Was going through some old pictures and came across something I did back in the day that was at the same time weird yet useful as hell. Basically my first “grow tent” was a pretty massive piece of shit, got the job done but barely and horribly. So Version 2.0 to the rescue. Note I had never actually seen a proper grow tent before, this was long before my first Apollo. The design goals for this were based on:
- Need something with flat white surfaces inside
- Needed good airflow
- I was into big-time experimenting back then so a key design goal was for this grow tent to be flexible enough to handle anything I threw at it.
- Finally it had to be easy to build, rugged enough to last and be composed of nothing I could not get at a local hardware store.
The result: I built a 4x8x6 foot grow “tent” out of huge sheets of white pegboard tie-wrapped to a 3/4 inch PVC tube frame. Each panel of this type was 4 feet wide and 6 feet tall. I made one custom panel that was 4x8; this became the floor. As for the rest of the panels, one was the perfect size for the ends and two of them together became a nice 6 foot tall, 8 foot long side-panel. I picked this supply of white pegboard sheets, 100ft of PVC pipe with elbows, Ts and 4-way connectors and a buttload of heavy-duty zip ties. I constructed the frames and zip tied the pegboard to all the frames in the living room and then simply assembled my grow room in my spare “office”. Extra waterproofing and stabling was done to the floor and I had the grow tent from hell that I could hang anything from any position I needed to so it could support all of my experiments…I had the whole thing built and going in less than a day by myself and eventually grew many crops in that room, only taking it down when I bought my second Apollo tent and needed the room…
anyhow crazy as it sounds, this turned out to be a damned durable and useful way to construct a grow environment…nice part of how all the panels were joined is that I could open any one of them up like a door into the tent from any side…