Hah! You sir are a total badass, and I salute your bad-assery! I for one would gladly spend hours reading a build thread just about your house. I bet plenty of people thought you were nuts, and I bet plenty are still paying rent! 
Hats off to you sir, one day I’ll find the land to do it myself.
These T-8s ARE from MY grandma, for real. Lmao. She use to grow flowers in the basement, but has been confined to a wheel chair for over a year now. I picked them up to use as shop lights, but they never really got use.
I very much am thinking ahead, hence the minimal budget. I don’t want to buy $300 worth of crap I’m replacing soon when I have FREE crap at home. I need to do some work with LED drivers anyways, and SMD soldering practice never hurt. I probably will be making my own LED panels in a few months. Will have to do a DIY or Buy comparison first.
If she’s kicking down some lights you better hook her up with some flowers & some plants to water from the wheelchair. sonnyboy. 
Trust me, wish I could. I know her well enough to know she’ll never touch what she’s been told is bad, even if they say it’s good now. Everytime I’m over there and she’s complaining about pain, or restlessness; "Have you tried those CBD candies I got?“ ”Oh, no, I’m saving those still.”
LED strips make DIY super cheap and easy. I’ll post the link again…
If there is a will, there is a way.
When I started 20 years ago, I saved up $500.00 and while I saved, I went dumpster diving on construction sites.
My first box was built when I found 3 large shipping boxes, that big electric motors came in.
I hoisted them over the side, and into my PU. Brought them home, tore them apart and rebuilt it into a NGB stealth box.
I found ducting, insulation, boards, large pieces of plywood. I scavenged whatever I could, that could be repurposed into something.
I used some of my saved up money to buy a security light from a DYI store a 150 HPS, and a spare bulb. Ripped the light apart and remoted the ballast, built a box, and used bag seed to begin my path.
The months later with my first harvest that dries out to a whooping 68 grams!! WooHoo, and I fell down the rabbit hole, to become savagely addicted to growing the kine, in a perpetual set up.
A roll of cheapo plastic, and thumb tacks,some gallon jugs, ( hell I grew/cut a plant,growing in a Taco Bell salad bowl once), a light source, if I was starting out I found super cheap LED’s that screw into a light bulb socket, over at American Scientific Surplus. Not a great light, but a place to start IMHO. Perlite is a cheap source for medium, again not perfect, but a place to start. Peters fertilizers will do a fine job and it’s cheap.
Keep asking questions, keep hunting, be creative in your endeavor…you can do it!!
Where there is a will, there is a way.
I have some moving blankets I’ll be putting up, and then masking. Hopefully can find some cheap plastic or ideally Mylar sheets to put inside of that. Haven’t figured out ventilation quite yet but I’m thinking on setting up automation from the start with some SCRs and an Arduino (been meaning to learn to program that damn thing for years) to control the lights on a daily cycle plus maybe a photo-resistor to poll for light and send a notification if it detects light leaking in or a light malfunction. I would think it would be equally easy to control temp to a degree and vaguely RH hopefully, with a fan blowing out. The lights should heat it sufficiently right? The house is kept around 68-70 and the basement is maybe 2, 3 degrees max. lower. I worry it’ll be too dry, especially while I don’t really have a moisture barrier up.
I have plenty of questions, probably more than I need to be asking given my assets. I do have access to random electronics, I work in the entertainment industry; audio, lights, video, all that jazz. Between what I have at home and what I can acquire from the shop or friends I can do some basic things as one offs. Building is a little harder, I can’t lift much at the moment, nor can I afford much material. But I do have sizable area, maybe 10ftx6ft, if I can close it off. I’ll have to update when I know the actual finished size. How does one design their air circulation? I would assume you want air to circulate internally with the option to close the outside air intake and or exhaust?
Hope that all made sense to someone other than myself, not a natural writer.
@monkeyman i have used blurple, and works well:rofl:
Going back to them shortly for vegging.
So in most cases the primary concerns with ventilation are temp/humidity and odour control for security. If you have never encountered a dank plant in full bloom then prepare to get punched in the nose my friend! Without a carbon filter come flowering time you WILL stank your whole house out, even with just a few down there in the basement. For most growers this is a serious concern.
The other aspect, temp and humidity is more about providing the most optimum environment tou can for growth, and filtering intakes helps keep those sticky flowers from picking up dust and junk from the air. I still wash my harvests, even inside, even with my hepa filtered intakes because I like thinks squeaky clean when it come to my meds.
Inside the grow you’re going to want a bit of constant circulation not a hurricane but ideally you keep all those leaf tips just dancing a little. A small oscillating fan, or even a few recycled 12v pc fans on a junked AC/DC adapter can get the job done, but you gotta keep the air moving in there. Dancing leaves do not accumulate condensation where they rest upon each other, which can lead to mold and mildew issues in extreme cases.
I think I get the idea on the internal circulation, but with intake/exhaust how much air (CFM) do I need to spec out? I’m sure there is a formula to calculate x amount of volume air in the tent per hour, but that’s more math than I can do in my head. Any idea on cheap light barrier material to pass air through?
If you are able to keep it dark enough in the rest of the basement you might be able to get away with a few layers of black weed stop of landscaping fabric, if you’re trying for an unexhausted breathable kind of thing, but its not going to be totally light tight unless you layer it up enough to slow down the breatheability I’d imagine.
Honestly, the cheapest and easiest way to build a grow “room” quick and easy, without buying a tent, is to just frame up a form with some 2×4s, even 1x2s or scrap wood and skin it with plastic sheeting or tarps. Simple, cheap, no heavy lifting required. You dont even need to “build” a door, you can get a tarp zipper for $10 and slap it on the poly itself, or even cut a slit and make a flap that hangs over on the outside to block it when its closed.
Oh right, fan sizing and CFM! So this can vary quite a bit depending on what type of lighting you ultimately end up running. If you’re going with HID in the end you will have more heat to deal with and a larger unit will make that easier to manage.
The math isn’t that hard really though. Let’s say you built a 6x6x6 foot enclosed space for your grow. Well 6x6= 36 square feet of floor space, times 6 again gives you 216 cubic feet of space inside your grow. You probably want to be able to turn that entire volume of air over at least once a minute, maybe more if you have hot lights. With LEDs you can run higher temperatures overall because they dont throw off the infrared heat that HIDs do, so your leaf surfaces don’t get as toasty. That means with LEDs you can run less air changeover potentially, bit it’s the humidity that can catch up with you then. You’d be amazed how much water big plants in tull bloom can breathe out into the air.
Generally I’d say over spec things a bit and put it on a dimmer or speed controller. That gives you much more control to adapt to changes in seasonal temperatures and changes in plant size and humidity.
So to use the example of a 6x6x6, 216 cubic foot space if it were me, id probably be looking for about a 400CFM fan.
The spot I’m setting up has two existing stud walls, one with the stairs in the other side, and one with a doorway. I might just do that, and have the two outer walls be more like 2x2 frames tied to the joists. Hopefully none would fall it, lol.
Oh, and The light barrier in question would be part of a light trap on the air inlet and outlet on the tent. My first solution will probably be DIYed because I have a tight budget, but some stuff around the house I can fabricobble as good as any other man. I have basic power tools and some oddities for sure. I’d work in theaters that are underfund with directors who have ridiculous requests. I definitely have done some sketchy shit, and now is the time for slightly sketchy. Its just got to last me a year at most. Should have savings a plenty to funnel into better equipment as soon as that first crop comes up.
Oh yeah, if you’re used to shelling out regularly for your meds then once the harvests start rolling in you’ll slide easily into a crippling gear addiction with all the funds it clears up for ya! 
Seriously though, its true, you can get started with something pretty simple and fugly and grow enough quality product to free yourself from the dispensaries. Once you’ve done that it becomes pretty easy to build up a top notch setup pretty quick. I just kept investing what I would have normally spent on meds in a month back into the grow. A few months of that and you can have top notch versions of everything you’d need to crop out successfully for years without buying much more than nutrients regularly.
I once told a buddy a ballpark figure for what I’d spent on grow equipment over the years. This is a guy who loves to splash out on “big boy toys”, fancy unnecessary shit, fancy new gaming pc every year or two. It was a figure in the thousands and he laughed like “you spent HOW MANY thousand on gardening!?!” He wasn’t laughing so hard when I told him how many elbows that gear had turned out! He once watched me buy a $350 high end extraction fan about 15 years ago.
“$350 for a fucking FAN!?!? That’s STUPID! I bought an xbox for that much! You should buy an xbox instead!”
Well, 15 years later that stupid fan is humming pleasantly away in the other room, keeping my precious babies happy and keeping every trace of stank safely contained. So far its cost me $23 a year, a crippling 6.3 cents per day to keep my crop churning out countless delicious flowers. 
15 years later I’ve got a ass kicking fan and some pretty solid grow skills. He’s got that old xbox in storage, buried under 3 or 4 newer consoles that are now obsolete.
So waaaaaait a second… who’s hobby was laughably expensive again here? 
It’s medical cost. Medical quality. I don’t mind accommodating the plants, they pay it back. I have a mind to automate it entirely, to the least it’s caretaker friendly. I go out on music or comedy tours and I just can’t tend to them directly. I’m sure that will become an obsession soon. I’d love to do aeroponics but little expensive to start.
Oh yeah, that was the other bit, automation. Unless you already have a bunch of arduino sitting around and feel like banging your head against for fun, just get a Raspberry Pi and run Mycodo. Ivr got it in my cab, @pufferfishfiend os running it. Fully open source free software, get yourself a level of control and customizability you can’t get in the high end industrial systems on the cheap at home. I’ve watered and checked on my plants from a beach 6 hours of driving and 4 boats from home. And you can have that remote access without having to let creepy Orwellian google or amazon into your grow room!
I keep saying I’m gonna finish writing up my guide to a Mycodo build, and hopefully I really mean it this time. I’ve gotta get my next one put together sometime this month so I’ll document it and get it up at some point. There’s a bunch of info on it in my grow thread already though…
I am looking forward to that information when you get around to putting it all together for us 
Looking forward to that myself. I have an Arduino development board, and have programmed it once. That’s my only attachment to it, I have thought about moving to Pis for projects but I’ve never wanted to bother learning it. Also arduino nano boards and like amazing for for say a lamp or something. Cheap, small, and easy if/then programming. Pis do have more support for communication so that’s probably a good call! I’ll have to see if a friend has a dev board I can borrow. My mom is a programmer by trade, but I’m more of a hardware guy myself. Never cared for it. Arduino a were easy if/then but Pis seem to have a lot of the automation programs already written with interfaces to configure them even, so eh fuck it. Easy for me to follow your grow if I learn it anyways, lol. Thanks man.
Alright, today I’ve been looking at mediums and containers. I think ultimately I want to work with aeroponics for medical, which will be a ways out in the future. Currently I’ll be growing in soil, still haven’t settled on what, depends on what nutrient system I can find locally, as I’d prefer using all one brand for the first couple grows, so I can follow the chart pretty easy. I do have interest in growing landrances in live soil (my property is crap soil, all clay so it’ll have to be indoors. What mediums, techniques, whatever will translate best from potting soil into live soil? I imagine they are similar to work, just one is more work to maintain.
Grow bags- yes? I was going to grow out of some cheap vessels at first, 5 gallon buckets or cheapo plastic pots. Then I was seeing a lot of people using bags, and they aren’t that expensive.
Also, I should be able to sprout the seeds in some paper towel and then put them directly into the soil and cover it to keep moisture in?
On a grosser note, my soil may be crap but I have access to a good amount of, well crap. Actual feces. I have three guinea pigs that just constantly put out the stuff. Plus two cats, and a big ole dog but the guinea pigs make nice little dry pellets that are easier to collect. This would of course also have some urine in along with it, guinea pig urine is high in calcium as well as the stuff you’d expect. Anyone have some experience making say a manure slurry to apply some extra nutrients? Not crazy about the idea, but logically I know it’s nature. If you have had experience; how’s the smell long term? Grow room smell like a barn?
I would propose you start a worm bin, put the guinea pig bedding (along with the droppings) in there and let the worms transform it into black gold.
If you are interested in a simple, water only, soil recipe you can try this one. You should be able to find most of these items locally and cheaply.
Base Mix
7.5 gallons of peat moss
4.5 gallons of perlite
3 gallons of fresh EWC or compost
2.5 cups of dolomite lime
Ammend with
2 cups bone meal
1 cup blood meal
1 cup kelp meal
1 cup greensand (optional)
This mix will make two cubic feet (15 gallons). Mix up the base mix, then set some aside for seedlings and clones. Lightly moisten and let the mixture compost for about three weeks.
