First Taste Of Vert
Girl worked from home yesterday so I thought I'd actually have a helper in the garage, but she had conference calls and shit all day so that didn't pan out - however, I've told her that I own her this weekend, so I should make a lot of progress (hopefully).
Decided that having an exposed fluoro in front of my closet prolly wasn't the best move to get vigorous mothers, so bit the bullet and setup my little tent inside.
Was looking for my reflector hangars (can NEVER find them when I need them) when I thought "why not just take the bulb out and hang it vertically? Be a nice intro to vert lighting, if nothing else".
So I did (see pics below); the central AC had tripped its circuit and it was 83F in the house when I took the initial temp readings (96), but even with the house at 72 the thermometer in the tent is reading 82.
Still early, but I'm thinking that reflectors work WAY better in tents because they trap the heat from the bulb and make it mucho easier to vent out of the tent - bare bulb just lets that heat go wherever it wants, and keeping temps in check is much harder than I would've thunk.
Have a 4" (170CFM) for exhaust and passive intake, and temps are ~7 degrees warmer inside the tent than the room it's in.
This issue has also made me rethink whether the 14KBTU portable I ordered will be able to keep temps in check, and I'm fairly certain (during the height of summer, anyways) that the answer is going to be "no", but obviously time will tell - the cool intake air should help, as well as insulating the fuck outta everything, but we'll just have to run it and see.
As long as I'm thinking of it, anyone have any idea how many BTUs a 600 digi ballast puts out? Could put the ballasts in my crawlspace, but then I'd have to go down there when I wanted to dim them, etc........a MASSIVE pain in the ass, but if the BTUs removed are large enough, might just be worth it.
That being said, need to utilize the cool air in the crawlspace better if I wanna really get a handle on my temps, and I think I've come up with a solution - planning on plumbing ten of these together under the crawlspace, giving me 200-225 gallons (I'm assuming, not sure how much water I can fill in each) of cool water.
Not gonna run a cooler and am simply gonna let the cool air below the house cool it - that being said, here's my question - would it make more sense to utilize that cooling power on two 8" iceboxes or a Hydrogen CO2 generator?
I don't believe I could do both because I'd worry about the Hydrogen heating the water up to a point where the iceboxes would be blowing hot air, so I'm thinking they're mutually exclusive.
Before I forget, ordered my digital lux meter yesterday - goes up to 200K lux (brighter than the sun) and some equivalent number of footcandles, so it's a pretty badass model.
I know some people are thinking "Bob, you just like spending money", but I'm thinking you only really get one chance to setup a room right, and I wanna really have my ducks in a row on this one, so the original $4K budget is out the window (octagon alone will prolly run $4K) - trying to keep it under $10K, but whatever needs doing is what needs doing, costs be damned.
Oh, also found some spider mites on the bitches, so sprayed them down with that organic green shit.
And the clones hated the bare bulbed 400; gonna have to put them back under fluoros until they pop some roots - they were not happy this morning after being in there all night.
Oh, also have read a couple of places that you can "double up" on your EZ Cloner, so my 120 can really be a 240, which would be nice (both for space savings and money savings).
As long as this is the longest post of all time, lemme continue - here's my reservoir/system idea:
Okay, so ten MPB totes plumbed together - thinking 1" tubing should be enough to keep their water levels equal, although 2" would work much better, in all likelihood.
From there, run 1/2" tubing (via a 800-1000GPH pump) up to an insulated marine cooler located inside the grow room.
Run 1" (if not 2") tubing back to the reservoir at the other end of the bucket system, making the water constantly fllow through the totes when the system is on - the 1" fitting will be located higher on the cooler than the 1/2" to keep water in there when the pump is not on - also gonna have a backflow preventer (a check valve?) so water will stay in the cooler.
And that's about it; either run a Hydrogen or two iceboxes from that cooler and call it a day - I like being able to access the reservoir if I want to "ghetto cool" it (throw some frozen water bottles in the cooler) on really hot days or something like that.
Sorry for the rambling.