Posted on 10/02/2010 12:38:33 PM PDT by Wolfie
A New Breed of Home Marijuana Grower
California -- Joanne Clarke, a legal secretary in her late 50s, leads the way down a pale green hallway in her modest Costa Mesa home, past a small guest room on the right and a blue tiled bathroom on the left. At the end of the hall, she opens a door, pushes aside a thick black curtain and ducks inside.
"Isn't this wild?" she says, gesturing to the high-tech marijuana grow room she and her husband recently installed. "This used to be my daughter's bedroom."
Wild is one word for it. Bright is another. Unexpected, yet another. What had been a teenager's tropical-themed room is now a beaming, humming, indoor plant laboratory complete with silver reflective bubble wrap on the walls, blinding grow lights, ventilation ducts hanging from the ceiling and marijuana plants in various stages of development neatly labeled with names such as Platinum Kush, Purple Diesel and Blue Cheese.
"They are like our children," Clarke says, gazing proudly at the elegant fronds that look familiar and exotic all at once. "We talk to them."
Clarke's grow room is legal — in the state of California, anyone with a doctor's recommendation to use marijuana can grow it in limited quantities — yet it still feels clandestine. Although she's open about using pot (crushed and placed in capsules) to help manage the pain of rheumatoid arthritis, she and her husband haven't shown the room to any friends. "Ninety-five percent of the people I know are fine with it," she says, "but it's that 5% that I worry about. I don't want to make anyone uncomfortable."
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
I wish my life was so free of worry and freakin real, hard, hard, issues I have to deal with every day, that I had the time or the motivation to worry about whether or not someone somewhere is smoking a joint. I couldn't give a rat's ass.
Man, if that is all I had to worry about, I would be a rich and happy ...
I didn’t realize growing a plant endangered others. Are you allergic to soil?
Wait until they get their electric bill or a circuit breaker malfunctions and burns the house down while they are at work. The local LEO raided a home this week with 500 plants and a $13,000 power bill
Throwing hundreds of thousands of your own people into cages, ruining their lives even more, is stooopid. Ya don't treat your fellow Americans like a common enemy. People get caught up in alcohol and drugs....It's the way it is and the way it will be.
If they need and want help, ya make sure they get it....Dope like alcohol can be really mean. We're support 30 million illegal aliens, that are choking off our health-care system and everything else, so I'm sure we can help our own people...They break the law while high....They're are laws for that...obviously.
Get back to being united, bring some common sense to the table regarding imprison Americans for use, or this'll eventually get mighty ugly for everyone.
Yeah, I’m sure everyone who has a grow room doesn’t take the electrical system into account. And uses enough enough juice to have a five digit power bill.
This PG&E bill is really odd as most growers bypass the meter in various ways going so far as to use battery jumper cables on the incoming line or they use a butter knife across the blades in the meter base to bypass the meter. A lot of these grows end overloading a line and starting a fire in someone else’s rental and some end up in shootouts with a lot of blood spilled. Paranoia is a growers middle name...
Most growers? That’s a load of crap. A small minority of growers? Sure. Most growers are pretty small scale individuals who can harvest plenty with 2k watts or less, which is hardly some giant power surge. A 2k watt setup could harvest around 4.5 pounds a harvest (if they can attain a gram a watt, which is a pretty good yield). if that can be done on a perpetual harvest system and get that yield every 2 months, that’s 27 pounds a year. If a pound retails for around $4,000 that potentially over $100k a year. Big enough to be extremely profitable but not enough to be completely noticed.
A $13k a month power bill is absolutely the extreme end of things. A 1000 watt light at a high rate of 15 cents a kilowatt hour comes to around $120 a month, and that’s running the light 24 hours a day. To have a $13k power bill that would come to the equivalent of 108 1000 watt lights. Maybe a mere 70 or so when other equipment is factored in.
Yeah, I read it. And I find it hard to believe. I mean, a residential circuit breaker is 200 amps max, and running 80,000 watts (which would be close to the wattage using their bill) 24 hours on even a 240 volt outlet would come to around 250 amps. I just don’t buy it, but who knows.
15 cents a kilowatt is pretty low for most of California. California is one of the few power markets that make solar on the grid a viable option.
On Saturday, investigators did not locate any unapproved electrical wiring or other grow-related equipment at the home, according to the press release. The cause of the fire is still under investigation, but at this time officials do not believe it is related to the grow operation.
Pretty low? According to this link it’s average:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/electricity/epm/table5_6_a.html
But even at let’s say 25 cents a kilowatt hour it still doesn’t make much sense to me. A 1000 watt light run 24 hours a day would cost about $200 a month to run. At $13k a month, that would be about 65 of those lights running all day for a month. 65 1000 watt light bulbs on even a 240 volt circuit would come to 271 amps a day. Unless they replaced the circuit breaker I just don’t see it. The max a circuit breaker can handle in a residential complex is 200 amps.
No, that's what free phone apps are for, and free software. Of course we all agree to the terms, it's just that no body reads the terms, just like most congress men don't read the Bills they vote on. < /s>
They need to be in prison!
Aside from big activity days like repotting and harvesting, a small grow operation should only take up about 15 minutes a day of your time. It's not like you're running a meth lab. It's a weed that will grow in the cracks or a sidewalk, sheesh. It kinda does all the work for you.
You are high on drugs. There can be no other reason for your inane postings.
You need to get out of your cave once in a while and catch up on real life where weed is king.
I agree. This cave is starting to smell.
Will you ever trust your bus-driver or airline pilot again? I know they are supposed to take the urine test, but at what point does the whole society become so stoned they wave that.
What caught my eye was 2 Hyponic Growing Supply Stores of Eureka Road here in S.E. Michigan.
Drove by them and I had to honestly ask, since when has hyponic indoor gardening become the latest fad, for the health concious or not?
Ya right.. Again a scary development as Detroit tries to get on the decriminalization train. G_d help us...
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