My only gripe so far is that the clamp is screw adjusted. It makes a tight fight and deforms my tent a little. Adjustments are not as easy as spring clip on.
@minitiger
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grow tents are where fans go to die
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Yeah, that’s partly why I changed out my humidifier to an evaporative type from the ultrasonic type. It doesn’t make the white mineral dust like the ultrasonic ones, but needs the water treated to prevent mold/mildew and to replace the evaporative wick regularly. Trade-offs. LOL
Monkey Fan: https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Jardin-Monkey-Fits-0-63/dp/B074GGSB1J
The current fan in my tent is a 16" oscillating wall fan. Probably overkill for a 5x5 tent…but air movement is on point (though waaayyy too strong right in front of the fan).
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What are you treating your humidifier water with? A bit of bleach?
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A few mLs of white distilled vinegar per gallon of water works pretty well, though I’ve also used hydrogen peroxide. Bleach probably would work too. But again, this is for an evaporative humidifier, not one that shoots ultrafine particles of water into the air.
There are also bacteriostatic products available, but a lot of them tend to be made of stuff I can’t pronounce. They tend to keep the water clean longer, but can cause throat/nasal irritation & headaches and have warnings not to get it on your skin or in your eyes/nose/mouth.
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Vinegar sounds like a good solution. I use bleach on occasion in my evaporative humidifier, but not often, probably not often enough. I could see using vinegar on every re-fill.
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I looked at those at some point, can’t remember why I didn’t get it. I think I was already maybe three humidifiers in at that point and figured, you know, I’ll just stick with what I have. Aren’t they kind of expensive? Maybe that was the reason why. I’m running three humidifiers rated for 100 square feet, one rated for six hundred square feet and one rated for seven hundred square feet, all to keep humidity levels in a 5x5 tent in a 10x10 foot room in the 55 percent range (on a good day). It gets really friggin’ dry where I live haha. I think when I looked at those evaporative humidifiers, it was gonna cost something insane to replace all the humidifiers I have, so I just said,”Fuck it.”
I’ll see if I can get those from somewhere locally. I won’t order anything from Amazon. Jeff Bezos has enough money.
I’ve been trying to find one of those, but a little smaller. I’ve got a Gorilla Tent and bought the “wall” thing you can install in the tent to attach things like power strips and oscillating fans and shit. But I agree, a sixteen-inch one seemed like overkill.
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LOVE my 5x5 Gorillas!! Just wish I had the headspace for the extra foot.
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The one I bought is rated for a 750 sqft room. Was probably double the cost of the ultrasonic humidifier I was running prior ($80 vs $40), and also requires wick filter changes every few months which adds to the total cost. I have a humidifier attached to my furnace that does a pretty good job keeping the whole house humidity a little above 40% in the winter. That just means I don’t need to run multiple smaller humidifiers…and I don’t drive myself quite as crazy with winter itch.
Benefit: I can run it on low/medium and still get the air movement I’m looking for–as long as the plants cooperate and don’t put branches/buds within inches of the fan. I think the smallest wall mount fan I’ve seen is 12", though the bulk of them seem to be 16" or larger–and are meant for substantially larger spaces than a 5x5 tent.
Same! Though it seems like they should include a set of high cfm bars with tents 5x5 or larger since people are more likely to be running stronger exhaust fans with tents that size or larger.
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I agree on the high cfm bars. Do you like your “wall thing” so far? I just mounted a box fan, hanging from the top bars, pointing straight down.
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@minitiger Sorry about getting off topic!!
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That was one of the other things that bothered me about them. I’m so fucking bad about keeping track of things like,”Wait, when was the last time I did…?” whatever. I can keep track of planting days, transplants, what day I flipped etc etc, because I always write that stuff in my notebook, but something like a wick change, I know I’m gonna forget to even write that down. And the way time is a flat circle right now, I can’t remember if I did something a day ago or a week ago. Was it last month? Or last year?
The thing about the fans, I like air moving in all directions, from at least two oscillating fans, all the time. And I like to be able to move the fans to different areas of the tent if I want. I don’t, usually, but sometimes I do.
I’ll probably just buy a few of those Secret Jardins for the poles and then maybe get a big one for the wall. I dunno.
How dare you?!? As you know, my grow logs are always EXTREMELY ON-TOPIC. I won’t abide by ANY commenter causing my grow log to stray for even a second from the topic stated in the title of said log! Good day, sir!
Just kidding. It’s fine. And that above paragraph is supposed to be read in an extremely pretentious, vaguely British accent, if that helps. Think John Lithgow haha.
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i forgot who john lithgow was so i substitued john lovitz and it was still pretty funny
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holly shit man. that’s the coolest thing i’ve ever heard, i have to have chem fuego now (and black triangle) for sure. i have a 10inch carbon filter exhausting thru the top of my building, and all my neighbors are big grows and you can already smell weed outside so i can probably blend in a little chem smell in the air
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its the first of th mooooooonth!
time to check your email for that doc d flavor.
lemon thai coming in hot this month for sure. i really like his pre release crosses.
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Already on it, grabbed a few packs.
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Okay, let’s follow up here.
So the aphids showed up and I just got, like, paralyzed. Didn’t really do anything about it for a couple days, except I turned the fans off, closed the AC vent in the grow room and let the temps get really high, right around 100 degrees or so. I can’t remember why exactly I did that, except somebody either DM’ed me or suggested right here on this thread that I should let the temps get super-high, in an effort to get the aphids to kinda crawl down the plants and away from the flowers. So that’s what I did. But I think doing that really affected trichome production or whatever. Maybe washing the flowers the way I ended up doing affected trichome coverage. I dunno. In any event, the flowers are definitely not as crystal-y as usual. And raising the temps didn’t make the aphids crawl down the stems, either haha. After I hung these plants to dry, I found quite a few aphids on the tape that I used to label each plant. Mostly on the Black Triangle #2 tape. I dunno how that plant got so infested; I know Bodhi does some serious stress tests on all of his crosses. The males, especially.
Also, something in the tent did herm. Or maybe they all selfed in those last few days? When I let the temps get super-high and shit? I dunno, but I’ve found a TON of seeds in all of the buds, from when I started trimming and jarring to when I’ve been breaking up buds to smoke. A lot of seeds. And not, like, those little seed pods or whatever, but full-on, fully-formed tiger-striped seeds. If it was just the seed pods, I’d chalk it up to the plants being super-stressed the last few days of their lives, but these are fully-formed seeds. Fuck that.
Anyway, so whenever that was, I guess it was almost exactly a month ago now, I wet-trimmed everything while they were still in the pots and then just chopped off branches. I set up three buckets like this:
The orange bucket was the lemon juice-and-baking soda bucket; the other two were just distilled water. I was a barback for like six months yeeeaarrrsssss ago, so I understand this cleaning method haha. Move left-to-right.
So the first couple branches I washed, I only swirled them in the initial orange bucket for thirty seconds, like every online tutorial suggested, and then did the same in the last two buckets. Thirty-second wash in all three buckets. But what I noticed after doing that a couple times was that the aphids were STILL FUCKING THERE. Those fuckers wouldn’t come off the plants. So after a couple branches, I changed it up and just straight-up submerged the branches in the first bucket. The branches wanted to float, so what I did was get a bowl, filled it with the water from the first bucket and placed it on top of the branches, making sure that every part of the branches were fully underneath the water. Then I’d go outside, drink a beer and smoke a cigarette (about ten minutes or so) and then come back inside and rinse them off in the last two buckets. Then hung the branches on a drying rack in my garage with an oscillating fan blowing ABOVE the rack, just for a little air movement. Then, after about an hour or two, when the water had stopped dripping, I moved them into my usual drying area and dried everything like normal.
Just FYI, this took forEVERRRRRR. I was up until 5am washing the branches this way. I actually ran out of steam, drunk and depressed, and threw out the final plant, which was one of the Chem Fuegos. I’m kind of really kicking myself now for doing that, but at the time, five in the morning, drunk and really bummed, tired as shit, I was just like,“Fuck this. I’m over it.” It actually felt really good at the time haha. “Fuck you, aphid plant! In the garbage you go!” But now I wish I hadn’t done that haha.
Anyway, there’s a thread here on OG about washing your buds and a lot of people there have been recommending blowing air directly on freshly-washed buds. If you’re washing big-ass outdoor colas, yeah, maybe I can see doing that. But if you’re washing indoor buds, I can’t get behind the idea of blowing air directly on your flowers. Ever. A little indirect airflow seems preferable to me. But I live in a very dry area, so maybe if you live in a humid area, yeah, blow air directly on your buds. I wouldn’t do that, though, no matter where I lived.
So… Washing the buds. Here’s a couple pics of the buckets after washing for a while:
That’s a pic of the initial “lemon juice and baking soda” bucket. Notice the bowl in the water that I used to submerge the branches. Also notice all of the fucking aphids in both the water and on the side of the bucket, above the water line. Crazy. I dunno how I got those fucking things. Never again.
Here’s a picture of the second bucket, which was the first “rinsing” bucket:
Still a ton of aphids in there, even after soaking each branch in the orange bucket for ten+ minutes. There’s some plant material in there, too, which is kind of a bummer (looks like there’s a dog hair floating in there, as well haha), but I’d rather lose a few pistils and maybe some crystals and be sure that the aphids and the aphid feces is gone.
Another pic of one of the rinsing buckets:
Look at those fuckers, still trying to survive. If I wasn’t so obsessed with growing organically, I’d take some serious pleasure in just nuking the fuck out of my grow room, with some kind of carcinogenic flea bomb shit. Just to watch them die. Never again. IPM getting implemented this very grow.
Anyway, those pics are a bummer, so here’s some pics of things that got chopped, right before they got washed. I’m not sure which plants these are, but I think most of them are the Black Triangle #2, since that was the one that was most-infested.
One thing I’ve noticed since I’ve started blazing some of this weed the last couple days: everything but the Mexican Melon #2 really “tightened up” after washing it. I dunno how else to describe it, but everything (again, besides the Melon #2) is just rock hard, tight as fuck, very dense. I think the washing had something to with that, just because most of the flowers didn’t feel super-tight even on the day I chopped. Seems like the lemon juice and baking soda made them get really dense? Or maybe the “soaking in water” thing? I really don’t know. But I’ve grown some pretty dense nugs before and these are all denser than any of them. Pretty interesting.
Anyway, so there’s the washing report. First smoke report coming in a couple minutes.
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I’ve been curious what happened with these, but didn’t want to pick the scab by asking. I’m sorry, dude. Can’t tell you how many of those late night (or early morning) shitfests I’ve had where I did something at the time which seemed like a great idea only to wake up the next day feeling like a moron. That feeling sometimes carries on for days.
You think you’ve been able to to completely eliminate the aphids from your grow room now? I saw on a separate thread you dropped some BAH. Looking forward to seeing those develop and to ease the pain, hope this round produces double for you.
Your kitchen looks pretty sweet btw.
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I was going to say the same thing haha, I need an upgrade
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It’s fine, dude. Pick that fucking scab haha. I was outta commission for a while, mentally and physically, so people asking, like,”What happened to this grow?” is very welcome. Sometimes I need a kick in the ass. Most people, especially grow reporters, need a kick in the ass haha.
Yes. Absolutely. After I chopped, I just left the room empty, no growing, for like three weeks. From everything I’ve read, aphids can’t survive for more than like eight days without a living plant. So they should’ve all died. And then I scrubbed the fuck outta the tent, the grow room floors, every nook and cranny, everywhere, with bleach and water. I do that after every grow anyway, but I went extra-hard this time.
So yeah, I’m not worried about the aphids. They’re gone, dead as fuck.
Yeah. And when I woke up this morning, one of them was already above the dirt, less than 72 hours after planting them. Impressive. Got a good feeling about this grow.
Haha, thanks, guys. Yeah, I love our kitchen. I’m not a teenage girl and I don’t have a “favorite color,” but if I did, red’d be it. Gotta love a shiny red kitchen haha.
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