Grow cabinet without hydroponics.

There is a lot of interest in growing high light plants indoors these days and I supposed it’s because as of March 2012, growing Medical Marijuana is legal in 16 states. I’ve grown houseplants for years but when I tried hydroponics and I failed miserably. I could grow lettuce and other quick growing plants but when I tried tomato plants they always died when they got larger. I’ve pretty much decided that the small hydroponics kits you see on sale on-line and on eBay may have all of the chemicals you need to grow, but they don’t have what you need to maintain the correct liquid hydroponics cocktail to grow large plants or to grow a plant to flowering or budding stage. The big guys can do hydroponics because they can afford to buy the expensive equipment needed to monitor their chemical solutions.

This article is about growing high light plants like tomatoes, peppers, orchids, etc indoors without using hydroponics. The same setup should be able to be used for just about anything you want to grow as long as it can grow inside the space the cabinet provides. So obviously, you aren’t going to grow corn or bamboo or squash, but I don’t think you are going to grow these plants indoors anyways.

To be successful you need a bright light source that generates minimum heat and a enclosure to contain and focus the light. Everything you need except for the LED Grow lights should be locally available. We used our own Grow Sun Grow lights in this project because they work very well.

The first item you need is a Low cost cabinet. Our LED Grow Lights are extremely bright and the cabinet will help contain the light around plants instead of lighting up the entire room with wasted light. The light will bounce off the cabinet walls and back to the plants giving you maximum light penetration through the entire plant. This also prevents nosy neighbors from calling the cops and reporting the pretty violet light that would be coming from your spare bedroom without an enclosure. And the last thing I want is the local police knocking down my door only to discover I’m growing tomato plants.

I bought this 70"H x 48"W x 20"D Wood Composite Multi-Purpose Cabinet from LOWES for $108.00.

Picture of cabinet before I installed the doors or did the modifications. Each side is perfect for the pots I bought.

One of the pots I bought from LOWES.

Miracle Grow, also from LOWES

The 120mm Fans I chose for the project

You need a good grow light that puts out very little heat and the ideal candidate is a LED grow light. Good LED Grow Lights are compact and run so cool that you put your hand on the light when it’s running. Just make sure you have at least a 40 Watt LED grow light - smaller lights, no matter how much cheaper they are, are a waste of your money because they don’t put out enough light. And don’t bother with a High Pressure Sodium and Metal Halide grow light. Either of these lights will turn your grow cabinet into an oven. Also florescent grow lights small enough to fit inside the cabinet don’t put out enough light in the targeted bands that LED grow lights do.

We built this cabinet with our own Grow SUN grow lights.

I won’t bore you with re-typed assembly instructions when the instructions that came with the cabinet work fine. But you do need to do some simple modifications to pull the excess humidity out of the cabinet and to concentrate the light so it’s as bright as possible.

The inside walls of the cabinet I bought were tan colored so I painted them bright white before I started assembling. You can use any white paint, even inside house paint. I used bright white glossy spray paint and 2 cans were enough to cover everything I needed to paint.

Next I followed the included instrictions to assemble the cabinet.

I started the modifications by drilling 1-3/8″ vent holes to the outside of the cabinet and a 1-3/8″ hole for the power cord.

Drill a 1-3/8" hole through the back, top of the cabinet for a extension cord.

Drill 1-3/8" vent holes along both sides of the top.

To protecting the finish, drill the holes from the inside until just the drill tip pokes through then finish by drilling the rest from the outside.

Completed vent holes along one end of the cabinet.

Then drill the two 3-1/2″ vent holes holes between the top boxed in area of the cabinet and the lower sections.

I used a 3-1/2" hole saw for the main vent holes.

Drill one centered hole between each lower area and the top shelf of the cabinet.

Drill a 9/16" hole behind the main vent hole for the grow light power cord. You can see the 3-1/2" vent hole in the picture.

Picture of one of the inside vent and power holes from the bottom. You can see the inside of the cabinet top through the hole.

I added a power jack to the fan wires so I can easily replace the power supply if I need to. You could just as easily straight wire the fans to your power supply. The jack I used is P/N CP-011A-ND, ordered from DigiKey.

The 120mm Fans I chose for the project

Cut the PC power connectors off the end of the fan wires then strip back the outer covering to expose three wires. The black and red wires are negative and positive power. The yellow wire is the tach output and not needed.

Cut the yellow wire off - you don't need it.

Then solder both fans to the power jack so both fans will turn on when you plug in the power supply. Or you can cut the power plug off the end of the power supply cord and straight wire the fans to the power supply.

Mount the fans centered above each main vent hole so that the fans pull air up into the top shelf area.

Both fans mounted and plugged into the power supply. You can see the power supply plugged into the end of the extension cord in the middle of the picture.

Mount the lights directly opposite from the fans. Our Grow Sun grow lights include intergal mounting brackets that can be used to surface mount like I mounted these or they can be hung from chains.

Here is a better picture of the mounted Grow Sun grow light. You can see the edge of the vent hole by the mounting bracket.

I used this light timer from Lowes because it has 4 outlets. I plugged the two plant light power supplies into 2 of the outlets then plugged the timer into one of the open extension cord outlets.

Here are the lights below the shelf and the power supplies and fans on top. You can see that everything fits with plenty of room left over for supplies. You can also see how bright our lights are - they are much brigher than the camera flash.

Here is a picture showing the Grow Sun grow light turned on. The light looks violet becase we output only red light and blue light.

And like I mentioned earlier, our Grow Lights run so cool you can place your hand on them. Try this with a High Pressure Sodium or Metal Halide lamp and your hand will be blistered in seconds. Also, you can see that this light is much brighter than florescent grow lights.

And a straight on picture of our LED grow light mounted in the cabinet. Each 1 Watt led is being driven full power and the Surface Mount LEDs are so bright that everything around the light looks black to the camera.

One of two tomato plants we are growing in our cabinet.

Tomato plants inside the cabinet. The light gets dimmer twords the bottom because the doors are open and the light is escaping out the front. Once the doors are closed the light really brightens up from top to bottom.

And a final picture with the doors closed. You can see that some light escapes but it's very little. You could add gaskets but the exhaust fans need to be able to draw air in from the outside of your new grow cabinet.

Grow Sun LED grow Lights will be available from this site soon but we have to stock our distributor first.

In the mean time do you have a business license or a retail store and interested in wholesale pricing? Foxx Equipment has inventory and wholesale orders can be placed with Foxx Equipment.

Kansas City – 1-800-821-2254 – kcsales@foxxequipment.com

 

Denver – 1-800-525-2484 –
densales@foxxequipment.com