B
Bluebrother
- 10
- 3
I'm in the planning stage of converting a loft, right now it has no floor or walls and the roof rafters are all exposed.
We're gonna clear it all out, lay some tongue n groove weyroc flooring, install 2 steels between load bearing walls to hold a 600-750l reservoir, insulate the roof and board it all out with Osb sheets, Bring up power from a cooker socket below, 30Amp 240v, bring up water from the bathroom and install a tap, and branch into the soil stack as a means of disposing our waste water.
When this is finished I'll have a room measuring 3.3mx4.6m. The walls will come up 1m from the ground before hitting the roof, from the top of the wall to the top of the roof measures 1.9m from the top of the wall to the peak. The Osb walls and ceiling will be lined with panda film.
There will be 2 rows of 3 bar style LEDs hung at a height of 1.3m, I've got 4 allready ranging from 800w to 1000w that I'll use for now and I'll grab another 2 once the build is complete.
Ventilation will be 2 12 inch ac infinity fans with a 12 inch mountain air filter each, I've got a controller 69 pro right now but I'll maybe upgrade to the controller ai pro by the time it's set up. I've got 2 40lpd dehueys and various humidifiers but I'll probably upgrade those to one big humidifier.
For this new room I'm going back to my roots, glorious grodan will be the substrate. I chose hydro cos I don't think the weight of huge pots and beds of living soil is a good idea in the loft as it doesn't have a proper floor, it's just the ceiling joists, they reccomend no more than 50kg per metre squared static weight, of course you can walk around up there periodically but just can't store anything over 50kg per metre.
There are two load bearing brick walls that finish under the ceiling joists, I'm gonna span a couple of box lintels diagonally between them and this will hold a 600l flexi tank.
So from the floor to the top of the plant must be under 1m ( the highest I can hang the LEDs is 1.3m from the floor to give even coverage) I've grew plenty plants this size before that have given me great yields when trained right.
So now I'm looking at what kind of system I can build/buy. I'm leaning towards using Hugo blocks and grodan slabs ontop of perhaps a danish tray or in aqua trays designed for the slab.
I'll be using drip irrigation and I love the look of all the flora flex stuff. When I grew in rockwool I just used the 2lph drippers, 2 per block, tbe trays were on tables and would just gravity drain back into the res. Height unfortunately won't allow that here so I'll be using one of those fancy condensate/sump pumps with the float valve to return run off to the tank.
Im reading a lot about crop steering and low volume high frequency irrigation by using rootzone meters and solenoids, but in all honesty I'll probably just use a smart timer and figure my irrigation out through trial and error, I used to do 8 irrigations a day and just tailor the feed time to how the plants responded, I've even had good results running them 24/7 believe it or not.
I used to do hempy buckets with grodan cubes and blocks back in the day and they were so simple, at first I hand watered, then I built some drip rings and fed them once a day on a timer.
It's clear I didn't realise I could've achieved the same size plant with far less media lol. I was young what can I say, we live and learn!
So what do you guys think? I'm all ears!
On the construction side of things I don't really need any pointers as that's been my job for 20 years so I know what I'm doing and I've got trusted friends who are also in the biz. But by all means if you think I'm missing something let me know.
Mainly I just wanna know if anyone's done grows with this kind of height restrictions before and how did it go, what system did you use?
And anyone who's clued up with all this new irrigation tech and these condensate style return pumps, crop steering, know of any cheaper alternatives to a full grosens kit?
I don't really wanna go over 24 plants in this space so that works out about 2 per square meter.
has anyone grown 1m square plants in blocks and slabs? I've done them in Hempys and buckets of mini cubes with flood n drain and drip but never in a block.
Also if anyone has any input about where I should place my equipment in the room?
I'm tying to take advantage of all the space above the lights, this is where I'll hang my filter. I would've liked to get my dehumidifiers up here too but doubt they'd make much of a difference to canopy level humidity all the way up there.
Sorry this is such a long opening post but there was a lot to cover
Thanks in advance for taking the time to read this and I appreciate your feedback!
Blue
We're gonna clear it all out, lay some tongue n groove weyroc flooring, install 2 steels between load bearing walls to hold a 600-750l reservoir, insulate the roof and board it all out with Osb sheets, Bring up power from a cooker socket below, 30Amp 240v, bring up water from the bathroom and install a tap, and branch into the soil stack as a means of disposing our waste water.
When this is finished I'll have a room measuring 3.3mx4.6m. The walls will come up 1m from the ground before hitting the roof, from the top of the wall to the top of the roof measures 1.9m from the top of the wall to the peak. The Osb walls and ceiling will be lined with panda film.
There will be 2 rows of 3 bar style LEDs hung at a height of 1.3m, I've got 4 allready ranging from 800w to 1000w that I'll use for now and I'll grab another 2 once the build is complete.
Ventilation will be 2 12 inch ac infinity fans with a 12 inch mountain air filter each, I've got a controller 69 pro right now but I'll maybe upgrade to the controller ai pro by the time it's set up. I've got 2 40lpd dehueys and various humidifiers but I'll probably upgrade those to one big humidifier.
For this new room I'm going back to my roots, glorious grodan will be the substrate. I chose hydro cos I don't think the weight of huge pots and beds of living soil is a good idea in the loft as it doesn't have a proper floor, it's just the ceiling joists, they reccomend no more than 50kg per metre squared static weight, of course you can walk around up there periodically but just can't store anything over 50kg per metre.
There are two load bearing brick walls that finish under the ceiling joists, I'm gonna span a couple of box lintels diagonally between them and this will hold a 600l flexi tank.
So from the floor to the top of the plant must be under 1m ( the highest I can hang the LEDs is 1.3m from the floor to give even coverage) I've grew plenty plants this size before that have given me great yields when trained right.
So now I'm looking at what kind of system I can build/buy. I'm leaning towards using Hugo blocks and grodan slabs ontop of perhaps a danish tray or in aqua trays designed for the slab.
I'll be using drip irrigation and I love the look of all the flora flex stuff. When I grew in rockwool I just used the 2lph drippers, 2 per block, tbe trays were on tables and would just gravity drain back into the res. Height unfortunately won't allow that here so I'll be using one of those fancy condensate/sump pumps with the float valve to return run off to the tank.
Im reading a lot about crop steering and low volume high frequency irrigation by using rootzone meters and solenoids, but in all honesty I'll probably just use a smart timer and figure my irrigation out through trial and error, I used to do 8 irrigations a day and just tailor the feed time to how the plants responded, I've even had good results running them 24/7 believe it or not.
I used to do hempy buckets with grodan cubes and blocks back in the day and they were so simple, at first I hand watered, then I built some drip rings and fed them once a day on a timer.
It's clear I didn't realise I could've achieved the same size plant with far less media lol. I was young what can I say, we live and learn!
So what do you guys think? I'm all ears!
On the construction side of things I don't really need any pointers as that's been my job for 20 years so I know what I'm doing and I've got trusted friends who are also in the biz. But by all means if you think I'm missing something let me know.
Mainly I just wanna know if anyone's done grows with this kind of height restrictions before and how did it go, what system did you use?
And anyone who's clued up with all this new irrigation tech and these condensate style return pumps, crop steering, know of any cheaper alternatives to a full grosens kit?
I don't really wanna go over 24 plants in this space so that works out about 2 per square meter.
has anyone grown 1m square plants in blocks and slabs? I've done them in Hempys and buckets of mini cubes with flood n drain and drip but never in a block.
Also if anyone has any input about where I should place my equipment in the room?
I'm tying to take advantage of all the space above the lights, this is where I'll hang my filter. I would've liked to get my dehumidifiers up here too but doubt they'd make much of a difference to canopy level humidity all the way up there.
Sorry this is such a long opening post but there was a lot to cover
Thanks in advance for taking the time to read this and I appreciate your feedback!
Blue
