Garage Grow Room CO2
by Mark
(NC)
My question is about adding CO2 to the grow room. I'm running your most successful homemade hydroponic system. I'm set up in a garage that is apx. 25 x 25, and the system is in one corner with panda paper along the back. I'm using two 400 watt lights over a 6 x 4 area, skipping the first and last rows. I have a 20 lb tank with 20 ft of laser hose strung on trellis netting, hung just above the plants.
What I have been doing is running the CO2 for a hour with the oscillating fan off, followed by 2 hours of just the oscillating fan. With that much open space in the garage, if I ran them together the CO2 would dissipate quickly. Do you have any suggestions on a better way of injecting the CO2? Thanks for all your help, it's invaluable for us beginners.
Answer: Mark- CO2 is much heavier than air, so the CO2 you are releasing is quickly sinking down through your plants to the floor, where it is providing little benefit. Ideally, in a slightly more sealed grow room, you would place the oscillating fans a little closer to the ground and run them while releasing the CO2 (in reality, they would be running all the time). This allows the fans to scoop up the CO2 rich air hanging close to the floor and keep blowing it up into the plants.
I myself have used Panda Plastic before to construct whole grow rooms in the center of large basements. As the sheet is unrolled, it is tacked with a staple gun to the wooden rafters in the ceiling. Any size garden area can be walled off in this fashion. Make sure to overlap the plastic walls where they begin/end. Once the basic size and shape of the room has been formed, the plastic is duct taped to floor.
From our local hydroponic gardening store we would purchase a 6 foot plastic zipper with sticky tape on either side. This allowed us to duct tape the grow room shut where the walls overlap (where they begin/end). The zipper is held up against the plastic wall wherever you would like the door to be. Then, as you remove the backing on the zipper, it is pressed into place on the plastic wall. Once in place, the zipper is unzipped and a razor is used to cut the opening in the plastic between the two halves of the zipper.
These zippers are affordable, and can also be found online (although I cannot think of the exact name of them). If you cannot find these zippers, simply make sure your plastic walls overlap by at least 12-18 inches where they begin/end. The flatter these two sections lay against each other, the more efficiently the grow room will be able to hold in it's CO2 rich air. This whole setup will enable you to release much less CO2, and will also allow you to use it more effectively by running the oscillating fans at the same time.
If you cannot staple the plastic into the ceiling of your garage, this is not a problem either. Unroll the plastic sheeting to the length of the wall, then hold the sheeting tight to the ceiling with a strip of 1 x 2 cut the length of the wall. This piece of 1 x 2 can be held firmly against the ceiling by jamming another piece of 1 x 2 firmly into place (vertically) between the floor and the piece of 1 x 2 at the ceiling (which is obviously horizontal).
Once you have a more sealed grow room in place, be sure to read my CO2 and Plant Growth page to get your CO2 levels dialed in just right. Hope this helps you out Mark, and Happy Growing!
Comments for Garage Grow Room CO2
|
||
|
||
|
||
AffordableGarden Design&Setup
Hi everyone, Jason from Jason's Indoor Guide here. When I got started with hydroponic gardening more than 24 years ago, my first garden used rockwool cubes and B.C. Nutrients....and I remember thinking to myself yeah, sure, there may be a lot of advantages to gardening with hydroponics, for example there are very few pest problems, therefore very little pest control, no weeding, no plowing or tilling the soil, no soil testing or having to add things into the garden soil, no watering the garden....but for someone who just wants to grow their own vegetables and have more control over their food supply and the quality of the food that they eat, the cost of constantly having to buy grow media and hydroponic nutrients makes this an expensive hobby for most people...
Epic Nutrient Change
I suppose when you take into consideration how much money you save NOT
having to buy food at the grocery store, it is surely cheaper to grow
your own food hydroponically even with the cost of high quality
nutrients. Nevertheless, I didn't have a whole lot of money to work with
and I needed to make my efforts as affordable and effective as
possible....and in the last 24 years I HAVE learned a thing or two!
As you browse through Jason's Indoor Guide, you will notice all of the
systems that I use personally are homemade systems. As I got 3 or 4
years of experience under my belt, I quickly adopted a preference to
standing water systems and systems that use expanded clay pellets or
lava rock, because the media is re-usable and it eliminates a huge
operating expense. So once a hydroponic system is built, garden
maintenance is minimal- check and adjust the nutrient solution daily,
and to change it completely every 2 weeks....and the biggest operating
cost is the hydroponic nutrients. (and the electric bill, lol)...
Homemade Cloner
And, regarding the cost of the nutrients....I experimented for about 3 years with making different compost teas and nutrient teas, but there is still a lot of expense $$$ associated with making high quality nutrient teas....like kelp meal, liquid seaweed, rock dust, bat guano, un-Sulfured molasses, worm castings. You can eliminate a lot of this expense by becoming an expert at making high-quality colloidal humus compost, and use your properly made compost as the basis of your hydroponic nutrient solution.
Unfortunately, I have been gardening for over 24 years and I have only
just recently mastered this difficult skill....and even then, only
because I happened to find a very easy to follow, high quality technique
and decided to follow the instructions to the letter. I produced more
high quality compost in just one week than I was able to use in a whole
year! If you can master the technique, I highly recommend it. It is one of the top 3 things you can do to
increase the productivity of your food production efforts, while at the
same time decreasing the amount of effort required to grow all of your
own food, and decreasing the total cost of operating your food
production system.
And when I say decrease operating costs, I mean decrease them to almost
ZERO, especially if you are producing your own nutrients...
High Efficiency
Hydroponics
The ultimate solution to eliminate the cost of your hydroponic nutrients: Imagine a hydroponic system that does not require you to buy any nutrients, does not require you to make your own compost, and does not require you to brew your own nutrient tea. Seriously! No cost and no effort as far as providing nutrients to your plants! Plus, at the end of the gardening cycle you harvest all of your garden vegetables, PLUS YOU HARVEST FISH from the system--->
Aquaponics
This solution is aquaponics. If you are serious about producing all of your own food and being self-sufficient, this is the ultimate solution for reducing expenses (as much as possible), reducing the total amount of work required, and maximizing the productivity of your gardening efforts. I have been gardening for over 24 years, and it is the perfect food production solution in my opinion.
Besides mastering how to make high quality compost, learning aquaponics is one of the top 3 things you can do to increase your garden productivity, reduce your total costs, and reduce your total work. The product that I learned from is called Aquaponics4you. With all of my hydroponic gardening experience, the first time I came across the Aquaponics4you product I knew immediately that it was something very special! Place an aquaponics system outdoors and use the sun instead of grow lights, and you have reduced every garden expense to nearly ZERO!
The Same System/ 10 Weeks Later!
