Growing weed indoors needn’t be difficult. All you need is the right equipment.
To set up an indoor garden, you will need equipment to help create a stable environment that mimics the necessary periods of light and darkness to grow plants through the flowering stage. This includes horticultural lighting, fans to recreate a gentle breeze, dehumidifiers to maintain the proper humidity, HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning), and all the basic supplies that a plant needs to survive, from water to grow media to nutrients.
Planning, designing, and implementing an indoor garden can seem daunting, but having a firm understanding of the basics goes a long way in helping a new indoor grower get started on the path to a healthy and bountiful harvest.
Benefits of growing weed indoors
High-quality weed: Although it’s more resource-intensive than growing outdoors, you can control every aspect of your environment and what you put in your plant, so growing indoors will allow you to dial in your setup to grow some primo weed.
Adaptability: Live in an apartment or a small house? You can grow weed practically anywhere, even folks who don’t have a backyard or a lot of extra space.
Multiple harvests: Unlike outdoor growing, you aren’t tied to the sun and the seasons. You can let your plants get as big as you want, flip them into flower, harvest, and then start another batch right away. You can grow whenever you want, even straight through winter.
Privacy and security: Even in legal states, you may want to conceal your crop from judgmental neighbors and definitely from potential thieves. Growing indoors allows you to grow discreetly behind a locked door.
An Complete Overview For You
Setting Up Your Grow: Choosing a Space
Before you purchase any equipment, it is important to understand the possible limitations of an indoor garden. Consider the height of the ceiling, how much insulation your space offers, and your ease of access to electricity and water. Some local jurisdictions may also ask that indoor gardens mitigate odors during the flowering phase.
If you’re a beginner, prefabricated grow tents are a great option, as they allow for minimal wear and tear on your property. Instead of renovating or building a new room, marijuana grow tents can be set up and taken down in a matter of minutes while also providing a clean, reflective, and enclosed environment for your plants to grow. As a general rule, your ceiling height should be at least a height of 8 feet, or about 2.4 meters; this is the typical height of a tent. Check your prospective tent’s measurements before committing to the purchase.
Grow tents also make it easier for home growers to maintain two separate environments: one for vegetative growth, and the other for flowering. This allows you to keep a perpetual harvest going by propagating and growing young plants in one tent and flowering another set of plants in the other tent. Maintaining a balanced rotation like this can result in maximized harvests year over year. If you are a beginner, a marijuana grow tent kit will help you more.
Electrical Power
Whether you are growing two or 30 plants in your house, grow equipment requires a significant amount of electricity, primarily from your lighting and air conditioning units. Make sure that all electrical equipment is installed by a trained professional to reduce the likelihood of an electrical fire. You don’t need to be an electrician to design an indoor grow, but having a basic understanding of watts, volts, and amps is essential. The equation below can be used to determine whether your property has the minimum amount of power for an indoor garden:
Amps = Watts/Volts
Always make a list of the power requirements for each piece of equipment and make sure your electrical panels can support the electrical load before you make any big equipment purchases.
Water
Water quality is another key aspect of indoor gardening. It’s important to determine water acidity and general mineral content prior to planting. Checking the pH, the acidity or alkalinity of the water, is easy to do with a handheld water quality meter. The same device can be used to check the total mineral or chemical content of your water as well. Knowing these things will help you determine the correct amount of nutrients to feed your plants or if fresh water needs to be introduced.
Odor Control
Most local jurisdictions require you mitigate the odor from your plants to avoid disturbing your neighbors. Activated charcoal filters absorb plant odor in your grow area. Adding a charcoal filter to your HVAC system or placing one within your grow space is a great way to drastically reduce the odor. The size of the filter is largely dependent on the size of your grow. Make sure filters are sized and installed correctly. Keep track of the life of the filter, as their effectiveness diminishes over time.
Security
Even when growing cannabis legally, it’s a good idea to minimize your public visibility as a grower and take some mild to moderate precautions. Simple steps, such as not geotagging your location when you post grow pictures or hiding the glare from your grow lights when you run them at night, can go a long way in keeping your prized indoor garden secure.
Creating the Ideal Environment: Lighting
Choosing the right Cannabis Grow Lights for your indoor grow can mean the difference between success and failure. Correct lighting is crucial, as it drives photosynthesis. In other words, your plants will not grow properly without proper lighting. The duration of your lighting controls the photoperiod, or the times in which a grow is exposed to light. During the vegetative growth phase, plants need a minimum of 16 hours of light. The most common schedule during this phase is 18 hours of light and six hours of darkness. To initiate flowering, plants need a shorter day, with 12 hours of light and 12 hours of darkness.
Correct lighting is crucial, as it drives photosynthesis. In other words, your plants will not grow properly without proper lighting.
The intensity of light and its placement within your grow space are important aspects to consider when choosing what kind of light to grow with. Low light levels will slow photosynthesis, delay growth, and result in poor yields. If your light is too far away the plant will not receive enough of it and will grow spindly. If your light is too close it can damage the plant and ruin your colas.
Light-emitting diode (LED) lights are another form of high-intensity lighting that have been growing in popularity as their technology has advanced. LED lights produce a spectrum suited for all phases of plant life. They typically cost more than other grow lights, but they last much longer, are more energy efficient, and give off a lot less heat than HID lighting.
Creating the Ideal Environment
When it comes to cultivating cannabis indoors, you need to be sure to provide your plant with the optimal temperature, humidity, air circulation, CO2, and nutrients.
Temperature and Humidity
Maintaining the ideal temperature and humidity at all times is crucial to the health of your plants. Some plant varieties prefer hot and humid climates, while others like it cool and dry. Keeping them alive and healthy means controlling the temperature and humidity when the lights are on or off.
Air conditioning (AC) and humidification systems are used to control the temperature and relative humidity of an indoor grow room. The size of each unit is based on the amount of heat the lights and other equipment produce in relation to the size of the space. In an open grow room, intake and exhaust fans are used to constantly exchange the air within the room to maintain a consistent temperature. In sealed rooms, mini-split AC systems are used because they circulate the air in the room without bringing in fresh air.
AC systems maintain temperature and also dehumidify rooms. Fluctuations in humidity can affect plant health and should be controlled using a dehumidifier or humidifier, depending on conditions.
Advanced growers use digital environmental controls to monitor all equipment responsible for maintaining a stable environment (i.e., fans, AC, dehumidifiers, sensors, thermostats, etc.). These environmental controls can be worth the hefty price tag for the peace of mind they provide.
Nutrients
With lighting, AC, and other environmental controls in place, indoor cannabis plants will require large amounts of fertilizer or nutrients throughout their lifespans. Hydroponic systems lack the base nutrients that occur within soil; that leaves it up to you, the grower, to feed their plants with nutrient concentrations — the exact formula of which depends upon plant variety and phase of cultivation. With hydroponics, salt-based nutrients typically come in the form of a concentrated liquid or dry soluble powder that can be mixed with water.
As a cannabis plant develops, its nutrient needs change. That’s why different nutrient lines are available for different growth phases. Most nutrient lines come with recommended feeding charts. If you’re just starting out, be sure to get to know your nutrients and their ratios.
Carbon Dioxide Supplementation
Controlling the amount of available carbon dioxide (CO2) in your garden is another aspect of growing marijuana at home. During photosynthesis, CO2 converts into sugar, which the plant uses as energy for growing its vegetation and, ultimately, its seeds or flowers. Adding CO2 to your indoor garden can drastically improve your yields. While the atmosphere naturally has an average CO2 concentration of around 400 parts per million (PPM), most indoor growers try to maintain a range of 800 to 2,000 PPM, depending on the plants’ growth stage. Levels above 2,000 PPM can damage plants, and anything above 3,000 PPM can be dangerous to humans.
The amount of CO2 you supplement your garden with depends on how much light your plants are receiving, the growth phase they are in, and their overall size. CO2 should only be used during the “daylight” period, as plants are unable to utilize CO2 at night or in the dark. Sealed grow rooms are ideal when supplementing CO2, as open rooms tend to exhaust the CO2 more quickly than the plants can use it.
CO2 can be supplemented into an indoor garden using compressed gas tanks or generators. Using compressed CO2 tanks is the most common method because they’re readily available, easy to set up, and do not add any extra heat to your room the way a CO2 generator does.
Air Circulation
Air movement is the least expensive component of creating an ideal environment for your plants. Even a gentle breeze can help keep pests and microbes from landing on your plants, move oxygen and carbon dioxide around the leaves, and create a uniform environment throughout your room. One of the easiest ways to maintain sufficient air circulation is by hanging oscillating fans on the walls or ceiling/grow tent corners and placing a small box fan on the floor. A ventilation kit is best recommend. The goal with air circulation should be to mimic a light breeze and avoid powerful gusts that may harm your plants.
Final thoughts
As you gain experience and knowledge, you will alter your grow room and equipment to better fit your particular environment, growing techniques, and the specific strains you grow, but this article will give you a solid foundation of knowledge to get started on the right foot.
And remember, growing marijuana is a labor of love, so spend a lot of time with your plants and have fun!