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CFL test cab - 1st run - 70w in 1sqft

blynx

WALSTIB
Moderator
ICMag Donor
Veteran
Here is a start to finish log of the first grow in a 1sq ft CFL test cab I made.

I created the box as a play toy to try to grow 9 plants in one square foot with CFLs.

Here's the box.



The front door 'pushes' in and is held in place by the foam padding that is glued to the board. There is a dayton blower and a homemade scrubber on the top. The blower is a lot stronger than computer fans or cheap inline home depot type bathroom fans and keeps the cab nice and cool.

The first run I decided to use 70w of CFLs (5 x 14w). The CFL's are arranged in the following way.



The above pics are showing the CFLs for my next run, they are 23w CFLs.

While DrBud's 20oz mountain dew bottles work for him. I didn't really want to deal with the day to day involvement needed with such small sized containers. I also didn't like the wasted space between bottles (since they are round), so I looked around to see what I could find.

The answer I came up with was half gallon plastic milk jugs. I liked that they were square, thus maximizing usuable rooting area. I also liked that they had a handle and wanted to be able to use that to move/carry the plants.

My first 'design' was partially cutting the top open. This gave me enough open area so I could actually plant the clone, and it left the handle sturdily connected.

After the third week in flowering, I was seeing that my cutting design wasn't working as well as I thought it would, so I slightly modified the design of how I cut down the top.

Here's the original and modified design.



Here's what one with a plant in it looked like before and after changing the design.



NOTES ON GROWING METHOD

I've been re-using my soil for 2 yrs now. After chopping a plant, I run the soil/rootball through a 1/2" hardware cloth screen, then add ammendments; add a bit of guano, plantone, alfalfa meal, sometimes a little of kelp meal, lots of bone meal, a touch of pickling lime, compost, etc. Then I moisten it, stir it up and let it sit until I use it. This is the soil I used in this grow.

In my regular cab, I've taped up the drain holes on all the 3gal container I use, and my homemade growbags don't have them. For this grow I just didn't make any drain holes in the milk containers. I only had to water once a week for this whole grow.

I also only water all my plants with straight tap water the whole grow.

END NOTES ON GROWING METHOD

I ran 4 different strains in this test run; Chesaw, Lady G1, PBSxSDIBL (pbs is purple bagseed), and Sour Creek.

The plants were transplanted to the milk containers and placed in the cab in a 3x3 arrangement.

Every week I would pull a row 'forward'. The front row would go to the back of the cab, the middle row would become the front row and the old back row would become the middle row. I did this to 'rotate' the plants under the lights.

Due to extraneous circumstances, the plants ended up going into the cab about a month later than I had planned, so they were a lot taller than a couple inches when they went in.

I don't plan on doing any vegging in this cab, so the plants were immediately under 12/12 once they went in the cab.

I didn't take a lineup shot of the plants the day they went into the cab, but here's a shot of all of them on the day they went inside the cab.

Day 0



There was very litle stretching since the plants were so old when they went into the cab. Once they reached their maximum height, I had to place things under plants to raise them up so the canopy was even and up in and very close to the lights.

Here's a compilation of the rows, week by week, from week 1 to week 10.

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Here's a shot of the cab on day 70

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The plants were all chopped on day 70 (end of week 10).

Here's the stems/compost trim/sugar trim and buds.

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Some closeups of the sugar trim. This is the sugar trim from all 9 plants.

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Here are the wet weights.

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Here's what it dried to

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I can't complain about the results, but I believe I can do a lot better by getting the plants in earlier and bumping up the wattage. While 70w/sqft of CFLs will produce decent buds, I think it definately needs more to maximize production.
 
C

cellardweller

bangin job doin it blynx! very well documented!
what about a 70w HPS?
 

K.J

Kief Junkie's inhaling the knowledge!
Veteran
Wow, great results from a 70w CFL! I really love your geek-out level of documentation too. I think maybe I'll swipe your method of documenting the harvest weights.
 

justanotherbozo

Active member
Veteran
:yeahthats
hey you F.U.C.K.E.R., lol, i wanted to say that!

lol, the good job part. oh, and blynx, i'm jealous you got some of that
Chesaw. is it as good as it looks?
 

blynx

WALSTIB
Moderator
ICMag Donor
Veteran
bangin job doin it blynx! very well documented!
what about a 70w HPS?

Nope this was built strictly for CFLs.

I want to do multiple runs with various wattages, a run with all cool CFLS, and a run with a mix of soft/warm/cool/daylight CFLs.

I'd like to find what wattages are optimal per square foot when using CFLs. I'd like to find what color bulbs produce optimal results.

One square foot is very easy to control, and doesn't take a lot of time and space. Measurements can be easily calculated per square foot because thats all I'm working with.

I believe it will be more accurate to take the results from one square foot and extrapolate larger, then it is to take a large cab, use part of it, and try to extrapolate usable and valid data concerning square footage, ie gpw for example.
 
C

cellardweller

oh ok..
the ol' scientific approach huh?
very well then. I wonder what the daylight cfls' will give ya..
 

justanotherbozo

Active member
Veteran
as a CFL'er myself, i've always wanted to try using blue light only for
the first 2 weeks of flower to limit stretching, then switching to just
red for the rest of the cycle.

also blynx, if you use splitters and double your wattage, as you already
postulated, i'm sure you will see dramatic improvement in your yield.
i think adding more than that would be un-needed in so small a cab.
 
B

Bean Curd

That's awesome, I had no idea you could pull an aounce with just 70 watts of CFL power. I can't wait until I move into a safer apartment! (a private landlord owns my place and he's been trying to sell it forever, ALWAYS there are people coming through, be glad when my lease is up!)
 

Che

Active member
Veteran
Can't wait to see the 5x23W grow. Do you plan to try out the 42W CFLs after that? If you have the space and cooling to fit them it would be awesome!
 

blynx

WALSTIB
Moderator
ICMag Donor
Veteran
:yeahthats
hey you F.U.C.K.E.R., lol, i wanted to say that!

lol, the good job part. oh, and blynx, i'm jealous you got some of that
Chesaw. is it as good as it looks?

The chesaw is very tasty with real resiny buds. The calyxes can swell nicely on the chesaw. It forms pretty buds, but they aren't heavy and dense like an indica. I find the high to be more on the sativa side. It's potent, but I didn't really get any body load from it.
 

abirdintheair

Buteo Jamaicensis
Veteran
damn fine work blynx, a zone dry using cfls in this cab isn't half bad at all, plus you got enough of each flavor to be able to switch it up as the days go. K+ all day :respect: are you gonna run it again with a higher wattage?
 

justanotherbozo

Active member
Veteran
The chesaw is very tasty with real resiny buds. The calyxes can swell nicely on the chesaw. It forms pretty buds, but they aren't heavy and dense like an indica. I find the high to be more on the sativa side. It's potent, but I didn't really get any body load from it.

thanks for the info man, i've been admiring it in the Doc's threads for a while
now. it's nice to see his work spreading through the community!
 

catman

half cat half man half baked
Veteran
My jaw is dropped.

Great idea, grow, and documentation.

I tip my hat to you blynx. Very impressive!
 

blynx

WALSTIB
Moderator
ICMag Donor
Veteran
Hey blynx awesome grow. Just wondering how your hot your cab got?

The cab is in a basement so the ambient temps around the cab are pretty cool, specially when the lights go out.

The Dayton blower is pretty powerful. It's way more powerful than a couple of computer fans or any cheap Home Depot or Lowes in-line bathroom fan/duct booster.

I will throw a digital thermometer that records highs/lows into the cab in the next round. Even with my plan to bump up the wattage to 115w (5 x 23w), I don't imagine the temps will get out of the 70s.
 

kaotic

We're Appalachian Americans, not hillbillys!
ICMag Donor
Veteran
Very nice. Are you going to enter this in the challenge?
 

blynx

WALSTIB
Moderator
ICMag Donor
Veteran
Can't wait to see the 5x23W grow. Do you plan to try out the 42W CFLs after that? If you have the space and cooling to fit them it would be awesome!

I probably won't try out 5 x 42w.

That's not to say I won't have a run with a 42w bulb or two in in, say maybe a cool 42w in the middle socket surrounded by 23w or 26w warm/soft CFLs, but I believe 210w of CFL per square foot is overkill.

Obviously you can grow plants under 70w of CFL and produce bud. Adding more wattage should produce more bud, but I think you are going to start hitting a point of diminishing returns at a certain amount of wattage.

If you can produce around 1.5oz with 120w of CFLs, I don't think it makes sense to run 200+ watts if your yield is only gonna increase to say 1.6oz.
 

justanotherbozo

Active member
Veteran
I probably won't try out 5 x 42w.

That's not to say I won't have a run with a 42w bulb or two in in, say maybe a cool 42w in the middle socket surrounded by 23w or 26w warm/soft CFLs, but I believe 210w of CFL per square foot is overkill.

Obviously you can grow plants under 70w of CFL and produce bud. Adding more wattage should produce more bud, but I think you are going to start hitting a point of diminishing returns at a certain amount of wattage.

If you can produce around 1.5oz with 120w of CFLs, I don't think it makes sense to run 200+ watts if your yield is only gonna increase to say 1.6oz.


i don't remember the dimensions of my bins exactly but i'm sure they
weren't much more than 1 square foot and i used a 4 bulb bathroom
fixture with y splitters for a total of 8 bulbs, a mix of 23's, 26's and
30's, for a bit over 200 watts. anyway, i was running a DWC under it
with 8x9oz cups filled with hydroton and my bagseed clones and i was
pulling close to 4 oz's per bin.



anyway, i'm not sure where the point of diminishing returns is but i'd say
200watts isn't it, not with CFL's anyway.
 
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