Stealth Insulated Attic Build

[Brastaman]

Great fucking job well done. Attics are challenging. Props to you starting and keeping this thread alive brother.

did you find any solutions for the a/c vibration and noise?
this is the part i'm stuck at as i type. i'm just going to insulate the a/c in a box and treat it like a studio.

i believe you can add support to your attic so that the load is accounted for, but don't take my word for it....i had my contractor help me with all that critical stuff.

can't wait for the really big update!!!

 

[BlueberryNutz]

all i can say is wow. that setup is amazing. everytime i finish a grow i always dump all the money back into equipment lol. i have more shit than i have room for unfortunately lol. your grow is inspiring. i wish i had more space damn it

 

[Kerosene]

Well through a debacle I lost my CMH lamps. Sucks, but if I rock the boat enough to get em back, I'll probably throw my ass in the water.

Next payday I'll get another batch of em and and hopefully they'll be ready for next grow.

We're pushing the flower room into 12/12 tonight. So hopefully we can get some pictures before we go to night.

Kerosene

 

[Bender]

Okay Kerosene and I finally took some pictures of the room as it sits right now. We've got the room completely sealed up and we own the environment. We need to go fill our propane tank to get the C02 levels up but just being in there for a little while breathing is adding a lot to the room.

Here's the veg room cleaned up.

Our cheerleader

Another veg room shot

10 gal fish tank bubble cloner. Works awesome!

The brains behind it all. We're not done with wire management yet and we could use some touch up paint on the ducting.

The exchange between the two rooms is handled by our 8" HO Can Fan on a Variac.

Orange room

Batch of various clones: AK47, DSD, CH9 Jack, and our house strain. We've been getting hit hard with thrips and we're lucky these plants look as good as they do. They've had a rough time so far.

The 18kbtu attic rattler that makes it all happen. Custom built box with giant filtered intake and exhaust.

These are supposedly SSH from a fairly old mom. We can't verify the genetics but there's 40 of them in and they're filling out nicely. We had some pretty bad pH issues with the Fox Farms soil mix in the beginning but we're doing much better now. We moved all the sickly plants to the front row for troubleshooting and the rest are doing relatively well.

 

[NOKUY]

wow......loookin great bro!

 

[Kerosene]

I have to add a detail. The carpet has anti-fatigue matting underneath it. Center door is made entirely of black plastic, reflectix, and velcro. Easy and reusable. The outlets in the silver boxes are on a dedicated 20amp circuit that's feeding all the peripherals save the A/C (on it's own 30a) and the lights with their fan on another 30amp circuit.

Melissa is delicious.

Oh, the A/C has been running for a few days now and the ducting stays within temp. Outdoor temps have been around 50-75 and the A/C has been keeping up with 4 400s + all the other crap in the rooms (us included)

Everything is still modular so it can be ripped out in short order.

We've made progress, but until the room can stay buttoned up for 2 weeks without attention, we won't be able to be lazy about anything (motivator).

 

[Bender]

Took a couple pics tonight. Larger plants are 40 SSH 1 week flower and smaller plants in front are clones from our bag seed mom, AK-47, DSD, CH9 Jack, and Barney Farms Blue Cheese. Some of the smaller plants have been damaged by thrips and we think we're through the worst of it. There are 61 plants in there if I remember correctly. Room is completely sealed. Running 78F lights on, 68F lights off. 1500ppm CO2 during lights on and humidity is consistently between 40-60%. We're finally getting through our pH problems and education and the crop is looking relatively decent.

 

[KickNader]

so u use cmh? what type of balast u use? cant use electronic right? would 400watt sunsystems harvest elite work? which one? MH Or HPS?

 

[Bender]

Unfortunately we're not running CMH at the moment. If you're wanting to run CMH yourself I would purchase a HPS ballast from any reputable company. And you are correct, can't use electronic yet.

 

[madpenguin]

Mellisa has some perky ass tits.... :wink:

 

[SkizOflan]

i bet if you were using a trellis/scrog you would see much larger yields..

 

[SkizOflan]

i bet if you were using a trellis/scrog you would see much larger yields..

There's really no substitute, especially for someone in your situation. When you create a horizontal plane thru which you distribute your canopy you will see twice the yield you currently do.

Anyone else feel free to back me up on this..!

Grow On.

 

[acidfire]

Excellent setup guys!!

One thing I would do (which you already posted) is air cool your hoods.
Especially since you have height issues, being able to lower your lights will maximize your space + increase your yields.

Melissa is delicious.

Agreed!

 

[BlueberryTerry]

well damn man! everything looks really nice in that attic of yours. I've always wanted to do an attic grow myself!!

 

[Bender]

There's really no substitute, especially for someone in your situation. When you create a horizontal plane thru which you distribute your canopy you will see twice the yield you currently do.

Anyone else feel free to back me up on this..!

Grow On.

Thanks for the advice. We're still trying to get the room dialed in and we've needed to move plants around a couple times. Plus we have a handful of strains with multiple phenos that were flipped on different days that we've never grown before. Scrogging isn't really an option for us at this stage of our grow. We're planning on having 3 bays dedicated to a monocrop that we'll either sog or scrog depending on what we want to grow. Just need to finish getting the room dialed in and establish some good mom plants.

 

[Bender]

Excellent setup guys!!

One thing I would do (which you already posted) is air cool your hoods.
Especially since you have height issues, being able to lower your lights will maximize your space + increase your yields.

Yup, lights are already air cooled in the pictures that we posted. There's a 6" fan on the end that draws air through them and the AC takes care of the rest. The hoods are cool to the touch, even the glass. Only reason they're up so high from the smaller plants is because the webbing gets in the way of the ducting and I don't feel like blocking them up right now. The only reason we've been raising the lights is to keep the light footprint the same size as the canopy.

 

[Bender]

well damn man! everything looks really nice in that attic of yours. I've always wanted to do an attic grow myself!!

Thanks for the kind words. It has been a huge challenge but it looks like the last years worth of research, construction, and ridiculous amounts of money spent is going to pay off. This is the baseline grow for the room so hopefully we'll show some nicer grows in the future.

 

[Newb]

Nice attic!

Nice attic!

We are also doing an attic room.
Ours is roughly 6'6"wide x 6'tall x 16'long A-frame.
We are still in construction stage
sub floor down,drywall hung, electric, and A/C installed.

Couple of questions as we are doing this all this based on books and forums read on here-

I noticed you guys also bought a window unit-did you get one for each?(flower/veg)
How well is it keeping up?
We bought a new 8000btu LG for our room. We are very concerned whether it will be enough. We did totally insulate the entire room with R30 10"thick. But as you know attic temps can really get up there. We did install a whole house fan in the attic floor which draws outside air into the attic; that has dropped our attic temp tremendously and we hope it helps that window unit keep up.

I see you have a nice door between flower/veg-how do you get cool air to both rooms?

We also have a small fortune wrapped up in this project-really hope it pans out!

 

[micro gro]

Wow excellent build & grow.

 

[SativaDreams]

this picture is an amazing shot. Should go in a magazine.

What a great growspace, nicely made and perfectly cleaned up and designed!!

only idea I have is maybe you can raise those plants nearest to the camera in the pic higher up to the lights? if you cant lower the lights maybe you can put something under them to get them closer?

I'm going to add it to my list of stealth grow methods (check my sig!)