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Trickerst
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Hello everyone, I am in the stages of building my first closet grow.

 

I don't smoke very often, but I love the process of growing. And I will be very happy to be smoking my own work!

This is not my first time growing things - I have grown a lot of stuff over the years so I am not a newbie when it comes to everything.

 

My space is quite small, 450 x 500 x 1200 (W x L x H).

 

I have built a cabinet out of 24mm ply wood and painted it. The inside is a nice clean matte white.

I will have passive intake via a light trap and a stealth exhaust venting out the roof.

 

I am planning on going scrog, with coco in cloth pots for my first grow. I reeeeeally want to do a Northern Lights #5 x Haze plant.

 

I am in the process of building a controller to control my entire grow box.

It will control the exhaust and internal fans depending on temp/humidity and CO2 levels

It will control watering via moisture sensors & humidity

It will control my lighting too.

Nute dosing will be manual for a while, I will add auto dosing on the next grow I think.

It will log all the variables so I can tell exactly what was happening at any one time in my grow.

 

With my fans I will be able to turn over my entire box's air  2x - 10x depending on the above. I'd lower that to 1x - 5x with carbon filter and ducting.

 

I have tracked my spending on the cabinet so far [including the controller but excluding the fans, I had those already](I have a little project document lol) and I am sitting at around 2k. I had to buy some equip for the build that hit me for another 1k or so, but I will use it again.

I could have gone for a tent, but firstly they come in standard sizes, secondly I can hide my cabinet in plain sight - super stealth compared to a tent.

 

I have some questions however, living in Africa sure does have it's own challenges.

 

I have a few questions:

 

1. Can I grow all year round with the crazy summer temps of 40c outside? My house isn't that well insulated.

2. Where can I get LED lights? And what would you guys recommend that is locally available?

2.1 Where do you guys generally get your stuff from in SA for growing, is there a GOTO?

3. Do I really have to import the NL #5 x Haze seeds? Are there none available locally?

4. How much scent does NL produce during flower? Will carbon filter eliminate the odor?

5. If I vent straight up and out the house, with good negative pressure in the box will smell be eliminated or will it stink around my house?

6. I know the plant I want to grow can get quite tall, but I feel like with a good scrog and controlled vegging I can manage it, opinions?

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Wow trickers that's a high spec box you building, but I guess when you go small the environmental becomes more critical to control. Hence I understand the rationale to attempt to automate. Good luck, look forward to your progress

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My cab is all nicely painted and ready for assembly. Which is going to be a headache seeing as it is 25mm ply.

Planning on sealing the joints with white silicone. I am adding recessed layer of weatherproofing foam strip inside that the door will press against to make a good seal.

 

So far I have spent around 3k getting everything prepped, however that includes tools I can use on subsequent builds.

 

I will be putting a pair of Vero 29 3500k LEDs on 140mm pin heatsink (passive cooling) up in there with a dimmable driver. I will be running them at 50%.

 

The programming of the controller is almost complete, I just need to to test it in the cab.

 

Essentially I have a humidity and temp sensor. If the humidity or temp goes above the threshold the controller increases the RPMs on the fans incrementally until the fall within the desired parameters. It will always operate at a minimum of 3-5 cab volume a minute. It will also always ramp down to the lowest setting to achieve the parameters.

I will also be adding moisture sensors to the soil so I can control watering auto-magically. I will be adding the nutrients in correct quantities to a blackout container that will have an internal pump managed by the controller.

I was thinking of adding a camera into the canopy of the cab so I can monitor growth without actually be at home or opening the cab.

Light cycles will again be also be managed via the controller, although in this case it is very simple.

 

Still to do:

Order seeds

Order pots & tray

Order lights

Get ducting

Build light-trap intake

Measure and cut out venting

Research nutrients & soil parameters.

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Jeez you are organized man. Wish I could operate like that. Sounding like an awesome build.. can't wait to see pics.

 

Where's a good place to get sensors? I'd like that in my new box. Are you using raspberry pi as base for controlling?

Hey @Brown-dawg,

Haha I am trying to be:yipeeee

There are a few online shops that sell DHT11 or DHT22 sensors which are temp/hum sensors. You can also get the moisture sensors there. Like RSOnline, NetRam, PiShop, MicroRobotics etc.

I am using an Arduino UNO WiFi (testing on the UNO R3). I have a RPi3 which will has an MQTT broker on it with Grafana and inlfuxDB for logging. Thing is that I find Pi's GPIO's don't play as well with the sensors as the Arduino's.

Lord knows I'd rather write this in python or c#.

 

So I will use the Arduino for monitoring/control and it will push the data to the RPi3 which can log it all for me so I can have pretty graphs of exactly what is happening.

 

Here are some pics:

(I didn't have a banana so I used a can of spray and cook for scale)

Also, I added a nifty little lock.

Front.thumb.png.72622173dfd4e90c911cd079fb12b1aa.png

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Damn!

That is super slick.

Hats off bro.

 

I'd be keen to learn more re the arduino setup when you've got it waxed. :-)))

 

Seems like I'm gonna have to learn programming real quick. Thanks for sensor info... gonna look into it today.

Can't wait to see your grow

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Damn!

That is super slick.

Hats off bro.

 

I'd be keen to learn more re the arduino setup when you've got it waxed. :-)))

 

Seems like I'm gonna have to learn programming real quick. Thanks for sensor info... gonna look into it today.

Can't wait to see your grow

Yeah it is quite easy for Arduino and stuff. You don't need to be a dev to get it to work.

Haha and also I am more of a brorella :-trip

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