How to Set Up an Indoor Grow Room for Cannabis: Complete Guide

Whether you’re a brand new cannabis grower or a master budsman, it’s possible that you have not yet considered setting up a grow room in your own home. Why not? What was once considered a complicated and costly investment has become quite simple thanks to modern technology and our helpful guide!

The most critical step to any successful indoor grow room is planning. A few extra moments spent planning can yield better results and save you money in the long run. Make sure to sketch out the general floor plan of the room you have chosen. Remember that in general, any size room will do, provided it can be heated and cooled. Things may be easiest if you have an exterior wall or door available for venting purposes. Sketch out how and where you plan to hang your lights and place your pots or beds. We suggest hanging lights from adjustable chains so that you can ensure they always remain an optimum distance from your plant.

There are plenty of factors to consider when first setting up or building your grow room. Some of these factors may be ones that you have never thought about before.

The aspects of grow rooms that are of the greatest importance will be covered here, so read on to understand what exactly you need to do and why you need to do them. This article will teach you how to build your own indoor marijuana grow room.

The Grow Room

Before you take any other steps towards growing and cultivating your own marijuana, make sure you have a plan for what you’re doing. You want to have the space you need, as well as all the requirements essential for indoor plant growth— lights, ventilation, nutrients, water, etc. Keep in mind that installing your own grow room is a large investment. That includes labor! You’ll definitely want to follow the “measure twice, cut once” policy.

The size of your grow room depends heavily on how much marijuana you want and how much space you have available. It also depends on the type of cannabis you want to cultivate. If you’re growing for medical purposes, the amount you grow will generally be up to you. The sensitivity and type of illness of the person intending to use it determine the volume that should be grown. You don’t need to be an expert on medicine dosing to calculate the required amount of cannabis for your condition. Everyone can decide by themselves, how much weed they need.

If you don’t want to build a grow room, check these plug & play options

A lot of medical patients average use comes out to between 1 or 2 grams per day. This means for personal use, you’ll need to be pulling in about 1 or 2 ounces per month. In theory, you could be harvesting every 2 months because there are around 60 days of a flowering period. If you want 2 ounces a month, you have to harvest twice the amount, in this case, 4 ounces of cannabis.

The location of your grow room matters for a number of reasons. First of all, you want to have some discretion and privacy for your growing operation. You’ll also want to be sure it’s a location you have control over. There’s no sense trying to grow indoors if it doesn’t allow you to control the environment. Below we’ll list some helpful tips related to location and planning, before jumping into a couple of hypothetical options.

Choose a sensible area for your garden – someplace out of sight. A cellar’s perfect because it ’s underground. The earth is naturally thermally stable, and it takes a lot more time to cool down or heat up then above ground. A cellar will be reasonably cool in the summer and keep out the frost in the winter.

If you are in an apartment, you want to keep the location of your Cannabis garden discreet. Therefore, it’s wise not to choose a spot next to the entrance but instead, somewhere at the back. Use an unused room, a special wall unit or even a cupboard as your growing location. Avoid rooms with large south-facing windows, especially on upper floors, because you can run into issues with heat control. Believe it or not, the sun puts out a lot of heat. Buying a marijuana grow tent is a good choice.

Most importantly, the grow room should be fit for the variety of cannabis that you are planning on growing.

Controlling Your Room’s Climate

Now is also a good time to decide how you plan to handle ventilation and humidity control. In a small home setup, you can opt for a simple solution: install an opening near the floor on one side of the room, with a bent PVC pipe leading outside to allow in the fresh air. The bend in the pipe will prevent light from entering but will make sure that you and your plants have a fresh supply of oxygen at all times. In order to filter the heavily scented air that will be leaving the room, attach a carbon-filtration system to an external vent leading outside, closer to the ceiling (because of warm air rises). An alternative to this – which can work if your room does not have an exterior wall – is to modify a door to serve the same purpose.

Fans should also be placed around the grow room to assist with humidity control. Humidifiers and other equipment that automatically monitor the temperature, humidity levels, and other conditions in your grow room are available for purchase inline duct fan if you decide that you would like to make that investment – some even allow for you to control them from your mobile device! But know that these tools are not required in order to get started, or to grow cannabis at home, successfully.

Pick Your Grow Lights

The next step is to determine which type of grow lights you want to use. Light plays a huge role in the quality of our cannabis plants, so it’s important to choose the best lights that complement your grow setup. There are dozens of types of grow lights on the market, but the most common when it comes to growing cannabis are LED lights, HID lights, and fluorescent lights.

HID grow lights

HID (high-intensity discharge) lights are commonly used because they provide a great balance of energy efficiency, light output, and value for the cost. Some HID brands cost more than standard fluorescent, but they also produce more light per unit of electricity. However, they are not as energy efficient as LED lights.

LED grow lights

LED lights are some of the most widely used and talked about grow lights, mostly because they have been around for much longer. LEDs are pretty efficient and also tend to be some of the easiest lights to set up and use for new growers. One of the main drawbacks of LEDs is that they can get costly when you start dealing with large plant quantities. Overall, LED’s tend to last longer, generate less heat, and have better designs that accommodate more types of grow spaces. You can also easily find LED grow lights online and in stores.

Fluorescent grow lights

Fluorescent lights are popular among small scale growers because they are inexpensive to set up and don’t require cooling systems because they don’t generate as much heat as the other types of lights. The main downside is that they are not very energy efficient. They produce significantly less light per watt compared to LEDs and HIDs.

A few other types of lights you might come across are HPS (high-pressure sodium) lights, and incandescent lights, which both are a bit more challenging to manage for first-time growers.

If you don’t have the time to monitor your plants vigilantly and adjust the lights manually, we recommend investing in a grow light timer. Grow light timers will help you make sure that your plants are always receiving the right amount of light in the grow room, even when you’re not paying close attention.

Set up a Ventilation System

With all of the lights generating heat in your grow room, your plants will be producing a lot of Co2. You need to create a proper ventilation system to make sure that the room stays cool enough to dissipate moisture and heat that could damage your plants. Higher humidity levels can also attract pests and other harmful pathogens. Luckily, you can quickly remedy too much heat with a ventilation system, a Co2 regulator, and a proper humidifier. The easiest and most cost-effective way to ventilate your grow room is with an inline fan.

A good rule to follow is that your fan should have the capacity to move the area’s entire volume of air every ten or so minutes. So, an exhaust fan that is installed in a 200 cubic foot grow space should be capable of moving 20 cubic feet per minute. The larger your space and the more grow lights you have, the more fans and ventilation you’ll need to protect your plants. If you’re concerned about the level of c02 in your grow room, then you can also choose to set up a carbon filter to monitor levels and filter out extra carbon dioxide.

If your space is small enough, you may be able to get away with a single fan, and just leave the door open for a few hours per day. Always remember to place your fan close to the space intake to promote better air circulation throughout your grow space.

Sometimes, if you live in a colder climate, you may face the problem of your grow room getting too cold. If the lights in your grow room aren’t enough to keep the room heated, then you should also incorporate a heater into your grow room.

Installing The Growing System

The final step in the process is to move the growing system (soil containers, hydroponics, etc.) into the area with the plants and set them up in the room as required.

At this point, you might need to re-adjust your light’s distance to the plants, move plants around and adjust the flow of the fans circulating in your room…getting everything in its place and set right.

After you have everything in place inside of your grow, you will want to keep a watchful eye out for any problems that may occur such as high/low humidity levels, high/low temperatures, heat stress, etc.

If a problem occurs you will need to adjust different aspects of your grow room from more/less ventilation, more/less circulation, more/fewer lights, etc. and making any changes to balance the growing environment to ensure your plants alive and well.

Complete marijuana grow tent kits come with nutrients and air ventilation systems led grow kits, grow lights and extras. The complete grow kits make growing simple- just plug in, set up, and grow.

Final Thoughts

Growing marijuana is a long game. Even after reading a beginner’s guide like this one, it might take some trial and error until you learn the best ways to manage your plants in the space that you have. Remember that growing marijuana indoors is a huge commitment. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to grow indica or sativa, your plants need nurturing and care, as do any other type of plant. If you put in the effort to learn as much as possible about the growing process, your plants will reflect your efforts. And of course, this process should be fun! Try not to take it very seriously, and enjoy the journey to reap the benefits of a bountiful harvest. Happy growing!