250w HPS wardrobe grow

Hi Folks

I have recently built a wardrobe setup. I have a 250w HPS in a cooltube in a wardrobe 82cm wide and 50 cm deep, 2m tall. I have two air movement fans - 12v 120mm computer fans, one at about 75 cm from the bottom as an intake and one at the top as an exhaust. I have a small inline 220v fan intended for bathrooms sucking air through the cooltube, the end of the tube is open so this also acts as an exhaust for the cab. I also have a clip-on 8 inch 240v fan blowing accross the canopy. I can get the lamp within an inch or two of the plants with no burning as the combination of cooltube with airflow and the 8 inch fan blowing a good deal of air at the outside of the tube, it stays very cool. The glass of the tube just feels warm to the touch.

Here's a rough breakdown of the costs involved:

120mm Cooltube 35ukp
250w HPS bulb 4ukp (eBay bargain)
homemade 250w ballast in a small PC case 35ukp
Mylar 5ukp
120mm ducting 4ukp
120mm metal flanges 7ukp
inline 100mm fan 18ukp
2x 120mm 12v fans 7ukp
Assorted wiring and electrical fittings 8ukp
Approx TOTAL 123ukp

Add to that the cost of 15 square 3.5 litre pots and a 50 litre bag of coco and some nutes, and the other bits and bobs, I have spent well under 200ukp.

It runs at 80F, sometimes getting upto 82, I usually have the door open a little during lights on to allow more fresh air to enter. I am going to do 15 plants in a high density SOG using 3.5 litre square pots. I have just finished a 10 plant grow in there using a variety of pot sizes from 2 to 6 litres that was a success, but left a lot of room for improvement.



I'm gonna do this run as a 15-plant SOG usign coco hand watered, then next run will be 6 plants in 8 litre hempy buckets, possibly SCROGed to see what works best for me. I prefer the idea of a SOG as it's less maintenance than a SCROG.

I still need to tidy up the wiring and complete the mylar covering as I ran out of mylar (I used some car sunshields I got for a pound each, I'm on a very tight budget) and then it's all ready for my next crop. The four quite raggedy looking plants in there are a Herijuana, Skunk #1 x Lowryder, Purple Rhino and an AK47 x Hawaiian Delight that I harvested the main colas from a week ago and left the lower popcorn buds to mature and gain some size. I originally vegged these tall and bushy ready to go outside, but circumstances meant I had to keep them indoors. The top colas were of a decent size, but there was lots of popcorn lower growth as the plants were too tall for the low penetration of a 250watter. You can see the 3.5 litre square pots I will be using in the pics.

So thats my flowering cab setup, I will polish off the little details and complete the jobs left to do before beginning flowering. For starting off seedlings, I have this little blanket box with 160w of fluoros (4 x 40w 2 ft tubes) and two 120mm 12v computer fans for airflow. I can fit 15 1 litre square pots in there.

Nice looking boxes, good luck with your grow

So that's what I have to work with.

So what strains am I going to grow I hear you cry?

Well, I have these clones:

Double Dutch
Cheese
OG Kush
Deep Chunk
Herijuana
Colombian Gold
Purple Rhino

I think I will definitely run clones of the Deep Chunk, Herijuana, Cheese and OG Kush, that will cover the indica side of things nicely.

The other 11 plants are going to be grown from seed. I ummed and ahhed for ages trying to decide, but finally I plumped for the Colombian Gold x Grapefruitbowl F2s I recently made.

Here is the mother of these F2s, as you can see, she is a nice budstick grown in a 3.5 litre square pot of soil. Be interesting to see the difference coco makes in the same pots.

I chose a Colombian pheno male as the father as the mother was Grapefruitbowl dominant and I wanted to increase the proportion of sativa influence in the F2s. I will be looking for the most Colombian dominant F2 individuals to make the F3s. I have 25 seeds in the paper towels now, I just want to end up with the 11 best females in order to have a fair selection to choose from. Males will be placed somewhere else well out of the way for selection and pollen collection.

mmm nice pics and genes dude.. grabbing a pew nice and early

Thanks for popping in Dr Dog. The seeds only went in the towels today so not much to show yet. The clones have very short quarter to half inch roots in mu homemabe bubbler cloenr so not much to show so far.

Nice bro!!!

nice set up at a nice price!

i also use wardrobes.
had a 250w (hps) in single drobe to begin with. got on fine, although door was ajar most of the time due to heat issues. plodded along for about a year with that.
now i use that single drobe for veg and a double wardrobe for flowering.
double wardrobe is fitted with a 400w cooltube and i have no heat issues.
i now have only a 125w enviro in the single room (no heat issues) and the plants love it.
ive lost count of what its cost so far though.

well done in showing us how cheaply a set up can be achieved, and good luck with it!
up the british hempire!

im currently working on a perpetual harvest.

Hiya Farmer, Pop, thanks for stopping by.

I originally used this wardrobe as a double decker with fluoro tubes in the top for flowering and CFLs in the bottom for veg. I used this setup for two years until I got sick of micro scale plants and LST to bonsai proportions.

Then I upgraded to an aircooled DIY 250w MH in the top for veggign and a 250w HPS in the bottom for flowering. This worked fine for tw oruns, but I decided to go to a single decker setup and just veg in this cabiet with the 250w aircooled MH. I built a second setup in a portable plastic wardrobe customised into a DIY growtent with a 250w HPS in a cooltube. This changed my growing altogether, having seperate cabs for veg and flower. Sadly, I lost most of my equipment and the portable wardrobe, it's a long story.

So now I;m bak to this setup, really miss having a snother wardrobe for vegging, but its all I have to work with at the moment so I'll do my best with what I have.

Ideally, I'd like a second, larger wardrobe with a 400w for flowering and use this existing wardrobe for vegging by swapping the lamp for a MH (it's a dual ballast).

I reckon this setup wil lwork fine, with 15 single cola plants in a SOG I reckon I should be able to pull 10g per plant easily, which would be 0.6 grammes per watt. I reckon with coco and some practice, I can get upto that magical 1g per watt. I have got 10g off single cola plants in 2-3 litre pots of soil under a 250w HPS many times so with coco I expect more than that per plant. 1g per watt would mean yielding 16.67g per plant which sounds reasonably easy with coco. For this first run I'll aim for 15g per plant, which would be 0.9g per watt and 225 grams (8 oz) total, although I'll settle for 150g for a first attempt (0.6g per watt). Genetics will play a big part, the CG x GFB F1 was a good yielder, although that one I showed was seeded, which messed up the yield, I reckon she would have easily yielded 15g unseeded, possibly 20g.

Well, I screwed up the germing of the Colombian Gold x Grapefruitbowl F2s. here they are after 4 days in paper towels, 16 out of 20 have sprouted, but some of them have got bloody huge, when I looked at them yesterday they had an inch of root, I left them a day longer so the ones that had only a quarter inch of root could get a bit longer. I like them to have an inch of root.

Anyways, I transplanted them into rookwool cubes and I snapped the four longest biggest ones trying to get them into the holes I made in the cubes, so right away I have killed the four healthiest, most vigourous seedlings, bugger.

Anyways, I got ten ofthem into cubes and left two with only a couple of mms of root in the towels along with 4 that hadn't sprouted. I soaked the cubes in wtaer with a drop of superthrive for quarter of an hour. First time I've used rockwool cubes, anyone got any tips?

I've placed 10 Egyptian landrace beans (personal collection from S. Egypt, 2004) in towels as I think I'm only gonna have 10, maybe 12 CG x GFB and I'm not convinced some of the bigger ones are gonna survive the transition to rockwool. I had to use the rockwool as it was all I had as my coco I ordered hasn't arrived, I was going to plant the sprouted seeds in small plastic drinking cups of coco. I have plenty more CGxGFB seeds so I may end up germing some more when my coco (finally!) arrives.

Well, it looks like the seedlings I managed to transplant into the cubes have survived, most of them have popped their heads out of the top and four have opened their cotyledons, only 10 hours under 160w of fluoros. The two clones are OG Kush and Cheese, gonna establish those two as mothers. Both are really easy to clone, I ma one of the worst cloners around, I suck at cloning, but these two have rooted and look really healthy. I normally use a bubble cloner, but my diy one got thrown away and I have yet to build another one, having nothing to clone.

looks good,cant wait to see the egyptian seeds,i bet there going to be nice,good luck,great cab

I am really looking forward to seeing what the egyptians are like. They are from Southern Egypt, the Kush region (not related to Hindu/Afghan Kush, it's the name of an ancient civilization), an old dude gave me them in a tea shop in the heart of the old souk. I went wandering one day and followed my nose to the sweet smell of hashish and came upon this tea shop full of arabs smoking hookahs, probably mostly the ghastly rough flavoured tabacco they like to put in those things, but their was a definite hashish smell and some stoned looking geezers. I wandered in and although I didn't speak a word of arabis, some of the locals spoke some English and I was familiar with these tea shops, you pick a hookah you like from the number lined up on the back of the bar, is you like they will prepare it for you, load it with the tobacco and get a nice smoulder going with the charcoal, and you drink tiny cups of very sweetened tea with no milk and eat little sweet cakes and squares of nougat-like stuff (kulfi I think it's called). Being Egypt, I didn't eat any cake but I picked a hookah, had the guy prepare it and chose a table right next to what looked to be the stoners corner with a load of old guys piled into a corner with their hookahs and much laughing and bright cheery conversation. Anyway, didn't take me long to explain I was intrigued by what they were smoking and half an hour later I was he proud owner of a lovely piece of very black sticky hash that smelled so divine it was like it was perfumed. They also had some lightly pressed sand coloured hash, well one guy did and although he spoke no English (in fact he barely spoke at all, his eyes were a very deep red and he was obviously a local hash connoiseur), he insisted (oh the hardship! lol) that I try his hashish and loaded his hookah afresh for me. One of these old guys gave me a load of seeds wrapped in a piece of newspaper and told me they were what they grew locally to produce their local hash, although I am not sure if both the types of hash I smoked were local or whatever, but the seeds came from Egypt in 2004 and I have no reason to suspect they are not an Egyptian cultivar.

I have no idea whether these will be a broadleafed indica type hashplant similar to Turkish and Iranian types of whether it will be a thin leafed more sativa type similar to Moroccan and Lebanese. I also have no idea whether in Egypt they grow these seeds in the very fertile farming areas along the Nile or in the drier areas further south near the Sudanese border. The closest strains geographically that I have seen either in pictures and reports or in the flash would be Lebanese, which tends to be a fairly thin leaves more sativa type, Iranian which is a broader leafed more indica type with a typical xmas tree indica structure and Ethiopian Highland which is a sativa but a very fast flowering one. Whre this Egyptian falls in the family tree I will only know when I grow them. I'm going to try out a whole load of indica ibls and landraces this year - Dark Kush, Nepali, Tibetan, Uzbeki, Pakistani, Lebanese (Leb27), Afghani and Moravian (Czech Republic).

8 of the CG x GFB F2s have popped their head above the cubes now, just waiting on the other two to put in an appearance. Out of the 5 seeds still in towels, one had sprouted and I planted this is in a cup of coco (it finally arrived today!)



I'm using 200ml clear plastic drinking cups because I happened to have them lying around. I cut four drainage holes in the bottom and covered them with silver duct tape to avoid algae from light penetration (god this grow is cheap! lol)





I had one SSSDH (Sour Diesel x Super Silver Haze) feminised bean left so I also planted that in a cup of coco. I had two young seedlings of SSSDH a couple of weeks ago but gave them away to a friend to get him started.

A couple of the CG x GFB F2s have worrying yellowing and all have deep purple stems so i am worried they are hungry. I did add a drop of superthrive to a gallon of water and soaked the rockwool cubes in that. Tomorrow I will lightly water the cubes with a very diulte seaweed extract (0.5ml to a litre).

Hey bro,

plants are looking great and wow i love the huge pics...

Cheers man.

Today I checked on the 10 Egyptian seeds I placed into towels 2 days ago and voila, all ten have sprouted a nice taproot. I was going to plant these in a mix of John Innes no.1 and Perlite, figuring that being a landrace, they will prefer soil and light feeding, but as I have 47 more of these seeds and the germ ratio so far is 100%, I decided to plant them into cups of coco.



Two of the CG x GFB haven't sprouted from the cubes, I think I let them dry out too much, watered the cubes and fingers crossed they will appear. I potted the other 8 cubes into cups of coco, easier to keep them mosit than a little cube.





The CG x GFB planted straight into coco surfaced today, as did the SSSDH fem, so after the rough start with the cubes things are looking better.



I placed 8 seeds of a purple Afghan or unknown origin into towels today, I think that will be it for this run, but I'm tempted to add some sativa beans into the mix too.



I also potted the OG Kush & Cheese cuts into cups of coco.

Looking good man, personally I wouldn't mix sats and indica's in the same grow.

real intresting start BH...Nice cab you build yourself....i like DIY guys....i'm quite handy myself..so its nice 2 look at some homemade work...:smile:
and quite a linup you have ....gonne be a sweet run inthere...tagging this

Thanks core. I put 5 Durban Poison seeds into coco in 2 litre plastic bottles with the top cut off and covered in silver duct tape tonight. They have about 1.5 litres of coco each. I'm going to do these 12/12 from seed as I had great success growing Swazi in soil going 12/12 all the way. I need something to fill up my wardrobe while the seedlings are vegging under the fluoros.