The Race to the Bottom

A British grower offers advice on equipment quality, sourcing and pricing

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

Nowadays, things have changed significantly. While it is not exactly true to say that growing has become mainstream - the cops might have something to say about that! - it has certainly become far more widespread. There are several hundred grow shops in the United Kingdom and, unless you live in the highlands of Scotland, you are never really more than ten or fifteen minutes' drive from picking up your grow gear. In some regions, it is more like two minutes' drive; there are over sixty 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 United States, Canada and Australia, plus a huge volume of products that are designed and manufactured right here in the United Kingdom.

For us, the growers, this seems like good news and, for the most part, it is. More competition between manufacturers and shops means more product innovation, better quality products being made available and, most importantly, lower prices.

Walk into any decent grow shop and you will see that this is all true. There is 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 am not saying that I'm adverse to value products. In fact, there was a stage in life that my very existence depended upon the availability of cheap bread and beans from a certain large supermarket chain! However, those value products were fit for purpose. The ones we are 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 will get to that shortly, but because the parts are mismatched and not fit for purpose. For example, a 2.4 m by 1.2 m tent package with two 600-watt light kits is offered with just a 4-inch filter and a TT fan as an outtake. It may be cheap as hell, but with such an underpowered extraction kit it will cause huge problems for the inexperienced grower that will most likely buy it, after they have been seduced by that cheap price.

These cheap packages also create a problem for the grow shops, who are now faced with an onslaught of newbie growers complaining that they can get everything in the shop cheaper online, not realizing that the products are not of the same quality. So, the shops have had no choice but to get the cheap gear in... if you can't beat them, join them, right?

I have 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 have reluctantly taken stock of the budget items.

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

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

Let's have 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. Nowadays, it seems that there is 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 (preferably white) to the walls, floor and ceiling. The grow tent follows this concept, but is easier and faster to put together, is light-proof and waterproof, and can be easily dismantled and hidden away between grows.

Putting some of the more advanced features of the top end tents aside, if you are 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.

Minimum Requirements of a Grow Tent

A good grow tent should:

• 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 setup. You should be able to easily dismantle it after a crop, store it away and then set it back up when you are ready to do another grow. This means that it will need to have robust zippers that will last a few grows and reinforced corner material that will not rip when you are setting up or taking down the tent.

• Be lightproof - which is important for two reasons. A tent that leaks light into a room could attract unwanted attention from nosy neighbors 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 twelve 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 your girls go hermaphrodite.

• Be waterproof - good quality grow tents will have a waterproof liner to put into the base of the tent. This is not essential if your tent is in a basement or garage, but it is very handy if the tent is in an upstairs room or attic. Even if you are just hand-feeding your plants, there is always the odd occasion that you spill water or overfeed slightly and it is good to have that waterproof base for added security.

• 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 are considering a larger tent, where two, three or four 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 would 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 are not necessarily a bad thing. Carbon, whether it is pelletized 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 odor. 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 are 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 quality control is not possible when buying online. So, it is best to avoid unbranded products altogether or ensure that you are 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 nine to twelve months. For peace of mind, replace the filters three months before the recommended life expectancy. Smell is the easiest way to get caught and the plants need clean air.

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; your goal is to replace all of the air in the room about once per minute. If you are buying a larger fan and filter setup, 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.

Last thing, but by no means least, is the grow light. Undoubtedly the most important component of your grow room, your plants simply will not grow without it! It seems bizarre that some growers want to scrimp and save on such an essential piece of hardware. A 600-watt light kit with a magnetic ballast is possibly the one item that shops compete over the most and, predictably, there are some seriously crappy products out there.

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

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

A good quality 600-watt HID grow lamp, whether it be metal halide (MH), high-pressure sodium (HPS) or dual-spectrum, is designed to run at 600 watts. The chemical elements in the bulb have been specifically included to provide the optimum amount of usable light when powered at 600 watts. If that bulb receives ten percent less power than it requires, it does not just mean that it emits ten percent less light. It could actually mean that it is 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 will not fall within the manufacturers intended spectral distribution. A larger portion of the light will not be usable for the plant and this will seriously affect your 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 do not 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!