[electricword]

If you ask me, I think Mars, AC Infinity, Spiderfarmer and Vivosun are the same as far as customer support goes.

Ac Infinity seems to have the better gear as they actually have an R&D budget, Mars is a good second and Vivosun is Temu grade trash. Spider farmer has decent gear, but I’ve seen lots of damaged shipments that they seem to think isn’t their problem to deal with.

As far as tent size goes, I would split the difference and go for a 3×3 You get an extra square foot of space over a 2×4 and a 2×2 will most likely lead to you wishing you went larger at some point.

[zoomycat]

My plan to afford the tent was to drop my ISP and Cell phone costs drastically and this was going to allow me to have the $ to pay financing monthly. I did manage to gain around $100 a month back budget wise to do this but this spider farmer just showed me I’m better off building my own.

I was actually planning on building my own enclosure before getting the tent because it was customizable after the fact and I wasn’t locked in. I could build the unit modular and expandable to my needs as a grower. I liked this idea and think I’m going to instead go back to the DIY route like this.

[electricword]

Also don’t give in yet, don’t let the gear Mafias still the jam out of your dough-nutz.

It gets better…

[zoomycat]

I was DIY before and liked doing it my way. So I think I’ll get out of the gear game and back into the plant game. I live in Canada so I just need to buy or build a room scrubbing filter. I think I’ll buy a plant zapper to help deal with the pests that get into my house. They get in whether I grow or not and its a constant battle, I viewed the tent as a physical barrier between pests and the plants but perhaps just killing them with zappers is the best bet. 😀

[flowerpower]

AC Infinity is the brand I use, but I know growers that use only mars. Check out Bill Ward on youtube. The size tent you use depends on what you’d like to produce. I started in a 2×4 and found it cramped my plants. One plant will fit in a 3×3. I am currently going for a 3×5 tent, using the 2×4 for veg. A 3×5 will grow two plants comfortably. You can grow in a 2×4, but if you grow well they will be cramped and require a lot of training. Most important if you intend to grow don’t skimp on height. I think the 80″ high tents are best. My 2×4 is also 60″ tall and I’ve had trouble with plants growing to close to my light and getting burned, light burn that is not combusting. I started growing with a vivosun 2x4x60″ tall tent and a blurple light. I still use the tent for veg. I since bought Vipar Spectra lights, (cheapest light I could find that met my requirements). They are now 5 years old and running fine producing the dank, that is way better than the despo. The only thing I didn’t like from AC was their fabric pots. They only have three gromets that are more suited for hanging a pot than training. I haven’t used their lights, but their tents and fans are great. It’s a definate game changer to control your temp and humidity with their controllers. I have four inch and six inch inline fans with a controller 67 and a controller 69. AC carbon filters for both. My six inch filter is refillable. Both work well to hide that dank aroma. AC infinity is probably the best, and remember you get what you pay for. DGC also has discount codes for AC. Hope this was helpful…good luck growmie!

PS Your plant looks great so far.

[flowerpower]

• This reply was modified 2 weeks, 6 days ago by  flowerpower.

[zoomycat]

Nice plant 😀

[zoomycat]

Here is an update today. Did some defoliation and noticed the fan in the background wasn’t oscillating. Got that oscillating again and the plant is happy about that. Its not the only fan I’ve got going on so its not terrible but it is better now that I’ve fixed the fan.

• This reply was modified 2 weeks, 2 days ago by  zoomycat.

[zoomycat]

Also tower fans work great for grow environment fans. Love mine!

[surfdad_grows]

Keep whatever as a secondary, get rid of whatever you don’t like or doesn’t work send back or sell. Get ACI. You won’t be disappointed. Ordering or questions about anything they are super fast and awesome to deal with. I have everything for just a grow except ACI light and heater for basic essentials. I just graduated from (4) sf1000D’s thankfully . Buy twice cry thrice. My experience 🤣. ACI, the everlasting relationship

[zoomycat]

While I can return, I still feel the burn. Don’t like the support of any of the vendors from what I can see, I think its gotta be DIY for me.

[surfdad_grows]

I’ve got mix and match things. I started completely unprepared. Picked up things just to work and get by. I got the ACI humidifier and intake fan and loved everything about them. Having to personally communicate with ACi I’ve had nothing but amazing help. I bought twice cried thrice. I did the the absolute hard way and should have listened from the start getting the right stuff the first time. Don’t get me wrong I’m feeling the wallet hurt but if you’re going to do it, do it right to begin with or just don’t and deal with it. Remember, like life what you do now will eventually come back later on to either help or kick your butt. I’ve just always learned the hard way lol.

[surfdad_grows]

Sorry veered off. I’m now just about 100% all ACI now. Had (4) spider farmer 100w, cheapo extra 4” inline fans, dollar store circulation fans, Now that all for the 2×4. My biggest purchase was the light and it isn’t ACI and I’m ok with that where I built up to now. Been at this almost a year now. Building the whole time little by little to change the grow or upgrade. You’ll figure it out . 🤙.

[johnny509]

What I don’t understand is, how it’s the tents’ fault that it got uncontrollably hot?

[zoomycat]

When its 5+ degrees hotter than my lung room with little info as to what may be causing it and the instructions were so basic mistakes were inevitable. Then it takes 4 days to get a response from SF. 1 day was an automated response, Another was a person saying they were transferring me from one email to another. Then instead of going into helping me they took a day to joke about how their tent killed my plants instead of actually helping.

I’ve just had a way better time outside the tent. I’ll probably build my own enclosure and slowly figure out what works for me instead 😉

[shwagcity]

Lung room temp? Are you running a inline in there?

[zoomycat]

lung room was sitting at 23C, Temps jumped up to 28C when the plants were used to lung room temperatures. I kept lowering the temps of the lung room and nothing was happening in the tent, It was also stupid loud and had to be run at 100% power 100% of the time which I didn’t like at all(it’s in my bedroom)

I watched an informative DGC episode today about lights that talked about how the 740-760nm spectrum largely produced heat on the surfaces that it shines on… Guess what the SF2000 light has? 760nm lights and that is what my current Mars Hydro lights are missing.

I’m not convinced that spectrum is helpful at all times of growing and should be in a main grow light if I’m being honest. I think its better as a supplemental light that gets turned on during the flowering phase, Minimally to prevent baking your plants. Perhaps controlled via a temperature probe so they turn off if they start baking the tent.

I’ve been packing the kit back up and it will be getting returned to Amazon. It wasn’t what I thought it was going to be at all. I thought I was buying a smart kit but I wasn’t. If you look on spiderfarmer.ca and their grow tent kits… *All* of the kits except 1 has the temperature and humidity controller. It was unclear I was getting *that* kit when I ordered on Amazon.

I understand why I’ve heard the company referred to as ScammerFarmer now. I got got but am able to return… however I still feel the burn. I’ve sort of lost trust of the tent vendors in general, My plant adventure was doing well when it was a DIY adventure.

I went from trying to grow under 1 Aero garden sprout unit and quickly found out that wasn’t enough. Bought another one and the plant outgrew that too and I was balancing the lights on Pizza pop boxes to raise them up so the plant wasn’t burning them. That plant stayed pretty small as it touched the lights a few times and I’m pretty sure it stunted its own growth to stop doing that.

Then I bought a hula hoop and emergency blanket and I hung the emergency blanket on the hula hoop using an old school 5 branch tree lamp. I took 2 buckets per stand and made light stands and bought some mars hydro VG40 lights. These are my current lights that I’m running. I bought 2 sets.

I had planned to run the lights standing vertically but with two lights on each side of the 2 gal buckets, the light coming from the bars was immense and I started getting the plant shriveling and getting light burns. I had to take one set of lights out and have 1 light vertical on each side and I hung the other two from the top. This started a trend in how I setup my lights, Not all go up top and I believe this gives a better chance at spreading light throughout the canopy. I run 80 watts on top and 40 from the left/right side. None from the front/back sides, I might have added a bar on the back but stuff in front of you being able to move the plants when you need is bad.

I went from the hula hoop to setting up the closet by cutting the emergency blanket in half and taping it to the walls with painters tape so it doesn’t damage the walls. Cheap and effective. I bought a couple boot trays and use them as plant trays that catch any runoff. I watch and stop watering right when I see runoff. Gaia Green does not suggest doing runoff so I don’t do a lot.

Recently I looked at the pulse grow stuff since Dude suggested checking it out and the zero being affordable. I wasn’t aware it was so affordable! I got hooked up with the Pulse VPD Calculator and that has helped a lot. I’m sure if you’re Canadian you know… A lot of the Information about VPD online is in F and to me I can look at it and be like yeah I can see data here… I can see a trend but I can’t really apply it to *my* grow because it doesn’t intrinsically make sense. For every square there I have to ask Siri what the temperature is in Celsius for it to make sense… So it was nearly impossible with the translation lag for me to notice any real trends out of charts I saw online.

The moment I was able to interact with the chart I could see what I needed to do. I’ve got a different heater in the room with the closet and can drop its temps drastically vs my bedroom. I pulled my temps down to around 19C and the plant has actually been self correcting its humidity to achieve the optimal VPD around itself for itself via its own transpiration.

I could see that the lower you can give the temps to the plant the wider range the plant saw as acceptable for the humidity to be. Once you bring the plant up to around 28C you need to be really tight with your RH so its easier to make mistakes the hotter the lung room gets.