My turn for a grow log. Before I start my next grow though I thought I would let you guys follow along while I upgrade my grow box.
The box itself is a BCNL Bloombox. Let me preface this by saying no, I did not pay full price and neither should you. These things are nice but for the MSRP they are terrible (and really for the price the upgrades I’m doing should have come from the factory). I picked mine up cheap on the used market for less than what an all in one tent would cost and because of that so far I’ve been moderately happy with what I got.
First thing the BB needs is a scrog net. The box is very limited in the height department and if they stretch too much they hit the glass under the light and get burnt. I initially built one out of wood which worked okay but…
The problem with the wood frame is the legs don’t let you lift the lid later on in the grow, so the first upgrade was picking up some aluminum angle and bolting it direct to the walls now that i had settled on a net spacing and height. The other bonus of aluminum is sanitizing is now possible.
The piece closest to the camera is only held in place by one bolt on either end so i can remove it for tub removal. My initial concern is this aluminum angle wasn’t as thick as i would have liked so I’m concerned the tightness of the net may bend/warp this in. We’ll see if i have to beef it up in some way. The pieces on the walls are less of a concern because I placed a bolt into the walls at every net point so it couldn’t pull in.
Time will tell if I’m happy with how this turned out. If i like it I’m probably going to put a second net higher up for those stretchier strains that blow past the first one.
If anything i didn’t let this grow veg for long enough and the net was growing into the middle of a lot of the buds. 1st world problems when you never grow the same strains twice and never know what to expect.
Remaining To-Do before the next grow:
Fix the light leaks in the tub lid
Upgrade the 400w HPS with LEDs
Install a cabinet underneath
Install a drain
Revise auto level control
Install mixing pump
Maybe mess with air filtering
Install fans and fix air circ
This original air pump was similar to one of these:
They are junk. Super noisey and don’t push much air. I replaced it with the biggest Danner Linear pump i could find which is probably overkill but i would rather too much air than not enough. It gives off more of a hum like a hot tub pump instead of the ratcheting clackclackclack of a cheaper unit.
Biggest issue was it was too tall so i had to cut a hole in the lid but it panned out okay
From the department of should have been done from the factory i also installed 2 additional fans which can be seen on the right side which pushed air through the light chamber to help cool it. I also installed butyl all on the inside of the JB to help mitigate sound transmission through the metal.
The blunderbox for some reason doesn’t come from the factory with any carbon filtering on the mother/veg chamber so there is quite obviously a pretty strong smell during veg that needs to be taken care of. The only carbon filter the box does come with is a small canister filter about 8" tall bolted to the back of the flower chamber. What i did was move that 8" filter and put it on the veg chamber (which can be seen at the far right corner of the photo) and then installed an 18" filter with a AC Infinity T4 and a drier duct to wrap it around the corner because the whole assembly was too long.
One of the reasons i might redo the air filtering on the flower chamber is that I have since learned that for every 90 degree bend there is a drastic reduction of air flow which pretty much negates a lot of the benefits of having a larger fan and bigger filter by having 2 90’s takeing the intake around the side. So if i can get the whole assembly shorter and use 1 90 I’ll get better air flow.
A second option is finding more of the 8" filters and just adding several of them (the fan blows directly into them) but i have yet to find a reasonable source of them and BCNL charges a small fortune which I’m not willing to pay. The BCNL also require a mount for an additional $15
I like it but I ended up scoring a large sheet of aluminum a few years back that has been collecting dust that I’m going to cut to size. Its been sitting in the shed for a few years until the light bulb went off that i could replace the glass with a the aluminum sheet and stick strips to it. So I picked up 106 SI-B8T11156HUS for $.82ea when they were on sale so I’ll probably put 48 or so on the ceiling and another 24ish spread out on the walls and go from there. The nice thing about the walls is they are aluminum as well just not nearly as thick. Probably 16 gauge.
@Gpaw I’m glad you asked about the LED’s because it got me really thinking about the finer details of how I’m going go wire it.
What I’m thinking is this
The 3 supplies are 200w each. I’m going two parallel strings of 12 for a total of 24 on 2 supplies and 3 strings for 36 strips on 1. This lets me put 36 total on the ceiling and 48 on the walls. The 12 strips on the walls that are sharing a power supply with the ceiling strips will be on a switch.
This switch will allow me to turn off the 12 strips on the walls running at 8.3w. The remaining string on that supply will get fed 16.7w each strip and that will shift the wattage balance to 400w ceiling and 200w walls like this
My line of thinking for the switch is this. Of the 48 on the walls these 12 are the hottest. So if any are going to go below the scrog net its going to be them since the plants will never reach that far to get potentially burnt. On top of that once I’ve flipped the lights to 12/12 I lollipop below the net line which means there is no point running those lights anymore and i can turn them off and use the wattage where it is more useful.
This also leaves other options available to me in future. For example if at a later date I don’t want 100% 4K’s on the ceiling I can easily put those lower 12 on their own separate switched power supply and mix in 12 or more 3k in their place on the ceiling since there will be plenty of room. I should be able to squeeze a total of around 50 side by side on the ceiling depending on how i cut the aluminum plate and how i space out the 4k’s when i install them.
Hope that’s clear as mud and thick as water for everyone and I’m looking forward to see how well it works in practice once I get it all installed. It’s been cold as shit the last couple days and I haven’t wanted to piss around digging out the plate from the shed and cutting it to size outside.
Spend a good chunk of the day designing the cabinet I’ll be putting under the box and decided to take a break and do a quick mock up of the side lighting. Conveniently the strips fit vertically above the new angle almost perfectly.
