Background information

My new cannabis grow setup is an expensive dream

7.12.2023

Translation: Veronica Bielawski

Growing hemp has been my favourite hobby since before even consuming cannabis. That’s why I recently shelled out a small fortune for a modern growing setup. And paid over 1,2000 francs for the lamp alone.

Welcome to my broom closet! This is were I grow dope cannabis buds – whenever I succeed, that is. Currently, I’m having a wonderful run. My four female plants are in their fourth week of flowering. I expect to be able to harvest them in six weeks. They’ve almost entirely taken over my new tent. The setup inside the tent is also new. My greatest pride and joy? The LED lamp.

But what goes on behind the tent is also interesting. The second most expensive purchase of my new breeding setup is stationed there – a large tube fan and an activated charcoal filter that also seems huge at first glance. It’s the reason the whole place doesn’t smell of hemp (which is, incidentally, the best smell in the world).

My new tent measures 120 × 120 × 220 centimetres. The new LED lamp takes up almost all the space. And my plants are about to do the same.
Source: Martin Jud

The plants you see here are the second ones I’ve grown with the new LED lamp. When I launched my first attempt at the beginning of the year, I didn’t do everything right. But I’ve learned from my mistakes. I now know how much light my hemp plants need at what stage – and how close I can place the Lumatek Zeus 600W Pro 2.9 to the top of the plant. More on that in a future article. Here’s an overview of what my new grow box contains and how much it cost.

Interested in my old setup? You’ll find it here:

Background information
Cannabis grow setup – Marty’s grow report, chapter 1
by Martin Jud

Why the new grow box?

Originally, I just wanted to give my old indoor system an LED upgrade. I’d been using a sodium-vapour lamp so far – one of those incredibly bright lights also used for stadium pitch lighting.

Never look directly at the sun. Nor at the sodium-vapour lamp from my old tent (pictured here). Or at my new LED lamp, which is brighter still.
Source: Martin Jud

But sodium-vapour lamps have several disadvantages:

Sodium-vapour lamps get damn hot; LEDs much less so. In my old setup, I counteracted the heat buildup using a cool tube, that is, a lamp holder with active cooling. It’s always worked well, but I was never entirely comfortable with having a small sun in my broom closet.
The high heat production isn’t energy efficient.
Sodium-vapour lamps are difficult to dim and don’t always provide the entire light spectrum that a plant needs in its various growth phases. You need an alternative light source for sprouts as well as during the vegetation phase, unless you use a special sodium-vapour lamp with a higher blue light component. If you hang it up higher, you can use it in the early phases of growth. However, this is even worse in terms of energy efficiency.
Homogeneous illumination of the entire tent area is hard to achieve using a sodium-vapour lamp, even with reflectors. You get less light at the edge of the tent and in the corners than in the middle.

Long story short: everything speaks in favour of LED lighting. But why do I need a new tent, let alone a completely new setup? Well, after intensive research, I set my heart on the one LED lamp that was too big for the old tent (LED lamp: 109 × 118 × 5 centimetres vs. old tent: 90 × 90 × 220 centimetres). That’s why I opted for a new tent that measures 120 × 120 × 220 centimetres.

At the back left of the new tent, a pre-filter stands on an upside-down storage box. A 160 mm ventilation hose leads out from the filter. Outside is a tube fan and an activated charcoal filter. This leaves more room inside the tent.
Source: Martin Jud

The larger tent not only allows me to use the LED of my dreams, but also increases the grow area from 0.81 to 1.44 square metres. While this is nice, I’m actually more interested in additional vertical space. At 220 centimetres, the new tent is just as tall as the old one. So, I decide to banish things that have been hanging in the tent – a tube fan and an activated charcoal filter – to the outside, behind the tent, instead. This, in turn, had me green for further upgrades. Placed outside the tent, the size of the fan and filter is no longer important.

And so, the slippery slope led me to replace my previous cannabis cultivation setup with a completely new, larger and quieter one.

What’s in my new growing setup and how much it all costs

The following table lists all the products in my new setup along with their price and links to those purchased from Galaxus. For an overview of the products purchased from Galaxus, click here.

For technical reasons the links in the table only work if you open them in a new tab or window. In Windows, you can hold down Ctrl and left-click to do so, or right-click the link and select «Open in link in new tab».

If you’re thinking about starting your own indoor garden, do bear in mind that there are still a few cost generators missing from the table, such as electricity, soil, water and seeds. Then there’s fertiliser, a watering can, scissors, a drying tray, a pocket microscope, a pH pen and anything else you might need. Just getting the gear for my old sodium-vapour lamp setup cost me around 650 francs without these additional costs. That’s almost 2,000 francs less than my new setup. And that’s probably roughly the minimum you’ll need to spend on this hobby at present, too, before even buying soil and the like.

But I say it’s worth it – especially if you have a high need for weed. Do it right and you’ll get a few hundred grammes per square metre of tent with just one growth cycle. Trustworthy forums claim you should get at least as many grammes of dried flower per square metre as the wattage of your sodium-vapour lamp.

Got a need for weed? Home-growing is the cheapest method. Pictured is 462 grammes of cannabis.
Source: Martin Jud

And yes, if you grow high-yielding varieties, this really does hold up. Even with a grow area of just 90 × 90 centimetres, I usually got over 400 grammes with my old 400-watt sodium-vapour lamp. Actually, 400 watts is quite good for a small room like that, as the lamp produces a lot of heat. Heat or not, you shouldn’t up the wattage much beyond this, as plants get «sunburned» from too much light. For example, if you were to use a 1,000-watt sodium vapour lamp in the flowering phase, most hemp varieties would develop yellow and brown spots on their leaves.

You can easily cover your annual cannabis needs, provided they’re not excessive, with a single grow – even if you opt for a lower-yielding variety. I, too, typically do only one grow per year. A small tent is enough, too. Anyone who gets an even bigger one probably... has a big family.

My four female cannabis plants (predominantly indica) are 63 days old. It’s the fourth of ten flowering weeks (12/12 hour lighting schedule). The largest plant measures 75 centimetres – I suspect it’ll grow to be around 110 centimetres tall.
Source: Martin Jud

A little ahead of time, I use the new LED lamp dimmed to 75 per cent at 450 watts during the flowering phase. I crank it down because it’s such a small space, it’d be too strong at 100 per cent for most cannabis strains without additional CO₂ fumigation. And even with varieties that could actually tolerate this much power, you only turn it up to max power in the final few weeks before the harvest. According to online forums, an LED lamp’s 600 watts at 100 per cent brightness produces roughly the same amount of light as a 1,000-watt sodium-vapour lamp. Can I therefore expect at least 1,080 grammes (750 W × 1.44 m²) of weed from my 1.44 square-metre tent? Probably not; the increase in dried flower mass isn’t proportional to the increase in light intensity.

Assuming I get a more realistic 600 grammes, I’ll not only be one happy camper; I will also have amortised my entire purchase and additional costs. Beautifully fragrant CBD flowers in our shop (which are legal because they contain less than one per cent THC) can quickly run you six francs or more per gramme. In other words, 600 grammes would cost you 3,600 francs. Harvesting your own buds seems worth it, especially as cannabis can be stored airtight in the dark for a long time.

Outlook post-420

Speaking of the dark; the sun sets at 4:36 p.m., and it’s almost 4:20 p.m. In my growing tent, however, the sun only sets at 7:30 p.m. Either way, I’ll end here and save the rest of my story for another day in the near future. I’ll be talking about why I bought the sinfully expensive Zeus LED lamp and what I do to grow my flowers successfully.

And in Part 3, I’ll go into detail about how I protect my home and neighbours from the strong smell of cannabis. One of them had actually come ringing during a previous harvest, complaining that his entire apartment smelled strongly of weed. We then discovered that there was a crack in one of the beams of our half-timbered house between his room and my broom closet through which the smell reached him. Before this, I had also wondered time and again why my place seemingly always smelled of onion soup... In any case, we had the hole promptly patched up.

As soon as the two articles are live, I’ll link them here. If you want to be notified when they’re published, hit «Follow».

Header image: Martin Jud

123 people like this article

Martin Jud

Senior Editor

martin.jud@digitecgalaxus.ch

I find my muse in everything. When I don’t, I draw inspiration from daydreaming. After all, if you dream, you don’t sleep through life.

Garden

Follow topics and stay updated on your areas of interest

Lighting

Follow topics and stay updated on your areas of interest

Plants

Follow topics and stay updated on your areas of interest

Background information

Interesting facts about products, behind-the-scenes looks at manufacturers and deep-dives on interesting people.

Show all

These articles might also interest you

Background information
Why I splurged on a sinfully expensive LED plant lamp
by Martin Jud
Background information
How I stopped the neighbours from smelling my weed and how much that cost
by Martin Jud
Background information
Cannabis grow setup – Marty’s grow report, chapter 1
by Martin Jud