Hi everybody, welcome to Ginger Rick’s Unidentifiable Flowering Object!
This will be my ongoing grow diary, a place for me to share my strange adventures and polish my craft. I’m not exactly new to all this, I ran my first crops in sunshine mix waaaaay back when, hand watered under big HPS, real basic stuff. Did alright for how little we knew back then! Its been many of years off for me, felt like starting from scratch, but I’m back to it in a whole new way now.
Since it was announced that Canada would legalize cannabis, including home growing, I have been on a quest to build the most efficient cabinet I can. Thanks to the horrors of the housing situation where I’m at I’ll have to save building my forever grow for another day, but there’s no reason I can’t pull down poundage in a piece of furniture.
I grow for medicine, for my wife and for myself. Cannabis is the difference between pain and functional living in my household, and that makes it too important to rely on the market to provide. Legalization has actually not been well managed for people who rely on Cannabis for medicine. Paying dispensary prices where I’m taxed like booze just to keep my wife comfortable is conceptually offensive, and while we should probably get our medical designation I’ve heard mixed reviews of the bureaucracy involved. If I can produce the medicine we need within the scope of a hobbyist recreational grower then why bother with all the hassle and paperwork?
But that’s a lot of medicine, in not a whole lot of space. So it’s a quest for extreme efficiency, as well as extreme yields. It’s a quest that will involve a fair amount of high concept mad science rigmarole, unconventional approaches and maybe some amusing failures. But failure is the teacher, and in the quest for knowledge we must always be willing to emabark on ever more exciting forms of failure! Thankfully I’m failing less these days, must have learned a thing or two over the years.
Now just to be clear, a little disclaimer…
I’m not advocating mad science, hacked builds, and lunacy to anybody here. It’s just that it’s always worked for me. If you want to build a flying machine from spare parts you found in the garage just like Ginger Rick did then it’s gonna take hard work and a lot of research. As a lifelong mad scientist and occasional supervillain I feel that the work is its own reward.
Oh, and the piles of buds… I guess that’s a reward as well!
My cabinet is a bit unconventional, and is still definitely a work in progress. Many of my design choices were heavily weighted by cost in the beginning, and access to home improvement and DIY materials at reduced cost led to some odd choices. I am lucky enough to have connections in my life that afford me access to nearly anything sold in a hardware store at discount pricing and it has been a true blessing in my pursuit of this hobby. Because of this some of my build choices were easier, faster, or more cost effective in ways that they just wouldn’t have been otherwise, and that certainly shows at times.
So let me introduce to you my Unidentified Flowering Object! A nice plain looking old wardrobe, she stands 6ft tall, 3ft wide and 2ft deep. It’s not much to look at but its what’s inside that counts.
Inside there’s a 4 site recirculating DWC, 2gal square buckets, sitting above it’s own rez. I run it at about 60 to 80 liters which feels plenty roomy for keeping things balanced. I run a pretty lean feed, highest I ever go is around 500 to 600ppm. Nutrient company feed charts are designed to sell you more pricey nutrients, and I like clean product. I run Green Planet’s GP3 line of nutrients with all the additives and ProCal. They’re a local company, I like what they’re doing, and I’ve always been happy with their products and the results I’ve gotten with them. I used to run an R.O. system but we have literally some of the cleanest, lowest ppm water in the world straight from the tap here so these days I dont bother anymore. I own a chiller but it’s honestly never been out of the box it came in, and I often run res temperatures that might panic other DWC growers. This is made possible because I run a sterile res, adding UC Roots every 2 to 4 days depending on temperatures, and maintain high nutrient exchange rates. The reservoir is a perfectly sized wide laundry sink and I’ve plumbed to pull from the drain in the bottom.
An 800gph inline pump pushes nutrient up to the sites where it enters the buckets at a right angle, promoting full circulation of the root zone.
Nutrient depth is set by a 1-1/2" stand pipe, maintaining a constant level as nutrient waterfalls over the edge and back down to the rez below.
I currently run an airstone in each site as a precaution but in future I may discontinue this, or relegate the air pump to an emergency response mode in case of pump failure. Dissolved oxygen is, like so many things in the strange twilight world of grow lore, a matter of near religious fervor. I’m fairly close to convinced that my system will maintain DO levels just fine with only the waterfall effect from the nutrient feed and return drops, but I’ve felt the pain of pump failure before. With the airstones in place I’m covered, as each site will maintain fluid and aeration in the event of a pump failure. As long as I don’t break myself and fail to get to things before they drink their buckets they’ll be fine… but that’s another story.
Feed lines on each site have quick connect fittings, and all drains fit into receivers on the lid of the rez. Stand pipes can be pulled, draining the site near completely, feed lines unclipped and the entire site lifted out for easy maintenance. A trellis integrated into the lid keeps the whole affair very manageable.
I run vertical because it seems to me to be a more efficient use of canopy space. When things go right I pull solid colas the size of my arm, and I can get solid nugs the whole way down. I get more square footage of exposed canopy than I could running flat in the same space, and ultimately that pushes up the yield potential. It does require very careful canopy management though, and that is a function of experience with the space and with the strain. I will fully admit that it is one of the areas where I am always looking to improve my game, and I feel has been one of the biggest limiting factors in the space reaching it’s full potential.
One of the other limiting factors? My lights, but hilariously not at all in the way most cabinet growers mean! So what I said about my build being influenced by discount access to the home improvement and DIY industry? Nowhere is that more apparent than in my supervillainesque Frankenstein lighting array…
When I started this build a few years back I was doing soooooooo much research. I’d been outta the game long enough to be a born again noob, and I knew I wanted to go in a completely different direction than I ever had before. A small space brings unique challenges and my experience had mostly been with big hot HID lights. I’d done surprisingly good SOG runs under a tanning bed like fluoro array way back in my young and stupid days of the late 90s, so I knew it was possible for even young idiots to get decent results under unconventional lighting. I also knew there was no way I was doing fluoro again, not now that LED was an option. But oh the options… sooo… many… options.
Any build is always a tradeoff between speed, cost, and quality. Pick the two that matter most. When I was building out the UFO I had so many tabs open, so many threads I was following, so many notes written on so many scraps of paper. I could have spent ALL that time on LED lighting research alone! I just couldn’t seem to find the answers I wanted to drop the money on the DIY array build of my dreams, and prebuilt offerings were at that time primarily over priced or over hyped. I knew there was a better solution but I just didn’t have the time and the money to winnow down the field quickly and hit the ground running. In the end cost and speed made my decision, but I’ve always known it wouldn’t be the final arrangement.
I’d seen a thread over on IC where a cat named blynx was dropping ridiculous tiny grows under store bought LED light bulbs. He was pulling a gram per watt in soil with a little LST, some headless bulbs, and a whole lotta LITFA. @Mr.Sparkle was hacking them apart and growing in a dammn bucket! Soon others were jumping in showing positive small scale results and I knew I had an angle I could sink my teeth in to, fast and cheap, but still ultimately modular and easily experimented with. Screw In LEDs would be good enough to get this ship off the ground.
But I wanted vertical, and I wanted power… in retrospect too much power to start. I wanted to be able move my lights and change my spectrum, to adjust my stretch and control my temperatures. That’s how I ended up building the stack. The stack consists of six vertical layers of seven sockets each, two to the left and right and three to the rear of the cab, 42 sockets in all.
Each layer is wired together as a group, and can be individually switched on or off. There are two lighting control relays and each layer can be set to channel A, channel B, or Off. This allows me significant flexibility, running different spectrums on different channels, turning groups of lights on or off dynamically to adjust for temperature, or “moving” my lights by running different groups to control stretch or target areas. In the initial build I installed 100w equivalent bulbs, 14.5 watts a piece, for a total of 609w of total lighting potential, though I had never intended to run it flat out. These days I’m running 60w equivalent bulbs, 10 watts actual draw each, in all but the topmost layer. This results in 5 layers of 70 watts each, and a 6th top layer of 101.5w, for a total potential output of 451.5 watts.
Screw in LEDs have internal drivers and that meant there was still a bunch of heat to move out of the flower space. Being as I had never cropped under leds I was prepared to fall back to a lower wattage HID in a vertical cool tube, so the cab was ducted with that possibility in mind. A 5" inline fan pulls in at the back and pushes up through the column and out through a light trap in the top. The column is formed from a custom bent lexan sheet to cover the lighting and an aluminumized corrugated ducting material called ThermoPan. It’s fire rated and used to build ducting so that’s what I did with it. Handles like cardboard, but nice and shiny and seems to hold up to moisture pretty well on the surface. I’ve sprayed in the cabinet plenty of times and it’s never seemed to get saturated on me.
In the end the column turned out bulkier than I had hoped, there are plenty of times I’ve wished I only had a clear round cool tube to reach past to the back. It has succeeded in kicking out the buds though, and it did come together quickly and cheaply for me. It has a certain nonsensically mad sciencey vibe that I also find appealing, but ultimately it’s not here for the long haul. It’s too big a pig for cubic footage, and I’ve had more time to learn and plan for it’s replacement. It’s unlikely to last past next winter, though at the moment it persists in its absurdity because it works surprisingly well and is doing its job full time. But plans are in the works for it’s successor, I want that volume back for buds.
Intakes are through two hacked motorized residential heating registers. The original consumer products featured little digital programmable timers so you could open and close the vents in different rooms at different times of day to save on energy costs. The name escapes me at the moment, but they were discontinued long ago anyhow and I scored the last few I could find on ebay. If someone were searching for a similar item today they would inevitably pay more for it to talk to their smartphone by means of some off site central server it’s ratting them out to on their vent use habits. And also plausibly their location history, phone browser history, contact lists and daily step count and movement profile! Basically like one of these “smart” vents.
I didn’t need all that hassle, just the motor and the gearing built into it, so I tore their little brains out and they were wired in to the Motherbrain. I can open and close either of them at will, allowing me to “seal” or vent the cab as I choose. HEPA filters guard against airborn monsters of all kinds, and carbon cloth keeps the funk under wraps when the exhaust isn’t flowing.
Exhaust is achieved with a 100cfm high end Panasonic smartflow bathroom fan, the exact name and model of which also eludes me at the moment. It’s fairly compact height made it a workable choice for the space I had available in the upper section of the cabinet and a home made carbon filter clips in below it at the top of the grow chamber. On the whole it’s worked fairly well, and runs reasonably quietly, though humidity can be a bit of a challenge. As with the lighting there are already plans in the works for upgrades, and the two will likely happen at the same time. An array of 12v PC fans are controllable for air circulation within the chamber.
Speaking of controllable… well pretty much everything already is or will be eventually. The UFO features a level of custom process control usually reserved for the very highest grade of professional greenhouse industrial systems, all for a fraction of their eye watering price tags. Thanks to the absolute miracle of brilliant and generous geeks around the world there’s a good chance that whatever you’re trying to do there’s some quality open source software that can help you do it, often better, cheaper, and more securely than the corporate offerings. In this case the free and open source Mycodo control software running on the RaspberryPi single board computer.
https://kylegabriel.com/projects/2020/06/automated-hydroponic-system-build.html
Mycodo is a truly incredible piece of software, and the fact that something so powerful is available for free is an absolute testament to the amazing dedication and generosity of its developer Kyle Gabriel. He began the project in order to grow edible mushrooms, hence the name, but it has since been used to control everything from meat smokers to frog breeders to DNA sequencing lab equipment. I have to believe in my heart that a guy as cool as this would have to have some appreciation for our beloved medical herb, and the thought of Kyle stumbling across this grow diary some day amuses me to no end. Kyle, having never met you I can honestly say that you must be a truly solid, deeply real individual and if ever we should meet the finest cola in my garden is gladly yours for the taking.
The Motherbrain features numerous sensors and controls including:
- 3 DHT22 temperature and humidity sensors, monitoring canopy, lighting stack, and ambient conditions
- 1 BH1750 light meter for measuring canopy illumination
- 1 DS18B20 waterproof temperature probe for monitoring reservoir temperature
- 1 MH-Z19B CO2 sensor for measuring canopy Carbon Dioxide levels
- An Arduino subsystem for controlling 12 volt devices like the fans and vents, as well as
interfacing with the MH-Z19B CO2 sensor due to difficulties connecting it directly to the RasPi - 8 120 volt relay channels controlling
-Lighting channels A and B,
-Lighting exhaust fan,
-Canopy exhaust fan,
-Nutrient pump,
-CO2 valve,
-and a couple auxiliary outlets for humidifiers or other devices. - Multiple webcams for live monitoring and timelapse photography
- 7" touchscreen control panel
- A well designed interface accessible from the touchscreen or my smartphone, with absolutely zero Orwellian corporate AI bullshit out of Siri/Alexa/Google
It records everything, graphs everything, allows me to control any device within the context of any combination of sensor readings or parameters. If I wanted it to run the nutrient pump for 6.253 seconds and flash the lights 3 times, but only at 7:17pm on Tuesdays when it rained it could do that, and then email me a notification of the video it shot of it happening. Ginger Rick is a man of science, science is all about data and controls, and Mycodo gives me all that I could need. 
Future upgrades to the Motherbrain will include:
- Atlas Scientific PH and EC meters for constant real time monitoring of nutrient solution quality
- Peristaltic pumps and solenoid valves for nutrient PH and EC adjustments and top ups
- Inline flow meters to measure nutrient movement, protecting against pump failure
- Reservoir volume sensing to calculate solution uptake rates
- Integrated Uninteruptable Power Supply, to maintain minimum emergency parameters in the event of power failure
- Inline Amp meter, for accurate measurement of real time power consumption
- 315/433MHz radio transceiver for control of cheap wireless outlets, allowing for greater environmental control of the area surrounding the UFO
- Some REALLY unusual stuff I’m not even kind of ready to talk about yet
- And perhaps a swarm of tiny drones for defoliation and pest control…
Ever heard the saying overkill is underrated? Well now you have. 
My goal is ambitious so my approach is as well. I aim to pull a pound per harvest when I get the UFO dialed in and running tight, with the most efficient use of time and resources possible. I want a high end appliance that rewards the skilled operator with chunky stank funk nugs like sweet gooey mana from heaven, each and every harvest, like clockwork. I want my wife to never desire for her medicine again without ample supplies on hand to ease her pain.
Sounds like an impossible dream you say? Well I’ve already made pretty strong headway. To date my highest yield in the UFO was 322 grams, running 350 watts through flower, for a reasonably respectable 0.92 grams per watt. That run was an uphill battle at times, and there were certainly points where I shit the bed entirely. I was over vegged, under pruned, and had stupid light cycle stress. In the end a confluence of terrible happenings forced me to pull the plug at only day 51 of flower.
(upload://3Ypsgqyrj0t5mC2RZXdkbroGaea.jpeg)
I know I can do better than that. I believe I can still manage to squeeze another 132 grams more out of it through better canopy management, careful strain selection, and general dialing in of the system. I can pull a pound from this UFO, and with Overgrow as my witness I won’t rest until I make it happen!
