Beginner Tips for Building Your First Grow Room

Here's what you should think about with every grow room setup:

Almost any space can be used as for grow room setup. You can either convert a whole room or cupboard into a grow room, or use a stanrard grow tent.

For a one light or two light set up, a couple of normal double wall sockets will be fine. You can always use an extension lead if you need to.

You should never use unfiltered rain water - you never know what you're feeding plants. The best water you can use is pure, filtered water. Read more on the  importance of water here.

Lights, pumps and your fan can make some noise. Bear this in mind with your setup.

Don't grow straight onto carpeted floors. They hold moisture (spillages!) and harbour bugs and bacteria. You can put reflective sheeting down, or grow in a tent. 

2. Get good light coverage in your setup

When it comes to planning your grow room setup and design, there is nothing quite as important as the lighting you will use to grow your little seedlings into full-grown behemoth plants.

Here you’ll see three main types of lighting options. You'll need at least one lof them.

Fluorescents

Compact Fluorescent Lights (CFLs)

Fluorescent lights are best for their blue light spectrum range and lack of off-put heat.  The T5s are very popular when cloning or boosting growth in the vegetative stage. They are larger than the typical CFLs and usually in panel form with multiple lights in one base. Their quality is great and you can keep them inches away from your plants without burning them.

High-Intensity Discharge (HID)

• Metal Halide (MH)

Metal Halide lights are best used in the vegetative stages. These type of HID grow lights provide high amounts of blue light hues. These wide ranges of blues cater to the exact types of lighting that are needed for root growth and vegetative growth.

• High-Pressure Sodium (HPS)

High-Pressure Sodium grow lights are best used in the flowering stage of the growing cycle. HPS lights are much different than MH lights because of the different hues they emit in the spectrum.

High-Pressure Sodium lights emit a yellowish, orange hue that perfect for bud production. These type of lights often yield larger grows that any light during the flowering stage.

• LED

LED lights have the ability to switch between multiple hues in the spectrum. You can enable blue lights, reddish hues or both. Most full spectrum grow lights  have fans and cooling systems built into lower the temperatures.

Using the LED light will save you about 40% of the energy consumption. They also last a lot longer. LEDs are energy efficient and have long-life space anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 hours of operations time.

Choosing A Grow Light

 3. Keep it cooler

• Lights: Different grow lights will give off different heat signatures. Hot lights such as MH, HPS, and fluorescents produce much more heat than LEDs. Also, lights can be raised or lowered to change the temperature at the canopy level.
• Airflow: You can remove warm air (up high) out of the garden and bring in fresh cool air (down low) with fans and ducting. Fans can also help exchange air throughout your canopy, cooling leaves in the process.
  

 4. Ventilation Kit- To make air circulation

Plants need fresh air to thrive and carbon dioxide (CO2) is essential to the process of photosynthesis. This means you will need a steady stream of air flowing through your grow room, which will allow you to move hot air out of the space and bring cool air in. Plants in the vegetative stage maintain a low odor as they haven’t begun to produce terpenes, the plant’s aromatic compounds. As medicinal plants transition into the flowering phase, trichomes will start to develop and produce terpenes, causing them to smell more.

Proper air circulation will help maintain temperature and humidity, and also bring down odor. Ideally, air needs to move through your grow space every few minutes, and you should create a vent to the outside. Oscillating fans, and intake and exhaust fans can move air through your grow room quickly, taking odors out with them.

5. Keep it Clean

A clean grow room makes for healthy medicinal plants. As a beginner, it can be easy to get overwhelmed with all there is to do and, as a result, forget to prioritize your cleaning. However, if you want to keep everything going as good as possible, you are going to have to remember to clean up after each watering and trimming session.

Keep in mind that your plants will also create waste. Stray leaves may not seem like a big deal, but they can also foster bacteria and disease. Picking up leaves as you spot them and taking off yellow wilted leaves will ensure that you don’t have to deal with the unpleasant build-up and the consequences that can arise from that.