Presenting My IKEA Mini Cabinet

Angel Eyes · Mar 18, 2006

Wow, here goes nothing...

This cabinet took me a little over two months to build, which may sound like a lot of time, but I wanted to do things carefully and correctly. I made a lot more mistakes than I wanted, and learned a lot more than I expected. I'll try to go through this step by painstaking step, and hopefully we'll all learn something in the process.

I'm dedicating this thread to the memory of Overgrow.com, since most of the ideas in my IKEA mini cabinet were inspired by those awesome build threads on OG. Hopefully, someone way down the line will get an idea or an inspiration from this thread.

The first photo is the cabinet pre-construction, and the second photo is the finished product (although I continue to tweak and make small changes).

Angel Eyes · Mar 18, 2006

The inside dimensions are 15" x 15" x 31"

As you can see, that ain't too big. My intention is for this to serve as a mother/clone/veg room, but I'm going to run at least one complete grow in this cabinet. That first grow is already three weeks underway.

This cabinet cost me around $85 at IKEA, which seemed like a good price to me. I'm glad I did, because as I discovered, IKEA makes a quality product.

Angel Eyes · Mar 18, 2006

My first concern was ventilation, even before lighting. I wanted to have good passive ventilation.

Here was my first idea, but these pipes took up more space than I wanted, and I also didn't think they could keep up with the ventilation I desired.

Angel Eyes · Mar 18, 2006

Instead, I went with a darkroom louver, and boy am I glad I did. This thing is 8" x 8" and it really provides almost zero resistance to air passing through, and yes, it's 100% light-tight. I got it for around $20, and at that price, I'd have to say it was the best value in the cabinet.

First I took a Sawzall to the bottom of the cabinet, and voila, a passive vent.

Angel Eyes · Mar 18, 2006

Next came lightproofing, which came in two steps: placing dowels around the doorway, and then installing weatherstripping. Here's the doweling first...

Angel Eyes · Mar 18, 2006

At this point I was faced with a problem: how do I get any doweling into the corner where the hinges are? I needed something firm so that I could get some lightproofing weatherstip against the door, but the hinges were so close to the door that I was stumped on how to get something in there.

I was saved by a trip to the hardware store, where I found this quarter-round doweling. After buying three different sizes (at 6 feet each!), I found the perfect size for getting into the hinges.

This worked so well that I count it as one of my proudest accomplishments in this project. I am NO handyman, let me tell you. I learned along the way.

Angel Eyes · Mar 18, 2006

Okay, so the preparation for weatherstripping is complete, no for the weatherstripping. Well, after another three trips to the hardware store, and another $25 (weatherstripping is expensive!), I found the combination that worked.

Angel Eyes · Mar 18, 2006

The last step in lightproofing the cabinet was to seal all of the small "cracks" along the walls, floor and ceiling. I used this gasket sealer, but if I had to do it over again, I'd just use some kind of tape. The gasket sealer was kind of messy.

Angel Eyes · Mar 18, 2006

My next project was installing a fan for ventilation. Probably the funniest thing about this project is how I was obsessed with having great ventilation, but in the end, I haven't even needed to turn the fan on! But more on that later. Let me just hint for now by saying that when you have an 8" x 8" passive vent on bottom, and a nice big chimney on top, you don't need as much active ventilation as you might think.

My whole intention was to install a 120mm computer fan INSIDE the cabinet, high on the back wall, and to build a light-trap around it, so that this mini-cab could be nearly 100% stealth. But this was not to be.

No matter what I did, and now matter how I mounted it, the fan made too much noise when I mounted it vertically. I used high-tech fan gaskets and rubber washers, etc., but the fan just made more noise through vibration than I wanted.

Added to that noise, when I placed my foamboard light-trap around the fan, the sound and vibration just became too much.

Here are some pics of the failed light-trap. I got the inspiration for this from Overgrow, of course.

Angel Eyes · Mar 18, 2006

So, after the vertical fan and interior light-trap didn't work out like I had hoped, I had a big hole in the back of the cabinet.

Well, you know what I did? I took the cut-out piece of wood, stuck it back in the hole, and plastered it back in with a ton of wood filler. Did it look good? No. Did I feel a little foolish for having cut a hole in my cabinet without testing vertical placement of the fan first? Yes.

I realize that many many people before me have mounted fan vertically with no problems, but in this particular cabinet, it just vibrated the walls too much, creating a resonating hum that I didn't want.

My next step, then, was to actually TEST a horizontal placement of my fan in the cabinet BEFORE I cut a new hole. I did this by taking off the roof of the cabinet (which is easy with the modular IKEA design) and I placed a proxy board up there with a cut-out hole for the fan. Guess what? Absolute silence when I ran the fan at 9 volts or below. More on my fan speed regulation later...

Here's the configuration of the fan, which I placed inside the cabinet, on the roof.

Angel Eyes · Mar 18, 2006

Okay, so my desire for 100% stealth just wasn't going to happen. No sense in crying about it, so I decided to make the best of the situation, which turned out to be a Godsend. With the fan placed on the back wall, with a light-trap around it, I question the efficiency of passive ventilation. With the fan and it's hole on the top of the cabinet, I can vouch for the passive ventilation. With 150 watts of CFL lighting, the temperature stays at 14 degrees above ambient, no matter if ambient is 58 degrees or 74 degrees. Consistent 14 degrees from a soundless (no fan running) cabinet. I think that's fine.

I didn't take step-by-step photos of how I built this light-trap for the top of the cabinet, but I made it out of 3/16ths inch clear plexiglas. I taped the plexiglas together with duct tape, and then spray painted it with flat black paint.

Angel Eyes · Mar 18, 2006

Here's how I made a stealthy situation out of that big black cube on top of my cabinet. Believe it or not, the airflow is great out of the top of that empty Heineken box, and a person would have to get VERY close to see that the Heineken box is anything more than a Heineken box on top of a cabinet. For my situation, this stealth is more than adequate.

I just cut the bottom out of the box, and slipped it over the light-trap, and it fits perfect. Next month I think I'll go with a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale box, but then, there's always Coors!

Angel Eyes · Mar 18, 2006

We're getting near the lighting stage, but first I had to get some power inside the cabinet. I take 100% credit for this idea, although who knows, maybe I saw it somewhere else along the line.

I used these little 1" conduit fittings to get power into the cabinet. Another part of stealth for me was having just one power line into the cabinet. I used a short threaded conduit sleeve, and then I used one of these self-sealing fittings that are supposed to be weatherproof. One thing is for sure, at least it's 100% lightproof.

Angel Eyes · Mar 18, 2006

Now that I had power into the cabinet, I had to decide how I wanted to manage and distribute that power. I decided to use a little Intermatic digital timer, which would allow me to control the light and ventilation cycle from inside the cabinet. Remember, only one line in!

Here's how I wired it up, and let me tell you all, before I started this project, I had ZERO idea how to wire a circuit. This was all learned from books, and I double- and triple-checked my work with the good folks in the electrical section of my local hardware store.

This is a two-gang box, with a timer on one side and a set of plugs on the other. At first I mounted the box high inside the cabinet, but I have since moved it to the bottom.

Angel Eyes · Mar 18, 2006

Just for the heck of it, let me show you one side road I went down, which proved to take me in the wrong direction. No harm in trying things, though.

I wanted to line the walls with this flat white Contact paper, and I did just that, but when the lights went on, the contact paper gave off a mild, sickly smell of heated plastic. I thought it would go away, but it never did, so instead I made the Contact paper go away. Easy come, easy go...

Angel Eyes · Mar 18, 2006

And now the lights!

My first idea was to use three 42 watt CFLs, centered in the roof of the cabinet. As it turned out, once they were installed, I just didn't like the light distribution in the cabinet. Too many dark spots in the corners.

Here's the wiring and the completed 42 watt CFLs, though:

Angel Eyes · Mar 18, 2006

With the three 42 watt CFLs, I was running around 18 degrees above ambient. Not too bad, I thought. But since the three 42 watters weren't doing the trick for me, I decided to try a 150 watt self-ballasted HPS lamp. It's the Mini-Floralux, by High Yield Lighting.

This was an interesting test, because the temperatures rose significantly over the 126 watts of CFLs. I mean it got really hot, really fast in that cabinet, and I was so used to running it without a fan, I was put off by how much heat this Mini-Floralux generated. And it wasn't the internal ballast that was creating the heat, either. The area around the ballast stayed relatively cool, while the hood got HOT.

I realize that 150 watts is overkill in a cabinet that is 15" x 15", with an effective canopy area of not much more than one square foot, but like I said before, there's no harm in trying.

Unfortunately, that Mini-Floralux sounded like a damned nuclear reactor! That thing hummed so loud is wasn't funny, especially since this cabinet sits about eight feet from the bed where I at least TRY to sleep at night.

The Mini-Floralux made the usual humming in the first 10 minutes while it warmed up, then it quieted down a bit, but then after a half-hour or so, it started humming again. It wasn't just the hum, though; it was this weird resonating buzz that seemed to make my back teeth vibrate. Too disturbing for my bedroom.

Guest · Mar 18, 2006

Awesome work. really well thought out. Good things come to those who wait.

Angel Eyes · Mar 18, 2006

And this is how the lighting looks today. Three 23 watt CFLs and three 27 watt CFLs, and if my math is correct, that adds up to 150 watts of fluorescent goodness. The 27 watters are 2700 Kelvin, and the 23 watters are 5500 Kelvin.

Funny, but I found that having the plant tops about 3 inches away produced ideal growth. At least the plants SEEM happier at that position. Anything closer, or farther away, so far has led to less-than-ideal growth.

It's a little difficult for me to fathom, but 150 watts in this configuration is running about 4 degrees cooler than the 126 watts in the previous configuration. Hmmm...

CGM · Mar 18, 2006

awesome cab dude

Presenting My IKEA Mini Cabinet

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