Gear
Gear I use.
And gear I’m testing, and gear I haven’t bought yet. Each one says which. Most of it will be second-hand.
Start here
Am I baked? Ask the trichomes.
You can’t tell by looking. That frosty stuff is thousands of tiny heads, and what growers watch is their color. Slide the weeks and move the loupe.
- Clear50%
- Cloudy50%
- Amber0%
Getting there.
Turning cloudy, still plenty of clear. This is where I’ve called it early before.
The bud is a drawing and the timeline is a made-up curve, so don’t plan around its weeks. Real plants keep their own schedule. This is the thing I got wrong enough times to draw a picture of.
Magnifiers
Three ways to actually look.
Jeweler’s loupe with a light
30x to 60x
Fits in a pocket and costs about as much as lunch. Hold it right up against the bud and bring your eye to it.
The usual complaint: Shaky, a tiny field of view, and you can’t show anyone what you saw.
Clip-on macro lens for your phone
around 60x to 100x
Clips over the phone camera, so you get a photo you can zoom into, compare with last week and keep in your journal.
The usual complaint: Fussy to focus without steady hands or something to lean on.
Digital microscope on a stand
whatever the box claims, usually less
A little camera on an arm. Hands-free, steady, and the picture goes straight to a screen.
The usual complaint: You bring a snipped sample to it, not it to the plant. And the zoom number on the box is rarely what you get.
This is how the three kinds are generally described. I haven’t tested specific models yet, and I’ll name some once I’ve used them long enough to say something true. There are no affiliate links on this site right now. If that changes it’ll be labeled, and the disclosure says how.
The list
Everything else.
Air
- Shopping for it
Inline duct fan with a controller
Pulls air through the carbon filter. A controller that reacts to temperature and humidity beats a wall timer.
- Shopping for it
Clip-on fans
For moving air under the canopy, which is where mold likes to start.
Light
- Shopping for it
Bar-style LED light, second-hand
Bars spread light evenly. I’m hunting used ones and I’ll measure them before I believe the spec sheet.
Water
- Shopping for it
pH and TDS pens
For checking water and runoff. Calibrated before every session. In theory.
- On the bench
12 V peristaltic pumps
Precise, self-priming and happy to be switched by a relay.
Sensors
- On the bench
Capacitive soil-moisture probes
What the homemade auto-waterer reads. They don’t corrode like the two-prong kind.
- On the bench
Temperature and humidity logger
Logs the room every minute, so I can stop arguing with myself about what the room is doing.
- Have it
Small microcontroller boards
Cheap, well documented and good enough for pumps, relays and logging over Wi-Fi.
Room
- Shopping for it
Scrubbable semi-gloss paint
Walls I can wash. Flat paint gives mold somewhere to hide.
No brands or models named yet. I’ll add them as each thing gets used for real. None of this is smoking gear, and I don’t sell any of it.