 days growing experience I too will ask for a seat at the table. I tried to get switches where I would only need one to do it all. I found I needed one switch for a heater. One for a humidity extractor fan based on humidity, One for a heat extractor fan based on temps, One for a cheapo home made humidifier and one for switching lights on and off. If life was that simple there would be no challenge. One thing I would have done differently is your door knob choice. Lever knobs allow you to open the door even while holding items with both hands.

Thanks and welcome

Good call on the door knob when building everything from scratch little details like that just tend to turn into grabbing the first thing that looks good lol. My only real thoughts at the time were that it would lock and look inconspicuous as possible. I mean a badge and Iris scanner like on the movies would of been dope but would of been kind of hard to explain why the "workshop" or "utility closet" I built in my garage needs something like that on it

Yeah there's a lot of different variables that interact with each other that can make it a nightmare to get everything tuned just right especially when you throw a veg and flower tent in the same room and try and keep them both just right using the same equipment.

The controller I have coming will control everything for two tents except the mini-split AC. It does some really tricky stuff to allow you to setup your equipment pretty much anyway you can think of and then some instead of forcing a piece of equipment into a single role like an exhaust fan only working as a cooling device etc.

My current plan is to setup a single cooling stage and two different stages for humidifying and dehumidifying. Cooling stage 1 will just turn the fan on as the AC can't be controlled by the controller so it will just be set low enough all the time with its built in thermostat. Humidify / Dehumidify stage 1 will just also just run the same fan the cooling stage used to try and fix the RH by cycling the air with the room's air. If the humidity doesn't get back in line within 5-10 min from the fan running then I will have stage 2 turn on either the humidifier or dehumidifier depending on if it's to high or low regardless of which tent triggered stage 2. When the RH in the tent gets back down to stage 1 range it will turn off the humidifier or dehumidifier and keep just the fan running until it gets back to the happy level where everything can turn off. This way I can rely on one fan per tent turning on and off to keep the temps and RH happy in each flower tent as long as the main room's RH is in the range it needs to be for the time of day and if it's not the controller will handle turning on or off the right device to get it back inline. There's also a ramp period so the temps and rh settings will gradually transition over a time period I decide to the new values instead of instantly switching to day/night temp and rh which should help with things like RH spikes at lights out.

Videos on what it can do with vent fans and stages if my ramblings don't make sense and your'e wondering wtf i'm going on about. It's a good thing they made videos to cover all the features. The manual's probably confusing enough to make you

 

[Stu]

Hello SmokeyMcFly, I had seen this journal a while back before the walls were finished but made the mistake of not following it, I stumbled across again tonight and am subbed in now.
Such an amazing area you’ve built!


I don’t have any experience to contribute but i would love to watch this grow...grow

I will mop up my drool I promise

Cheers

 

[SmokeyMcFly]

Hello SmokeyMcFly, I had seen this journal a while back before the walls were finished but made the mistake of not following it, I stumbled across again tonight and am subbed in now.
Such an amazing area you’ve built!


I don’t have any experience to contribute but i would love to watch this grow...grow

I will mop up my drool I promise

Cheers

Thanks! And Welcome back

You’re just in time for stuff to get interesting the rest of the gear comes this week and the first batch of flowering plants just got flipped last weekend, here’s a couple pictures. Everything is already much happier than they were in the closet...

Malawi x PCK

Mystery plant

 

[weenmeoff]

So jealous of your setup! You gonna start a journal soon? It'd be cool if the mods could just move this over to journals in progress seeing as this build is epic and important to your grow.

 

[Stu]

Thanks! And Welcome back

You’re just in time for stuff to get interesting the rest of the gear comes this week and the first batch of flowering plants just got flipped last weekend, here’s a couple pictures. Everything is already much happier than they were in the closet...

Malawi x PCK

Mystery plant

Thanks man, exciting times...
looking forward to it

 

[SmokeyMcFly]

So jealous of your setup! You gonna start a journal soon? It'd be cool if the mods could just move this over to journals in progress seeing as this build is epic and important to your grow.

I'm gonna journal this first batch of three flowering plants as part of this build journal. as the build wraps up I figure it will just transition into more grow updates than gear updates naturally. Also I will be learning and tweaking the setup through the first grow and if people that find this later they will have a sample grow to go with it Once I get finished getting the main stuff setup and settled in i'll start a real grow journal for the next batch, they're waiting on their soil to finish cooking and then I can flip a few more. One of the cherry queens is twice as big as the other so I got a male or a monster out of the pair, they both look really nice I'll get a picture of them up tomorrow, well technically much later today at this point

Couple pics of the flipped plants sleeping.

Tonights adventure, how much co2 can i breath and not pass out....

New Controller The flower tent is in room2 (lighter blue blocks on the screen) and is what is being controlled by this so far. Once I get it hooked up to the computer i'll fix it so room one is on the top and room two is on the bottom instead of having them all mixed up like they are now The other sensor is in my veg tent for the moment but nothing in there is hooked up to it.

Example cycle

This is what resting happy mode currently looks like, temps humidity and co2 are all within params so its not really doing anything although it's trying to run the dehumidifier for room1 but it hasn't arrived yet.

The RH in room2 got to high so it turned on the exhaust fan and killed the co2 from being able to run.

RH back down and vent fans turned back off, co2 is now low and turned on. I have the fuzzy logic setting turned on which is nothing more than a sliding scale of how long you have the set cycle time actually run for. The closer you are to the target setpoint the less of the cycle time it uses so you don't overshoot to much when you're close but it can still rapidly bring the level back up if it needs to by using the cycle if its more than 500ppm away from the target.

The co2 target was hit and its turned off along with the fans.

Humidity turned the fan back on again about 10 min after the last time it ran. When the exhaust fan turns on after being off for a bit the co2 goes up ~50ppm, I think I need a little better air flow at the bottom of the tent to keep it mixed up a bit better when the exhaust is off. Also you will notice I am limited by humidity atm not temp. I did water tonight but RH has been to high since the plants got moved in so the dehuy will be a welcome addition

The guts

Wifi adaptor (hopefully) need to get it a usb power adaptor, nothing like needing to buy an adapter for the damn adapter you had to buy

We also got the carbon scrubber / fan properly hung in the flower tent but I forgot to take pictures. It was kinda of a pita I got the biggest 6" scrubber I could find since I was planning on just having it run in the room stand alone originally.

Ok thats all for tonight i'm really sleepy and im usually bouncing off the walls this time of the night. I dont think spending that much time in there was the best idea, I started feeling a bit a couple times. Oh before I forget the room was up to ~800ppm before the tank even went in just from me and my wife hanging the exhaust filter and fan in the flower tent and mounting the controller on the wall. I thought the sensors needed calibrated when they read that high but I took one of them basically outside and it read right around 400 like it should so it was legit that high. Kinda crazy.

Have a good night all and thanks for all the kind words

 

[Neiko]

I love it! You are going to have the best weed possible. How bout I just send you what I want grown, throw you some cash for expenses and you just grow my stuff for me

 

[SmokeyMcFly]

I love it! You are going to have the best weed possible. How bout I just send you what I want grown, throw you some cash for expenses and you just grow my stuff for me

Thanks bud no pressure or anything
Your bud is so I Guess I better nail this first grow

The big light comes tonight shits bout to get real

 

[Stu]

Everything looking awesome.
Woop the light will be amazing, I went from cheap led’s to a hlg-600v2 and have been more than impressed with it in every way!

The hlg vs the cheapo, I’ve removed the plastic covers to get the most from the 50W chips, my flower tents full so it’s just there to give the plant in the corner a little extra light. Have 2 of the cheap ones, that one and one that’s double the size and it’s in the veg tent, someday I’d like to get another smaller hlg for veg too.
Cheers

 

[SmokeyMcFly]

Everything looking awesome.
Woop the light will be amazing, I went from cheap led’s to a hlg-600v2 and have been more than impressed with it in every way!

The hlg vs the cheapo, I’ve removed the plastic covers to get the most from the 50W chips, my flower tents full so it’s just there to give the plant in the corner a little extra light. Have 2 of the cheap ones, that one and one that’s double the size and it’s in the veg tent, someday I’d like to get another smaller hlg for veg too.
Cheers

Thanks!

Nice job your setup it’s super clean my ceiling looks like a spider web of wires and vent tubing

What size tent is that and how much of it do you think gets covered enough with just the hlg?

 

[Duggan]

Well, i'm here...ffs! I spend way too much time on this forum....why am i only finding out about this now???????I skipped a few pages...no time right now....
Anyhow, thanks for the invite Smokey...your set up is most awesome bud! I am VERY envious of all the space you have, not to mention the kick ass back yard.....i want another turn....PFFT! cheers bud!

 

[eggsman]