The Race To The Bottom

Not so long ago, growing indoors was an exclusive club, like a secretive society. There was just a handful of grow shops in the UK.

Not so long ago, growing indoors was an exclusive club, like a secretive society. There was just a handful of grow shops in the UK. Growers travelled for hours to pick up their grow equipment and receive expert advice from the bloke behind the counter. Equipment was imported from Holland and the prices reflected this.

Nowadays, things have changed significantly. While it’s not exactly true to say that growing has become mainstream – plod might have something to say about that! – it has certainly become far more widespread. There are several hundred grow shops in the UK and, unless you live in the highlands of Scotland, you’re never really more than 10-15 minutes’ drive from picking up your grow gear. In some regions, it’s more like 2 minutes’ drive; there are over 60 shops in Birmingham and the surrounding area alone!

As with any business market that grows in popularity (and profitability) the number of products available to the consumer has increased. We still import products from Holland, but they now share shelf space with grow gear from the US, Canada and Australia, plus a huge volume of products that are designed and manufactured right here in the UK.

Walk into any decent grow shop and you’ll see that this is all true. There’s a huge amount of product choice out there and a lot of it is of a high quality, which – in theory – will help you pull a bigger yield.

But, as the industry gets bigger and competition becomes fiercer and fiercer, something else is happening. Rather than striving to produce better products and compete through innovation, some manufacturers are participating in a race to the bottom of the price / quality spectrum.

Unfortunately, the only loser in this race is us… the growers.

Now, I’m not saying that I’m adverse to value products. In fact, there was a stage in life that my very existence depended on the availability of value bread and beans from a certain large supermarket chain! But, those value products were fit for purpose. The ones we’re discussing in this article are not.

A quick browse online will pull up all the examples you need. Some of the complete tent packages available on eBay are just ridiculously cheap. Not necessarily because the components themselves are crap – although we’ll get to that shortly – but because the parts are mismatched and not fit for purpose. For example, a 2.4m x 1.2m tent package with two 600w light kits is offered with just a 4” filter and a TT fan as an outtake. It may be cheap as chips, but with such an underpowered extraction kit it will cause huge problems for the inexperienced grower that’ll most likely buy it, after they’ve been seduced by that cheap price.

I’ve spoken to several shop owners who, in the past, refused to stock cheap light kits on the basis that they were of dubious quality and output. However, after a few months of seeing customers turn on their heels and walk out of the shop, they’ve reluctantly taken stock of the budget items.

So, what products are we talking about specifically? It’s the hardware that compromises the very foundations of growing indoors; tents, lights, fans and filters. The key components that regulate the environment that your plants grow in and, as any good grower will tell you, environment is everything.

If you’re new to indoor growing and have seen cheap equipment advertised online, or even in a grow shop, there’s no need to be put off completely, just educate yourself and ask a few well-placed questions to the seller and you’ll find out if the products are of a good enough quality to spend your hard earned cash on.

Let’s start with having a look at one of the products that has seen some serious reductions in price over the years; grow tents. Back in the day, there was one brand of grow tent available. Now it seems there’s a new brand being released every month and, usually, they are at the cheaper end of the market.

Put simply, a grow tent is a portable room in which a light and fan / filter unit can be hung above the plants. Historically, many growers created their own ‘room within a room’ by putting together a simple wooden frame and fixing reflective sheeting (either white or silver) to the walls, floor and ceiling. The grow tent follows this concept, but is easier and quicker to put together, is light proof and waterproof, and can be easily dismantled and hidden away in-between grows.

Putting some of the more advanced features of the top end tents aside, if you’re going to go for a grow tent rather than knocking together a cheap and simple frame with sheeting, it needs to be able to meet the following basic criteria;

Be easy to dismantle and reassemble between grows – this is one of the main points of having a grow tent rather than a permanent grow room set up. You should be able to easily dismantle it after a crop, store it away and then set it back up when you’re ready to do another grow. This means it’ll need to have robust zips that will last a few goes and reinforced corner material that won’t rip when you’re setting up or taking the tent down.

Be lightproof – important for two reasons; a tent that leaks light into a room could attract unwanted attention from nosey neighbours or house guests, which could lead to your grow being rumbled. Also, if the tent material allows light into the growing environment it will adversely affect the way that your plants grow. Plants that are not given 12 hours of complete darkness during the flowering stage can start to re-veg. At the very least the flowering stage could be prolonged, which will cost you time and money. Worst case scenario, it can make you girls go hermaphrodite.

Be strong enough to hang your equipment from – even a budget tent should be strong enough to hang a single fan, filter and euro reflector for the duration of a full grow without bending or snapping. If you’re considering a larger tent, where 2, 3 or 4 lights will be required then you really need to make sure that the corner pieces and tent poles are going to be strong enough to handle the weight of the lights, plus a larger fan and filter. There’d be nothing worse than arriving to check on your grow, only to find that your tent had collapsed under the weight of the equipment!

Next up is the fan and filter combo. To be perfectly honest, cheap carbon filters aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Carbon, whether it’s pelletised or granular, is so effective at scrubbing the air that even the cheaper filters on the market will still do the job provided that the carbon has been tightly packed. This ensures that the grow room air extracted through the filter has to pass through the carbon bed and will be scrubbed of odour. Air will pass through the path of least resistance, for example, any gaps in the carbon or loose carbon. This will affect the performance of the filter and, worst case scenario, will render the filter useless. This will obviously cause you problems.

There is an easy test for this, if you’re buying the filter in a shop; pick it up and shake it. There should be no movement of carbon whatsoever. If there is, avoid that filter. Unfortunately, this isn’t possible when buying online. So, it’s best to avoid unbranded products altogether or ensure that you’re buying from a reputable online retailer. 

One important question to ask the retailer, whether in the shop or online, is the recommended lifespan of the filter. Some of the budget filters on the market have a life expectancy of just 9-12 months. For peace of mind; replace the filters 3 months before the recommended life expectancy.

There are plenty of cheap inline fans available, with varying degrees of quality. The key is to match the fan and filter size to your grow space; you’ll want to be replacing the air in the room about once a minute. If you’re buying a larger fan and filter set up, make sure that the fan has enough torque to pull the correct volume of air through the filter. One trick that some of the retailers use to keep the price down is to sell the kit with a low torque fan that has really been designed as an intake fan rather than an outtake.

The most important part of the light kit is the ballast; it’s the big heavy box that provides the correct amount of power to your grow lamp. We could debate how manufacturers save money by cutting corners in the internal workings of their magnetic ballast, but that’s for another article, the most important point is this; a true 600w ballast will pull between 650-660w of power. Around 50w of energy is lost as heat and the remaining 600w are then used to power the lamp.

Some of the cheap magnetic ballasts on the market do not run at anywhere near 650w, some of them run as low as 550w! This is bad for two reasons, the first is that you are basically being ripped off and are not getting what you paid for, the second is that you are under-powering your lamp and this has serious implication for your plants.

A good quality 600w HID grow lamp, whether it be metal halide, high pressure sodium or dual spectrum is designed to run at 600w. The chemical elements in the bulb have been specifically included to provide the optimum amount of usable light when powered at 600w. If that bulb receives 10% less power than it requires, it doesn’t just mean that it emits 10% less light. It could actually mean it’s emitting the wrong light altogether, because when the gasses in the bulb are ignited with a lesser amount of power the light that is generated won’t be within the manufacturers intended spectral distribution. A larger portion of the light will not be usable for the plant and this will seriously affect yield.

If in doubt, get the electricity meter out and check the ballast, you may be surprised at what you find!

Put simply, the old saying “you only get out what you put in” has never been truer! You don’t have to spend a fortune to set up a decent grow, but pay that little bit extra for the basics in your room and your plants will reward you tenfold!

Happy growing!