Hi guys. I got my brand new laptop, at last. I am planning on installing Truecrypt on it to protect all my sensitive data. I suggest all growers do the same.
Anyway, I harvested my plants (what was left of them after the pump failed!). Instead of spending absolutely ages trimming all the buds, I selected about a jar's worth of the best looking buds to dry and froze all the rest, so I can make bubble hash out of them (it'll be a decent amount of hash with the amount of bud/trim I have).
I put the buds that are drying now in my tent on a drying rack, since I don't mind them being a little flat in places where they sit and will turn them regularly to minimise this as much as I can. The relative humidity is being kept at about 50% with a dehumidifier and at 16-18C with a TC-10 thermostat that is controlling a fan heater set at 1kW.
If you don't control your temperatures in your tent/greenhouse accurately, you can waste a fortune on heating. They say that if you turn your central heating down by 1C you can save a whopping 10% of energy, so this is why accurate control is important. This is why the TC-10 thermostat I got is so useful, as it is accurate to one tenth of a degree and you can input the heating and cooling hysteresis to whatever you want. For what it is, the
*snip* it cost is really good value for money. I think they ship worldwide, so you can get it wherever you are in the world. I bought it from
Forttex. It also controls a cooling device so it can turn on a fan, air conditioning or an evaporative cooler when the temperature increases beyond a certain point. It's probably the best buy I've made since I started growing. I find a lot of products geared towards growers have over inflated prices, so it's easy to spend a lot of money when you can get alternatives aimed at brewers or people keeping aquariums, such as this.
When I can afford it, I plan to buy the Forttex
digital humidity stat, which can operate a humidifer and dehumidifier when the RH gets too low or high respectively. Instead of a dehumidifier, I'll connect it to the fan heater to achieve vapor pressure deficit (when the air is heated the relative humidity goes down since it can hold more moisture without becoming saturated). I will use these in my greenhouse when it's set up and when the temp goes up, the autovents will open, which also helps reduce the heating even further.
My greenhouse will have four autovents on the roof and a couple of louvre vents on the gable end near the floor, so the air will flow from the bottom of the greenhouse to the roof. I've decided to go down this route rather than have a powered extraction and intake with a carbon filter. To control odor I will use an ozone generator. I haven't decided to get one of the more expensive ones or not. I'm worried if I get one of the cheaper models, controlling the dosing will be more difficult. Having more ozone than I need can slow photosynthesis to a crawl and make entering the greenhouse dangerous unless it's turned off first. The model I'm looking at at the moment is
*snip*, so I can afford it I guess.
Here's a couple of photos of the TC-10 in action inside my tent with the bud on the drying rack.