Originally Posted by jamstigator
Wow, been a while since I was on here! (Had a bit of a bout of paranoia.)
Anyway, I'd been using a couple of little modified WalMart cabinets plus two closets for the veg stage, and this was anything but stealthy, as the cabinets were very light-leaky, and the closet doors had to be open, casting a suspicious glow all over the place. Didn't like that at all.
So, I looked around, found a spare corner, measured it out and decided to build a box that would fit that space more or less exactly, with the intent of replacing both little cabs *and* both closets with one nice box that wasn't quite so obvious.
I began work a month ago with some power tools and a pile of lumber, and finished the box a couple of days ago. (Too freaking hot to work too much on any given day.) The pic shows it open but empty, open but with my veg'ing plants in it, and two shots of it in its default (closed) position.
The details: the light is a 4-foot 8-bulb T5 Tek Light with eight cool tubes in it. It emits 40,000 lumens while consuming 432 watts of power. It does generate some heat, though not as much as any HID light, even a small one. The fan is a 4" EcoPlus 170 CFM centrifugal fan attached with a 4"-to-6" duct converter to a 6" wall flange, exhausting in the back upper left. Intake is back lower right, via a 8"x8" Doran darkroom louvre. There is no carbon filter because another (flower) box in the same room has a carbon filter anyway, so I didn't think it'd be necessary to have one in this box too. (And I was right about that.)
This cabinet is completely lightproof, thanks to my using a wood 'plug' in the back of the front panels that slides 1.5" into the box, and all the edges around the front panels are painted dark chocolate brown to further absorb any light. With all the lights out in the room, this box emits no glow whatsoever.
The reason I used a 6" wall flange for the exhaust was because with little effort, it looks like it'd be possible to run two 400 watt lights in this box (one on each side, left and right) and do a ScroG grow. This would likely require upgrading the fan to a 6" centrifugal though...thus the 6" wall flange exhaust. Just in case I ever want to do that, I figured I'd save myself some time by designing that possibility into the box from the start.
The box frame is made of outdoor treated pine 2x4s, along with some pine 1x2s here and there as needed. The exterior of the box is quarter inch oak panels. The fake drawers are simply half inch oak boards with nice handles mounted on them. These handles are what I use to 'unplug' the front panels and remove them to access the plants inside.
The box itself has five casters on the bottom with which to roll it around as necessary, rated for a total of 875 pounds. I figure the box itself, empty, weighs around 300 pounds or so, and I added my 175-pound weight to it while climbing around inside painting and caulking seams and there were no structural problems whatsoever.
The plants inside currently are two Soma NYC Diesels (sex unknown), a Nirvana AK-48 mother, a Nirvana Jock Horror mother, three Nirvana Hindu Kush (one female, two unknown but likely female), three large-ish AK-48 females, and two smallish AK-48 females. (Yes, I like AK-48, heh.)
The cat inside is a 2 year old fixed male tabby, the brickweed of cats, named Stockard. *snicker*
The dimensions are 77" width, 42" height, and 36" depth, or around 20 square feet, and 60 or 65 cubic feet, something like that. About 5" of the height isn't useable because of the casters, the underlying 2x4s and the quarter inch oak panels top and bottom, but even so, it feels quite roomy. It helps that the TekLight is low-profile and takes up little height itself.
Anyway, I could not be more happy with this veg cabinet. Next I plan on building a new flower box or two, and a drying box, but this was the proof-of-concept box for me, the concept being my ability to do useful carpentry work with nothing but a few power tools and my imagination. ;)
