Hi,

Im wanting to do a little homegrow this coming semester and liked the sound of the microgrow. I have a suitably tiny space to shoe horn everything into and a minimalist budget. Im gonna need a lot of help on this one please. Everything from what strain to grow to the lights etc and nutes.

My space is 40cm x 40cm x 65cm. There is about 10cm of space at the bottom of the bedside table that is closed at the front but open at the rear. Here is an impromtu diagram.



The top section was to house the lights and provide venting out the rear of the bedside table. Ill make a homemade carbon filter that either some 12cm pc fans will draw air over or ill get a 10cm bathroom extractor fan.

Will a passsive intake at the bottom be enough. If I cut a strip of wood out of the floor of the main compartment down to the underneath of the bedside table then there will be a large vent the whole width of the base and about 10cm high at the very bottom rear and at the front of the main compartments floor.

The main compartment will be 40cm x 40cm x 50cm. The top section housing the lighting will have a hole in the floor of the section to let the light through to the main chamber. I will mylar the whole thing. Ill be Scrog growing this in soil and pots.

This has to be super stealthy, minimum noise and ill plug all holes to eliminate light leak. This is hopefully something that if i build well will give me many grows.

So basically:

Will my plans work.
Any Optimisations.
What strain of seed should I get ( I like quite cerebral highs that arnt too heavy. Tasty is never a bad thing.
What lights i require etc etc.

Any help would be fantastic. I might even put up a diary of it all.

ta

id pm aventinusdampf hes full of info and very friendly and does a lot of micro growing himself i believe
look in the members section for his user name and pm him
show him your post im sure he will be able to help

BB

Cheers matey, ill drop him a message.

Ta

I have a similar setup to what you would like to accomplish and will share what I have discovered:

1. LED lights are nice for small spaces
A $44 do it yourself LED panel is available from www.homegrownlights.com . These panels are relatively inexpensive, you dont need a fixture/ballast ,they last a long time, produce very little heat, use barely any energy and make a sufficient amount of light for a little over a square foot. I currently have a plant undergoing vegetative growth under one of these lights and it grows a new node around every 4 days. During Veg I leave the LED's on 24 hrs. The plant now makes direct contact with the light but doesn't get burnt. They also fit into small place very nicely

2. Your box smells
There are a few ways I have dealt with my smelly box. I used an ozone puck until it ran out and realized that instead of getting a new one I should just get an ozoneator. A good one cost me around sixty bucks on ebay and works like a charm. The first one I got did the trick until flowering, it had an output of 0.045ppm. The second ozoneator I got produced 300mg/hour; it only needed to be on for two 20min intervals a day. A nice bonus is that when your not using it you can freshen up the rest of the house. Alot of the ozoneators on ebay are expensive and also filter the air. You can get around this by getting a "vegetable freshener" or water ozoneator version.

3. Air Circulation
CPU fan

4. Hide your setup for extra fun
Its always cool to turn an old speaker, computer case, file cabinate or dresser into a grow box!

If you actually want to grow something to smoke - forget LEDs - if only for the vast expense it would take for yields comparable to £1 household CFLs.
Check out the best grow so far - the 70 watt one. So far as I'm aware, the yield isn't better than the 70 watt HPS, so you have the same amount of heat to dispose of.

20 quid's worth of LEDs covering 1 square foot ?
Maybe afrothunder would like to post his grow ?

With a space that small, lowryder #2 is probably a good option. However, there are a lot of downsides to LR's speedy growth rate and short stature.

Pros:
60-63 days from seed to harvest
Short, about 18 inches tall at most
Goes good in soil and grows so quickly that it won't need many nutes
Low odor

Cons:
Low yield (maxes out at about 1 oz per plant)
Quality isn't optimal. It's good pot but it's not cutting edge potency.
Burns easily

With the size you have, I think you could fit 4 LRs, sex them at 23-25 days, and toss all but the strongest female.

Just noticed the externally hosted diagram.
Much better to upload them to uk420 ...

having grown inside a small cupboard a few times, i would recomend a few things;
lowryders dont grow well in small pots (which makes them pretty rubbish for micro grows, ironicly) urs is a bit bigger than mine, but i would still recomend a scrog, my experience shows better results, as real plants are more forgiving, if you have a problem with a plant for a week, thats one weeks growth you never get it back, for real plants, you just veg them until they are perfect
airflow is very important, my box sounds like a server computer ive added so many fans now (much to the annoiance of the mrs) poor air exchange gives all sorts of problems that I've wasted time diagnosing as other things, because these random deficiencies and burns looked like so many other things
dividing the top and bottom with pvc worked really well at keeping temps down, use separate fans for the 2 sections, and then you can run the fans for the top without filters (2x125mm pc fans is fine for 2 125w envirolites, the pvc feels cool from the bottom) then use fans running thru a filter on the bottom, purely for air exchange, as there will be little heat to remove from the main grow area (I use 2x125mm fans thru a DIY filter sandwiching carbon pellets in cooker hood material, this isnt quite enough I'm now feeling, so would recomend more for ur larger box)

hope this helps

good luck