[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 1 month, 2 weeks ago by  ZoomyCat.

[ZoomyCat]

Nice plant 😀

[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.

[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. 😀

[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.

[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.

[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 😉