MGT builds 6 stacked cabs(planning phase)

[MedGrowerTom]

Planning a new build here in the couple of months, after this next harvest. Taking down the tents, and going to a proper furniture grade cabinet build. When you walk by, it will like like really nice custom cabinets, but inside there will be 6 stacked flower cabs, each being roughly 3ft x 3ft x 5ft, and each have 350-450 watts of led.

There will also be veg, mother/clone, and drying cabinets. There will be a shelf for freeze dryer, rosin press, and fridge for the dabs. I stream on twitch, so this will all be in the background and the focus of the stream. There is also two extra spots, one for quarantine, and one for breeding project.

I have some sketches I will share later or tomorrow, and update this with some more info. These next couple months of posts will be of the planning, and getting materials, and the build will start after this harvest in 2-3 months time. This will be a hell of a project. I have somethings such as the exhaust and carbon filter, and will be building our own controller for this build, because the way I need the exhaust fans speed control, and the cabs exhaust dampers to work, there is no off the shelf option.

This is a perpetual grow, with more info on that soon...

Stay tuned, this will be one hell of a ride, I spent the last few years doing large custom grow room installs, so it will be interesting doing a full build on such a smaller scale as this lol.

plz excuse the next couple place holder messages.

 

[MedGrowerTom]

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temp pic to give you an idea, will replace with better once I'm done making it lol

 

[MedGrowerTom]

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So, quick measurement, looks like the exterior dimensions of each of the 6 cabs on the outside will be 40" wide x 32" deep x 56" tall. That is 8.88 sq ft.
they are stacked, 3 on top of 3. and there is a 6" air lung between each pair, which is where the intake/exhaust ports will be, More on this later.

 

[MedGrowerTom]

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[Rocket Soul]

Planning a new build here in the couple of months, after this next harvest. Taking down the tents, and going to a proper furniture grade cabinet build. When you walk by, it will like like really nice custom cabinets, but inside there will be 6 stacked flower cabs, each being roughly 3ft x 3ft x 5ft, and each have 350-450 watts of led.

There will also be veg, mother/clone, and drying cabinets. There will be a shelf for freeze dryer, rosin press, and fridge for the dabs. I stream on twitch, so this will all be in the background and the focus of the stream. There is also two extra spots, one for quarantine, and one for breeding project.

I have some sketches I will share later or tomorrow, and update this with some more info. These next couple months of posts will be of the planning, and getting materials, and the build will start after this harvest in 2-3 months time. This will be a hell of a project. I have somethings such as the exhaust and carbon filter, and will be building our own controller for this build, because the way I need the exhaust fans speed control, and the cabs exhaust dampers to work, there is no off the shelf option.

This is a perpetual grow, with more info on that soon...

Stay tuned, this will be one hell of a ride, I spent the last few years doing large custom grow room installs, so it will be interesting doing a full build on such a smaller scale as this lol.

plz excuse the next couple place holder messages.

Sounds like a neat project!
Wattage: seems a bit over kill for only 9 ft2, 40w per sq foot is usually the max recommended for flower. If autos even less since they get more hours.
Have you looked at what light yet? Make sure you have something spreading it out nicely wince you dont have a lot of head room.
If youre diying lights then id rec basing it off 2 feet strips or similar.

 

[MedGrowerTom]

Sounds like a neat project!
Wattage: seems a bit over kill for only 9 ft2, 40w per sq foot is usually the max recommended for flower. If autos even less since they get more hours.
Have you looked at what light yet? Make sure you have something spreading it out nicely wince you dont have a lot of head room.
If youre diying lights then id rec basing it off 2 feet strips or similar.

the lights i go with, may in fact be to much wattage,(40 at 9 sq ft is 360 watts, between that and 'footprint' of the light, im looking between 350 and 450 watts) but thats what dimming is for. I'm more concerned with even coverage. and I have high yield goals with this. And yes, generally I would recommend about 50 watts per sq foot under HID, and about 35ish for led. I need lights from wall to wall.
And yes, I am on the fence between getting lights and building lights. I hope to get my placeholder posts updated later on, some of you points/questions will be addressed there.

I will say that we are shooting for 3/4 lb out of each cab every 12ish days. And more to explain on that later, I have some rough sketches of this build, and rough mock up in sketchup, will share all this later
For now, I will say that off the shelf lights, I am looking at mars hydro and ac infinity, as they both have lights with enough wattage, that also span the whole ceiling of each cab. HLG are to large or to small, same with next light, hortilux, lux, gavita, so def still looking into and am in communication with a few light manufactures to see what will be the right choice.

this build, is very exciting to me, and I cant wait to get started and share this journey with you all. More info later when I update the first few placeholder posts

 

[Rocket Soul]

I have plenty of experience of buidling with leds, hit me up if you chose to go that way.

I trust my own light better than mars, seen a few go bad in awfull ways online, burnt out connectors etc.

Whatever light you get it should have a detachable power supply; can get hot int there, quite a small space.

You mean harvest one cab every 12ish days for 3/4#?

For short spaces you can also side light.

 

[MedGrowerTom]

I have plenty of experience of buidling with leds, hit me up if you chose to go that way.

I trust my own light better than mars, seen a few go bad in awfull ways online, burnt out connectors etc.

Whatever light you get it should have a detachable power supply; can get hot int there, quite a small space.

You mean harvest one cab every 12ish days for 3/4#?

For short spaces you can also side light.

there will be no side lighting, just above light, and 1 plant under a scrog for each cab. and yes, i have to look at my notes and math, but roughly 12 ish days yes. I was shooting for 2-3 weeks, but to make everything work it came out to just under 2 weeks.

couple weeks for cloner, 3 weeks for veg, then into the bigger cabs, 3 more weeks of veg, then flower. (some of my strains grow fast, so they will need to be started later to keep in schedule, this will take a minute get dialed in for sure, but I allowed for up to 10 weeks of flower, and have an extra week of wiggle room, with mos things needing less veg time than i have allowed)

most def the driver needs to be remote, and if I were to diy them, I would be using meanwell drivers.

Im redoing my skectches, from my chicken scractch so someting a bit more presentable, and I will share them later on.
What kind of lights have you built? You mess with like quantum boards or strips or cobs?

I will say that I plan to be using node red and hubitat for environment/light controlling. Because I have some custom things I need to exhaust wise(more on that later), I have trolmaster controllers, as well as others, but they will not apply for this build.

But yeah, I may very well diy the lights fwiw, as to find the right off the shelf light for this space and my wanted wattage does not leave me many choices. We shall see..

 

[MedGrowerTom]

heres last harvest in a small 2x4, under 325watts of led

 

[MedGrowerTom]

right now i have two tents here, this will be where the 6 cabs are. 3 on bottom, 3 on top. with air lungs in between(will make sense when i share sketches later)

 

[MedGrowerTom]

this small tent, will end up be a lower cab for moms/clones/pre veg, with a shelf/desktop above with rosin press, freeze dryer, etc on it, with shelves above. it sets in the bay window area.

 

[Rocket Soul]

.
What kind of lights have you built? You mess with like quantum boards or strips or cobs?

Ive built with most components. Personally i avoid cobs, heat sinking/management is somewhat of a problem. But yeah, strips qbs, china boards. Whatever gives a decent deal for your $.
Strips is somewhat awkward if you use a lot, so many connections, especially with building in parallel connections. But you can do cool things with serial. My fav was this one:

Lots of features, double driver design so i can control light levels in the perifery vrs centre by dimming. Also red sup 630/660nm.

You cant really see it on the pics but its 2 strips side by side, and each strip has 2 channels; warm white and cold white. Its setup so that you can switch power between the warm/cold light with a switch, or leave both on for a full cycle spectrum(with higher efficiency). This was made for an auto tent of a client, the strips arent super efficient at full power but i gave him plenty of extra watts more than he needed.

Theres a few more builds on riu if you check the china knock-off thread.

Recently been building with mono channels as well uv, uvb and far red. Not completely sold on it.

Going to be trying out some strips from growlight australia soon, they come with proper full spectrum (plenty of uv and far red) in a single spectrum, using only best quality diodes. If theres anything into spectrum tweaking im making sure to find out.

 

[Rocket Soul]

One thing to keep in mind about dimmed down drivers: when you dim the driver becomes less efficient, generally whatever efficiency gains you get on chip level gets eaten up by driver inefficiency. Size your drivers for your space properly in order to avoid this. If you ever need more power keep another stronger driver at hand. I have a very hard time believing youd ever need anything more than a 320w driver for that space.

 

[MedGrowerTom]

One thing to keep in mind about dimmed down drivers: when you dim the driver becomes less efficient, generally whatever efficiency gains you get on chip level gets eaten up by driver inefficiency. Size your drivers for your space properly in order to avoid this. If you ever need more power keep another stronger driver at hand. I have a very hard time believing youd ever need anything more than a 320w driver for that space.

You are right on sizing the driver, and dimming is less efficient. 320ish would be good, long as the panels/strips are spaced/sized right. a light thats 2ft x 2ft will not work, i need to span the whole ceiling as much as i can, im sure you know what mean, I do know that they will veg under this light until the screen is mostly full, think I have around a month for this time, at which point they go to flower under the same light.

only reason i was look at some that were up to 450w was they are the right 'size' dimension wise for the coverage I want for these scrogs. I would have dimmed this down to rough 350w. most of the off the shelf lights the right wattage are intended to spread and I can do that in this small of space, so I need the lights spread out. there are some panels and strips I have been looking at, I have not got to the point of figuring out what drivers(other than I will use meanwell) I do know that I want to mess with far red, uvb as you said, and be able to turn then on/off/dim independently, so def need multi drivers. I do not have much knowledge into picking the components for mixed spectrum leds, but happy to learn

I will have more precise measurements later and I would happy to led build talk with ya. I think I may have tweaked the cabs slightly more rectangular in size so they may end up larger than I remember. I have a ceiling fan in the front that limits how far forward this can stick out, and I think I made up for that by planning them to be slightly wider than I remember.

I formatted the computer about a month ago, i still have to install sketchup and some other things so I can open my files and share them with you all lol. lots share lol, can't wait for this. I have done woodworking in the past, grew up working construstion, and helped out doing custom kitchen cabinets. but I have NEVER made nice furniture grade projects, and thats how I plan to build this. When you walk by, you will not know this is a grow. I hope to do these style build outs for clients, I'm sick of doing large room and facilitys, I think I want to something more like this for my installs Dont get me wrong the big jobs are nice, but I these I think I will enjoy more.

 

[MedGrowerTom]

Have not looked into board/strips in a couple of years, but this is first thing I was looking at earlier today. I would need 4 of them for each cab. they rated for up 150w i think, I would have to run them at like half that.

Rspec FR Quantum Board

Ultra High Efficiency LED Boards for DIY. 256pcs Mid power Whites, 12pcs Deep Red

horticulturelightinggroup.com

 

[MedGrowerTom]

ohh, also as a bonus, here is one of the entrances from the kitchen to the living room, and you see a tent there. the cabs will extend to the ceiling, and further to the right, blocking it all off. I will replace that bookcase and other cabinet you see there, with another grow. but this is for the kitchen, and will have herbs, salads, maybe microgreens, and maybe some tomatoes. we shall see...but that whole section about 5 1/2 ft wide and 3 or 4 feet deep, 7 or 8 ft tall, will be grow for the kitchen And I do see that part for sure be custom lights.

 

[MedGrowerTom]

I remembered wrong, looking at my notes I should harvest roughly every 16 days, not 12ish.

 

[MedGrowerTom]

very rough crude mock up, there some lung rooms in between the stacks. from half of each is for intake, back half of each for exhaust. still learning sketchup, but once I dial in some last measurements ill make full build in sketchup with dimensions and everything. I already added another 110 circuit for the area.

there is one exhaust fan and scrubber, its very large and more than enough for all of all this. there will be dampers for each cab, that will close when you open a door, and as the open/close the exhaust fan will increase/decrease in speed. this is most the reason I will be using node red and hubitat among other things, to custom control everything. ill have some better stuff drawn up, im working on it

fwiw, the 'shelf' looing thing in each cab, is where the scrog would go roughly

 

[Ca++]

40w a foot, doesn't sound extreme. 430w a meter, at 2.5umol/w gives 1075umol, which after some losses, might be 800ppfd. Which is enough to make me rub my hands together, but it's nothing too exciting. At least one of the top guys here is running double that. Though I'm not running a lot more myself, I wouldn't start a decent build with anything less. I think it's nice, and you don't really want your kit running at 100% anyway. That will tick along nicely at 650ppfd, which is where life in the fast lane begins.

 

[MedGrowerTom]

40w a foot, doesn't sound extreme. 430w a meter, at 2.5umol/w gives 1075umol, which after some losses, might be 800ppfd. Which is enough to make me rub my hands together, but it's nothing too exciting. At least one of the top guys here is running double that. Though I'm not running a lot more myself, I wouldn't start a decent build with anything less. I think it's nice, and you don't really want your kit running at 100% anyway. That will tick along nicely at 650ppfd, which is where life in the fast lane begins.

nope, 40 for led is pretty avg ide say. I have 325w in each of my tall 2x4 tents, and 300w in my short 2x4. thats 40w per sq ft right there. but it dont spread enough, and I could def of push these plants harder for sure. I ran 600hps in air cooled hood in these tents before as well fwiw. so going from a 2x4 to a 3x3, i gain a sq foot so ide like increase my light as well. 325w eact at an absolute minimum. I might be willing to go higher, but I will not be running a/c so heat is a concern if I go up much higher, but we shall see