Grow Room for Volksgarden

[leonardo]

OK boys and girls, I have a video update and a few new questions.

- Making the best with the electrical outlets I have.
- Internet security, uploading safely.
- What to do with the ozone generator I have.

YouTube - Grow Room Update 9/04/09

Don't forget to rate it!

 

[McBudz]

RE: power..

of the grounded outlets you have do you know if any are on different 15A or 20A circuits? If you have access to the breakers just plug a light or something electrical into each one and throw the breakers 1 by 1 and see if you hopefully have different circuits. If so then you need to put the AC and 600watt light on seperate circuits then try to balance out the rest of your electrical components.

remember AMPS = WATTS / VOLTS

your devices should tell you what there power rating is in watts or amp consumption. if you get just whats use the above the calculate the amps. I believe most houses are 110V or 120 . Do not exceed what you circuit is rated for. Should be noted on the breaker. Remember if running a timer may want to use multiple times and stagger startup times by a minute as max load can occur at startup.

 

[Munki]

I like the video.

The amount of plugs you see available has no bearing on what you can connect. It is a question of load. Can you access the circuit breaker for your place? ID what plugs are controlled by each breaker and also identify the maximum amperage on each breaker.

If you have a circuit that has a 15 amp breaker on it, that line can theoritically handle 15 amp x 110 volt = 1650 Watts. As a rule of thumb, avoid loading a circuit beyond 80% so the max in this case would be 1320 Watts.

Now if during your circuit testing you discover that the open plugs go to different circuits, then you have more wattage to play with; just do not overload any one circuit beyond 80%. If you purchase a "kill-a-watt" meter, you can test what your equipment actually uses. It is a real handy tool.

Now there are other things beyond your skill that can be done like combining 110 volt circuits to get 220 volts. 220 runs electronic devices more efficiently than 110 but you should consult an electrician to do that and you need your equipment to run on 220 volts.

 

[jcommerce]

Alright, I'm established on another site, but I had to register for 420 so I could comment and give some advice to you Leonardo. Rather than try to address all of your questions and concerns over the multiple post pages, just hit me up with the most pressing ones....I think I can help you out.

Did you get calibration fluid for your pens? Calibration is easy as cake and needs to be done often, especially Ph. I calibrate 1 - 2 times per month.

Your PPM levels are WAY too high for plants at that stage. I'm actually shocked that you're not seeing nute burn. I'm usually in the 300 - 500 level at the stage you are currently. I max out during early - mid flower in the 1200 - 1300 range and start to see nute burn if I hit anything over 1400. Keep your eye out for burn which will start on the tips of your leaves.

Go get a bottle of neem oil for your powdery mildew problem. As I see you're in Nor Cal, I know it can be a problem with the humidity levels seen there. I mix neem oil with water in a spray bottle and spray my leaves, top and bottom, once per month and have never had a problem with PM. Neem oil is a non-toxic fungicide, miticide, and insecticide which is very convenient for protecting your plants from powdery mildew, mites, and other little nasties. It leaves a sheen on the leaves for a few days but wares off as the plants grow...no need to wash off. I have had phenomemal results and it has saved me the headache of using a sulfur burner (which can ruin bud taste if used to late in grow) or a dehumidifier, etc. Neem oil works to prevent powdery mildew by changing the Ph on the leaf surface to a Ph level which is non-conducive to fungal growth. Chances of having powdery mildew and other types of diseases like damping off, are greatly reduced when their ideal Ph growth levels are offset. Non-toxic to plants, non-toxic to humans, deters nasty bugs, prevents fungus....bingo!

Go buy a reverse osmosis filter on Ebay. You can get one that will do just fine for $100 - $150 I believe. Buying bottled water, especially for things like flushing, is no bueno.....silly really. Sorry, don't mean to criticize, but that is expensive and not very green to be having plastic bottles used up like that. R/O is an investment you will be very happy with, not only is it ideal for your plants, but your drinking water as well.

100 GPD RO Reverse Osmosis Water Filter 6 stage DI NEW - eBay (item 370244125601)

Last but not least...and I hate to say this and it may sting a bit if you have your heart set on it....ditch the Rotogrow/Volkswagen idea. Serious...

Look on the internet and the only people you see promoting these things are the manufacturers, and people who have bought them and want them to work so bad, that they work and strain and toil in order to get them to grow what amounts to be a relatively weak amount of bud.

You could easily harvest 1 - 1.5 lbs with a nice 8 - 10 plant hydro system under a 600 Watt HPS...no problem. You're already on the hydro road with your coco grow you have there. I would seriously, highly recommend a shift of thought on how you're going to proceed. A RDWC (recirculating deep water culture) system will be much easier and require less maintenance that a roto grow....trust me. I've grown with 3 different methods over the years and have finally settled on a RDWC system I built for a couple hundred bucks and it produced the biggest harvests yet. Ph is much much easier to maintain and it requires about 10 - 15 minutes of maintenance per day, but also allows me to leave for up to a week at a time with no worries. Believe me, you, being somewhat new to the hobby, will HATE rockwool. I do and many many others do as well....it sucks. Type in "Rockwool sucks" on Google and you'll see what I mean. It can be done and done well by people who have gone through much trial and error and prep work, but it is not for beginners. It gets soggy and promotes root rot and the Ph is hard to get stabilized.

I will stop rambling and see if you have any thoughts. Talk to you soon.

jcom

p.s. - let us know how it goes with the landlord....

 

[leonardo]

Hey jcom, thanks for joining in! I don't have calibration fluid, but I'll go get some tomorrow and figure out how to do that for both pens. I do have neem oil, and I did give them some a few weeks ago, so it sounds like I'm safe to do it again. I also have a fungicide called GreenCure that everyone around here uses, I only used that one on the Limes and they did great afterward. After I clip up the Limes this weekend, I was planning on cleaning the room really good and applying either neem or GreenCure to the GDP's and then doing the other one in a couple weeks, allowing them two more weeks to grow before I clip them up to fill the Volksgarden.

I appreciate your concern and I know most people think I'm biting off more than I can chew with the Volksgarden. But after months of research I've decided rotary is the way I want to grow, so I figure that's what I should spend my time and energy on. I see the value in learning from basics and building a foundation of knowledge to work with, But I'm absolutely committed to becoming a rotary master and will learn whatever I need to learn one way or another, even if it takes several attempts to figure it out. Anyway way you look at it I'm going to have a big learning curve, might as well learn everything I need to learn on the system I plan on using. It might be harder and a lot more things could go wrong, but I KNOW I'll be a master eventually so it's just a matter of toughing it out and doing whatever it takes to succeed.

Thanks again for the good advice, hope you stick around to help me pull off a miracle!

 

[jcommerce]

Cool as school my friend. I think it's a good idea you have to start practicing cloning in advance. My favorite is Olivia's Cloning Gel, it is awesome. You dip the clones in the gel and then when you place them in the rapid growers, it expands and forms a cocoon, if you will, around the stalk. Very high success rates. Go with the lower branches as they have more of the natural root hormones that promote good root growth...your success rate will decline as you start to cut clones from higher branches. Actually, I would start topping the plants you have now to encourage out branching rather than vertical growth since you're going to use them all for mothers. That way you'll have many more lower stalk branch sites and therefore, better clone branches...make sense?

I would flush your coco down to 500 max for now....keep watering with fresh water until you achieve that level. Then only feed as the PPMs begin to fall below that level. Your plants will be getting plenty of nutes.

One other question. Why don't you have your AC outside of your tent? You could have additional grow space inside if you ducted the cool air in from the outside. With a rectangular home duct piece, you could duct tape it onto the AC vent, then run it into your tent with 6 or 8 inch flex ducting. Just a thought....

Order the Reverse Osmosis filter today!

 

[Keith Lake]

Offered solely for motivation

 

[leonardo]

I've thought about topping the girls and I know I need to do it, but I don't even know how yet! I know it should be easy and I'll look into doing that in the next few days so I can take more lower cuttings when I want to fill the VG.

With the nutes the PPM is about 600 when I water them, and around 1000 when I test the saucer water. I follow the Humboldt Nutriants directions to a T and those levels are under what they say it should be if I were using all of their products. They seem pretty healthy so I just don't know if I want to mess with that until I see signs of a problem, but I'll give them a day with no nutes this weekend I guess, and maybe even water them twice to give them a little flush. That's the nice thing about coco, you gotta try pretty hard to over water them.

I've thought about putting the AC outside the tent, but I don't actually have room for it! It has a dehumidifying function that will come in handy when the rainy season arrives, right now my humidity is a little too low, between 30-50%. I may change things up with the AC as we go along, we'll see. Once I get a CO2 tank we'll need to rethink all that.

I've been using the water from the machine at the grocery store this week and will stick with it for now because I don't think RO alone can match it. It goes through 5 different filters and UV light, the PPM is usually 1 and the PH around 6.7.

So I showed the landlords what I had in my room... I wouldn't say it went well, but the show is still on.

 

[WheeloFortune]

looking good buddy. i wouldn't freak out about the PM you see. catch it early, spray and you should be good.

i'll tell you what. jc has some valid points. and i agree RW is a f'n bitch, albeit a controllable one. I have ideas in the works on this.

I totally agree with the RO bit. but what your doing is just as good until you have the money in the budget. . . it's not like your feeding them chlorinated water.

I also agree that if you are mothering those DGP you should top them. . . to be honest, if i were you, I would clone the tops of those moms. then you have 8 moms to grow, then you only need 10ish from each. you should top somewhere above the 4th node of the GDP mom, and make sure its big enough to clone. this should prob save you time to fill the VG too.

about the electricity, good advice has already been given. pray to god that the two outlets in your room are on different circuits (they probably aren't) and if they're not, pray that the one around the corner is. lol.

about the ozone. i would not use them in the room. O3 is deadly to all life. including you and your plants. small amounts in big areas can kill smell, but doses high enough to sanitize will harm you and your plants. I have a living air O3/ionizer. adjustable. . . and i don't use it at all.

since you are exchanging air with the room, i would say its a better choice, but its still gonna get in there with near the same concentration. I would only vent the tent once or twice a day at most, i forgot what you said you had it timed for, no need to waste the nice AC. if you get co2 down the road there wil be no need to vent at all and no air exchange means no smell exchange.

looking good bro.

oh, and one last thing.

I do not work for Omega or anyone else, and trust me I am never so desperate to see something work that i will favor it over another method. I am a scientist. my loyalty lies in truth. if something else works better. use it. question everything that you take for granted. and rechallenge them next week too. thats why i am giving my hand a go at the volks. ignoring what IMO i don't see proof of yet is the increased speed of harvest and flushing the auxins to produce shorter plants. you still have one undeniable fact that every plant (branch) has perfect placing under the light, and that the linear growing space is 3.14 times as wide as the diameter of the machine. . . speaking as a scientist, i think that even this is slightly deceiving because as the plants grow taller, the effective radius shrinks. . . so if one were to grow 14" plants the effective radius of canopy would be 9" giving a linear canopy area of about 57", which is about an extra 20-25%. and remember the main enhancement in this type of grow is that all of the plants are in the sweet spot directly under the bulb. no flat garden can claim that (using hps).

when tuned. this should be an excellent machine for this kind of grow. maybe not all you were promised on the label, but still has significant advantages over other styles.

sorry to post a big block of text.
but i needed to say it.

also - his comments might be truer for some than others. this style is not for everyone's gramma.

 

[WheeloFortune]

also another thing. lol. smoking that fatty again tonight. . .

the learning curve today is not what it was 15 years ago. i did research on growing for years before i started. there was nothing out there. the internet was barely a thought. I had to read a huge book by ed rosenthal and mel frank that i downloaded off of a anarchy website. nobody to guide me, not enough literature for a young boy to find covertly.

today amoungst the wealth of knowledge posted in how to's and instructionals, you have nutrient companies making mutes specifically for bud, you have live help support right here, where you can get great advice (and have to weed out what you deem to be bad advice).

you'll do fine. and i believe your the first to be postin youtube, so you'll be famous! lol.

be thankful you are starting out in the age of information. both bad and good. but there to be had.

 

[leonardo]

WheelO, thanks as always. Are you saying I should put my two Vortex fans that provide intake and exhaust on a timer? I've always heard plants need plenty of fresh air and I don't have CO2 running yet. Right now I just have them dimmed down quite a bit and the AC unit causes the sides to suck in a lot if I don't have at least the intake fan running.

So true about getting advice, I always take everything with a grain of salt until until I know them. This just simply wouldn't even be possible without the internet, thanks Al Gore!

I think the best system is the one that's been mastered and gives it's grower a happy high.

 

[WheeloFortune]

1,000 ways to skin a cat.

i think you are just throwing electricity out the window by exchanging air AND using AC. the amount of electricity you must be wasting would prob buy you a co2 tank, selenoid and valve in 6-8 months in cali i would guess. there is like 300-400 ppm in the air naturally, it would probably take your plants most of a day to use up the volume in that big ass tent. you could run them 15 min/hour and save electricity and still not need co2. or even less maybe. otherwise you are pulling warm air into a cool tent, right?

why does your ac suck in the sides? i dont think it should. . . it is not exchanging air with the outside, i don't believe. you should have an in and an out to cool the hot side, these both go outside. and then the ac should suck in tent air and blow tent air just inside the tent. I agree with mcbuds, if you could get your ac out of the room, not only would it free up space it would make it easier to cool.

a little AC lesson.

AC uses a heat pump. basically, there are two radiators hooked up to tubing that runs with a pump in the middle. when the pump is on it creates a vacuum on one side and compresses the other side. one side gets very hot, the other side gets cold. the two hoses that are in the back of the ac go to cool the hot radiator and carry the heat outside. it is a closed loop. and the front of the ac has the other radiator, the cool one, that has a fan to push the air through it and cool it.

the hot radiator is inside the unit too, thats why it prob gets warm. that is leaking heat into your room. if you got it outside the room, that extra heat would be outside too, making it easier to cool. a little more electricity savings. . . they keep adding up.

the thing is you need an intake and an output if you took it out. i saw someone here do it with some cardboard boxes. i forget who, maybe maxx? maybe not. just smoked a huge blunt.

 

[McBudz]

I've thought about topping the girls and I know I need to do it, but I don't even know how yet! I know it should be easy and I'll look into doing that in the next few days so I can take more lower cuttings when I want to fill the VG.
.

Topping

 

[WheeloFortune]

that is a great way to get two top shoots, but if your plants are big enough to support it, i would take enough off the top to clone them (4-5") and that would act as a double, top the moms, and get new moms.

they will make it easier to get the 100 clones you want to take.

 

[leonardo]

Wow, you guys have given me a lot to think about, thank's so much. If I somehow pull off a good first run, it will be because of all the help I got here from all of you.

So, after playing mental jujitsu all day to get the balls to drop the bomb on the sweet old land lady next door before she found out on her own, I'm totally mentally drained and anxious to see how wicked the cat is that I just let out of the bag. But what's done is done, now I can do what I need to do to make this happen. I'm going to get heavily medicated and get a good night sleep tonight, tomorrow I'll have a clear head to decide when to clip up the limes and topping the GDP's, what to do about air, electricity and the best approach to dealing with the minor PM.

 

[jcommerce]

Leo, can you please tell us a bit more of how it went with the Landlady? This is like reality TV here, well, reality web...I'd just like to hear what you ended up saying to her to let her know and what her reaction was. I assume that in NoCal, it wasn't a complete shock to her. In some parts of the country, the cops would have been there within minutes obviously. I guess you're not breaking the law, but at the same time you will be running some items that will require significant electricity and it poses a threat of fire. Do you have a fire extinguisher? She'd probably like to know that you at least have that.

Ditto on the above post about the Ozone generator, it will kill your plants. They are best used to get rid of odor within exhaust lines, and outside of the grow room. If they are used in the grow room and the main fan fails for some reason, but the ozone generator keeps running, you would have a tragic event on your hands. If you're not too concerned about odor now that you LL knows, I would box up the ozone generator and forget about it.

One more thing about R/O water...even though it may not run through a UV sterilizer like the one at the grocery store, it's membrane filters really negate the need to even have UV. Because the membranes are so small, they end up only allowing the water particles themselves to get through and not any metals, particles, parasites, etc. My R/O filter is nothing fancy and it tests at 000 - 001 PPMs even after running for 3 years and no membrane changes. My tap water tests at about 265 PPM, so it's doing the trick. I use it to top of my 120 gallon saltwater reef tank and to refresh and refill my 75 gallon RDWC hydro operation.

Once you get the roto/volks, you'll be very very glad that you have R/O water handy so you can make quick adjustments to water levels, flushes, ph adjustments, etc. You're going to get very sick of going to the store and wasting your time and money. I can't stress this enough...

 

[leonardo]

jcommerce, you're right about the ozone generator, it's going in a box. But after I clip up the mothers in about 4 weeks, I'm going to take everything out and clean the fuck out of the tent and run the ozone in there just to kill everything before I fill up the VG. I can definitely see the convenience of having my own R/O, I'll get one once I get everything up and running smooth and get the necessities out of the way.

Well the way it down with the landlord was like this... I saw her outside and just grabbed her and said I had something to show her, I brought her in the room and asked if she knew what the tent was for or what was inside, she didn't so I opened it up and showed her. She was just quiet and shocked and needed a few minutes to take in what she was seeing. She started crying and getting emotional because she thinks it makes the room look so bad and she really just loves the little cottage I rent from her, but she insisted she wasnt mad about the pot and isnt one to judge. I think she wants me to get a girlfriend to move in and thinks this will only hurt my prospects, and she would probably right! So we had to get her husband over to see what he thinks, his reaction was shock at first too. He said he doesnt care what I do, but is concerned about his legal liability should something happen. He said if there was a fire and they determined the grow op started it and he knew it was there, the insurance might not pay out and he would get screwed for something he has no interest in. She talked about contacting the RE agent that handled my lease to get her opinion, he wanted to do his research and go eat dinner. They both insist they're don't hate me and aren't mad, just that they're a little blown away and need to process it all. As they left, they told me not to tell anyone and I told them I wished they could have amnesia and completely forget what just happened. So as you can imagine, I've got a little anxiety as I await to see what transpires over the next few days. If all goes well until the 15th, I'll place the order for the VG...

 

[jcommerce]

Wow, that's crazy. I bet your heart was in your throat for awhile there. I would strongly encourage them not to talk to the RE Agent. The agent will almost certainly recommend that they either evict you or insist you stop the operation. The RE Agent will do this to cover her butt. There's no way she's going to expose herself legally by recommending that they let you do your thing. I would go have a talk with them immediately and give them as much peace of mind as possible...and get a fire extinguisher to show them. I'd make sure you have a smoke detector too. Do EVERYTHING you can to show them that you're a wise, responsible tenant, neighbor, and grower. You've taken the first step by telling them...don't stop there.

 

[leonardo]

Well I told them that I would prefer it if they told no one. I don't think they would want to evict me because they like me and don't want to find another tenant, they know that will be a pain in the ass and money out their pocket, and they'll never find someone as good as me. If they say they want me to stop, I'll say sorry I'm too committed and tell them I would rather move if they can't accept it, if that doesn't work then I guess I start looking for a new place. I do have a fire extinguisher right next to the bed on the bed stand, I don't know if they saw it last night or not. They installed two new fire detectors in the place last month and one is in the grow room. I hope they just choose to pretend they don't know anything, I just hope they don't try to shake me down for more rent or a something like that.

 

[leonardo]

Well I've got horrible news. I made an enormous mistake in telling the landlords. They talked to the RE agent and were advised to shut it down or get me out. So they gave me a notice saying I have 3 days to get rid of everything. So now I need to decide what to do...