Marijuana Horticulture: The Indoor/Outdoor Medical Grower's Bible

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This closet grow room has everything necessary to grow a crop–lights, fans, and cannabis! A 400-watt HID lights the 3 × 4- foot (90 ×120 cm) flowering room above, and two 55-watt CFLs in one reflector illuminate mothers and clones in this perpetual harvest setup.

A single 1000-watt metal halide can grow enough mothers, clones, and vegetative plants to support 4000 watts of flowering HID light. This design allows pungent odors to waft upward before being evacuated via roof fans. A third area in the attic is used as a heat buffer in hot climates.

Setting Up the Grow Room-Step-by-Step
    Set up the grow room before introducing plants. Construction requires space and planning. A grow room under construction offers a terrible environment for plants. Once the grow room is set up and totally operational, it will be ready for plants.
    Step One: Choose an out-of-the-way space with little or no traffic. A corner of the basement or a spare bedroom are perfect. A 1000-watt HID, properly set up, will efficiently illuminate up to a 6 × 6-foot (1.8 × 1.8 m) room. The ceiling should be at least five feet (1.5 m) high. Keep in mind that plants in containers are set up at least one foot (30 cm) off the ground, and the lamp needs about a foot (30 cm) of space to hang from the ceiling. This leaves only three feet (90 cm) of space for plants to grow. If forced to grow in an attic or basement with a low four-foot (120 cm) ceiling, much can be done to compensate for the loss of height, including cloning, bending, pruning, and using smaller wattage lamps.

This attic grow room has access via a retractable ladder. The grower uses the dead airspace above the room for his ozone generator to exchange air before expelling.
    Step Two: Enclose the room, if not already enclosed. Remove everything that does not pertain to the garden. Furniture, drapes, and curtains may harbor fungi. An enclosed room allows easy, precise control of everything and everyone that enters or exits, as well as who and what goes on inside. For most growers, enclosing the grow room is simply a matter of tacking up some plywoodor fabricating plastic walls in the basement or attic and painting the room flat white. Make sure no light is visible from outside. If covering a window, do so discreetly–it should not look boarded up. Insulate windows and walls so a telltale heat signature does not escape. Basement windows often are painted to look like the foundation. Place some stuff–books, personal effects, household goods, etc.–in front of the window, and build a box around the things so a natural scene is visible from the outside. At night, bright light leaking through a crack in an uncovered window is like a beacon to curious neighbors or bandits.

    This attic grow room is insulated with Styrofoam and reflection/anti-detection barrier foil available at www.hysupply.nl . which keeps the heat signature from showing.
    Step Three: Cover walls, ceiling, floor–everything–with a highly reflective material like flat white paint or Mylar. The more reflection, the more light energy available to plants. Good reflective light will allow effective coverage of an HID lamp to increase from 10 to 20 percent, just by putting a few dollars worth of paint on the walls. Reflective white Visqueen® plastic is inexpensive and protects walls and floors.

    Step Four: See “Setting Up the Vent Fan” in Chapter Thirteen. Constant air circulation and a supply of fresh air are essential but often inadequate. There should be at least one fresh-air vent in every grow room. Vents can be an open door, window, or duct vented to the outside. An exhaust fan vented outdoors or pulling new air through an open door usually creates an adequate flow of air. An oscillating fan works well to circulate air. When installing such a fan, make sure it is not set in a fixed position and blowing too hard on tender plants. It could cause windburn and dry out plants, especially seedlings and clones. If the room contains a heat vent, it may be opened to supply extra heat or air circulation.

In this simple Sea of Green layout, there are ten plants in each tray (80 total plants) illuminated by a single 1000-watt HID. Each week one tray of ten plants is harvested, and ten new plants are started.
    Step Five: The larger your garden becomes, the more water it will need. A 10 × 10-foot (3 × 3 m) garden could use more than 50 gallons (190 L) per week. Carrying water is hard, regular work. One gallon (3.8