PT, I went and checked that out, wow, cool stuff. I did not see any prices though, got any clue as to how much something like this costs?

They are costly. They will provide you with a quote if you email them with specifics, according to the directions for putting together an order on their site. The particular estimate I received priced out to $2500 for just one spinner light (with I think 4 arms). Obviously, any custom work would probably be more.

As you know, that's how everything starts out. This is tomorrow's technology, and therefore has tomorrow's price tag on it.

I wanted to give people a better idea of the coliseum book that I've been working on. There is a tinge of self-marketing here, so I ask that people who are offended by that realize that the book format is truly the best format for this information since it is an in-depth case study (I go to Burning Man every year, so I hate advertisements myself ...). The more important thing to take away from this is to see the level of detail that I'll be offering. I think that once you guys see this that you'll understand that, yes, this should help move the vertical growing community a step forward. I actually hope that my book inspires others in the vertical grow community to do the exact same thing. It's certainly for a good cause, right?

Sorry about the length!!! Hopefully, at least one or two of you guys will make it through all of this. This is just a description of what's in the book ...

Introduction to Our Case Study

Over time, a standard system design strategy for coliseums has become apparent. The core of this strategy applies to in large part to most vertical grow systems. Since this book is largely about one particular coliseum system design, let’s go over everything that’s included in this book so that you know what you’re getting into here.

The system discussed in this book has been featured multiple times in High Times Magazine. It’s on the front cover of the 2007 September issue. Although Arista provided little in the way of design advice, this book was written in cooperation with those responsible for the manufacturing of coliseums. The intelligent reader will notice that this case study does not cover everything that somebody could do with a coliseum (in fact, that may actually be impossible). But, I will say that great effort was put into trying out experimental designs. Not all worked. It’s our belief that honesty is the best policy when a grow technique is still in its infancy because you will benefit just as much from information about the failures as the details about those things that did work. We do not pretend to be all-knowing, but having observed people working with the coliseum firsthand for more than five years now, it’s clear that the information presented in this book is more than sufficient for a book. And to be completely clear, there is certainly no shortage of experimental design upgrades being planned for a second revision of this book.

As much as it has pained the operation, the system featured here had to be built on three separate occasions. Building the system three times has actually expedited the process of fine-tuning the system design. Along the way, we will also share with you some ideas we’ve had for improvements.

Vertical grow systems differ from horizontal flatbed-style systems in fundamental ways. In particular, more attention must be paid to the movement and removal of heat. With flatbed systems, it’s acceptable to let the heat collect within the room to some degree since the worst of it will tend to accumulate at the top of the room where there are no plants. With vertical systems, our guiding design philosophy is that we want the plants to all experience similar environmental conditions. Since we will have plants near both the floor and ceiling, we are forced to mix the air vertically as much as possible.

Heat will for the most part emanate from the lights themselves , which will for the most part hang vertically at the centers of the coliseums. We must do everything we can to eliminate or move this heat as quickly as possible. Since it already tends to rise, the best design will assist this process with circulation fans at the floor level of each coliseum pointing upwards. To complete the air flow pattern into an actual circulation system, we will position the exact same type of fans around the coliseums near the ceiling level pointing downwards.

For low-wattage coliseum systems, this may be sufficient to achieve temperature stability with intake and exhaust. Since our purpose in this case study is to maximize yield per square foot and watt used, we describe a system in this guide that employs six vertical lights per coliseum for a total of twelve 600 watt HPS bulbs. This more challenging design requires additional measures to address heat.

Most importantly, light tube cylinders will be required to pass cool outside air over the bulbs (again, upwards), exhausting the heat back outside as quickly as possible. We will design this and all other air movement systems so that the room can still be sealed up. This will permit us to efficiently utilize a carbon dioxide generator and precisely control the room’s temperature and humidity with a water-cooled air conditioner and dehumidifier.

Based on experience, at least one other tweak is necessary. We’ve found that floor-level circulation fans can be inadequate for moving air through the canopy. It can be difficult to completely seal up the coliseums with baskets. Fluids can spill from inside of the structure out onto its surface, effectively raising the humidity beneath the canopy. Stale, moist air is not only a danger to the plant’s health, but it can also create a CO2-depleted microclimate that can limit yields. We detail in this book exactly how to move air through this thick canopy.

In addition to those three air flow systems, there is one final form of air movement that can help. As the plants grow taller, the circulation fans at the floor level will have a harder time moving air up through the coliseum. When encroachment is a bit more than preferable, this air will be resisted by some amount of foliage. We suggest a more concentrated form of airflow than general circulation fans surrounding the light tubes and directed upwards. We will explain how to implement this type of system, and we call it “plant encroachment airflow”.

Where it won’t seriously impair air flow, we also suggest the use of replaceable spore filters at those fans where they make sense as this can reduce the potential for the spread of plant disease. We show how to build soundproofed fan boxes that implement these filters.

The coliseum system featured is designed so that the coliseum structures never require moving. This becomes especially important when cleaning between cycles. This is necessary because the room is typically very tight on space. Although the system portrayed in this book can certainly be made to work with 9-foot ceilings (that’s the case here), an extra vertical foot is extremely helpful in order to fit a string of six 600 watt bulbs.

We will show you a good system for changing your reservoirs that will allow you to change out all four in just two hours (we recommend running the reservoirs separately rather than connecting them together). It’s important to design the movement of fluids so that maintenance is quick and easy. That will permit proportionately more time for problem-solving and system upgrades.

Coliseums are designed to be both media- and aeroponics-capable. As it is shipped, the coliseum supports low-pressure large-drop aeroponics. One of the more challenging modifications to the coliseums is the implementation of high-pressure aeroponics with smaller drop size. I’ll show you how to achieve sufficient pressure to drive those heads with two half-horsepower pumps per coliseum. The plumbing will be constructed so that it can be disassembled and moved, separate from the coliseums themselves. I also provide some words of wisdom based upon the experiences of coliseum growers pertaining to this particular project. To be completely clear, this is a project which is not to be taken lightly. Failure is a real possibility, so read carefully if this is what you intend to do.

I’ve seen firsthand what happens to beautiful hardwood floors when two inches of water fill a room. We accept floods as an unavoidable reality – especially with aeroponics and especially in the early days of maintaining a system. So, these coliseum systems are designed so that the entire room is a large pond. A layer of gym floor matting beneath this pond liner additionally prevents equipment from shaking the building’s structure. It’s an affordable way to keep pumps from vibrating your building.

The system employs a cable highway around the top of the room, up away from any fluids. We can also explain to you what your electrical needs will be so that you can keep your use of extension cords to a minimum. This will decrease your power consumption and keep your system as safe as possible.

Fire is a serious issue when drawing large amounts of power. Landlords will sometimes upgrade the electrical wiring in an apartment unit only to feed that nice, thick cable with a tiny wire down at the meter. Whether or not a property can house the coliseums will largely depend upon whether or not the electrical system can be upgraded. We’ll provide you with a good system design involving a ballast switch for operating two coliseums in older units which are relatively power-limited. We’ll also show you what type of questions you should be asking about properties in general when searching out a space to build a coliseum system.

Wires that are too small for these loads can heat up and melt. There is no getting around the need for an electrician. We’ll nevertheless explain what kind of electrical work typically needs to be done to install a coliseum within an urban environment.

Sooner or later, you’re going to have a power outage. If your system runs aeroponically, then damage to your plants’ roots can begin in as little as 20 or 30 minutes. We’ll show you how to keep your plants alive with foggers and a battery backup system. High-pressure aeroponic coliseums with foggers is a technique that is very new, and my hope is that this section will inspire more people to experiment with it in hopes of discovering the optimal design and parameters for various spray-fog systems.

Although people can certainly debate the merits of using both fog and sprayers, we nevertheless show you how to do build such a system. Two coliseums can easily go through 10 – 20 gallons of nutrient fog in a day. In order to be useful, the foggers therefore require a dedicated reservoir and a system for automatically topping them off as needed. We’ll show you one attempt at building a fog delivery system based on pumps and electric float valves, and explain the problems that were experienced. We also demonstrate how to install the same float valve onto the mixing bin’s faucet – which allows you to reliably fill a predetermined amount of water into a bin without fear that it will overflow. The more absent-minded growers out there will appreciate the peace of mind that this provides.

Foggers have multiple uses. One practical use is to temporarily increase the humidity around clones or fresh transplants. The smaller consumer-based humidifiers can be nasty breeding grounds for molds. So, we’re going to show you how to build your own fogger-based humidifier for both your grow and cloning rooms. This system can be made to have any size reservoir desired and can be controlled, if desired, with a recycling timer and if desired, a photo-diode.

We’ll show you a good technique for seating clones into baskets and for sealing up the system as best as possible with homemade plant collars made from cheap gym floor matting. We’ll also explain the coliseum’s requirements for clones and a good, easy system for creating your own clones in a separate room. Getting the coliseum to work as advertised can be a bit of a performance in terms of the clones. The timing has to be just right in order to get the proper plant height; the strains need to be short and stocky; and there needs to be consistency amongst all of the plants. We’ll explain all of these cloning issues, dramatically increasing your chances of success from the start. This particular topic is exceptionally important, as its easy for newcomers to coliseums to underestimate the importance of good genetic stock.

There are times when you may wish that you could pull the light tubes out of the coliseums. For this purpose, the design involves short runs of flexible ductwork connecting the light tubes to the rigid duct work which keeps them cool. We’ll also demonstrate a custom solution for connecting the light tube to a light mover railway which permits the light tube to move in all directions. Not only can it slide back and forth out of the coliseum’s doorway. But with this system, it can also swing from left to right, permitting more comfortable access when performing maintenance.

Since the focus of this book is primarily construction, I will recommend Graham Reinders’ incredible book Secrets of High Yield Plant Growth for understanding the theory of aeroponic and hydroponic growing. I’ve also on occasion drawn inspiration from Greg Green’s The Cannabis Grow Bible (a book which would be useful for growing most types of plants actually). When combined with those two other books, the intention is that this book completes all of the information necessary for a person to grow vertically with coliseums without ever learning how to grow more on the more traditional flatbed systems.

Even though we don’t focus on it, we will briefly discuss pest control and how best to train your plants for the coliseum. Mildew, mites and fungus gnats can be particularly destructive to the coliseum system under various environmental conditions, but some simple steps can be taken to eradicate all of these problems. Contrary to the rampant misinformation out there on mites, spider mites can be reduced to a non-threat, and it can, if desired, be done without the use of any pesticides. Algae can also be a very serious problem for aeroponically-run coliseum systems. While there is not yet any way to completely eradicate it, we can at least show you how to keep it from getting out of control.

We also explain how to build a cheap light skirt, which you can use to temporarily filter out the intensity of the lamps during transplant. From what we can tell, this works a bit better than just turning off every other lamp, and it’s a lot easier than switching out the bulbs from metal-halide in a string of Cool Tubes. Although your mileage may vary, we’ve found comparatively better results with all 600-watt HPS bulbs (as opposed to alternating metal halides). Some people may opt to switch out their bulbs at the end of veg, but this is easier said than done with the current light tube technology, and I would advise at a minimum to purchase a light meter to gauge the light intensity reaching the canopy. We’ll discuss this and bring up the topic of 1000-watt bulbs in colilseums as well.

What’s nice about the coliseums is that they can be employed with both soil and aeroponics. Aeroponics is by far the most challenging of the three. But, if you attempt aeroponics and decide that it’s not for you, it is a relatively simple matter to switch back to one of the other two. We will explain in detail the aeroponics conversion process for those who want a finer mist than the system that’s shipped from Arista. Out of necessity, we’ll also have to briefly discuss the situation with organic nutrients and spray heads.

Odors can be a problem within dense, urban environments. But it doesn’t have to be. In addition to using a carbon filter, we demonstrate an easy trick for managing particularly bad odors using odor neutralizing agent that’s been popularized on the Internet.

We’ll also discuss the advantages and usage of fertigators, as well as how they might be employed in a coliseum system in order to increase consistency of nutrient application and decrease overall workload.

Some people, in their quest for perfection, will opt for a reverse-osmosis water purification system. And I can’t fault them for that. However, the system featured in this case study was built with speed of reservoir changes in mind, and with concern for the overall water usage (the system’s water-cooled a/c runs on cold tap water). Although we will discuss a potential RO-system design, we demonstrate a system that utilizes a large multi-stage whole house filter. It can fill a bucket in less than five minutes with water that measures at 30 – 40 ppm, which will satisfy most growers.

Since coliseums are demanding in terms of air movement, we will show you how to design your ductwork and how to properly attach it to your building so that it’s out of the way, secured in place and generating the least amount of noise possible. Soundproofing centrifugal fans is an integral part of this system design as it directly pertains to your own security, so we give very detailed instructions on how to build soundproofed fan boxes. Although your windows will surely differ, we also demonstrate an example of how to build window boxes for room intake and exhaust.

The system in this case study employs a water-cooled air conditioner. We’ll show you how easy it is to hook one of these up, and we’ll help you to approximately figure out how powerful it needs to be given your ambient temperatures outside. Needless to say, many people will find coliseum systems far more challenging in the summer months than in winter.

One of the most difficult aspects of coliseum growing is the process of cleaning the coliseums. Some people actually avoid purchasing coliseums out of fear of cleaning them. We can tell you that their fears are 100% justified. But, it’s not an insolvable problem. We will share with you some tricks that we’ve learned that can drastically cut down on the time it takes to clean these machines. In particular, we show you how to attach a toilet brush to a drill – a device that you will both laugh at and come to love at the same time (pretend it’s a shotgun and tell your friend to take your picture … it’s hilarious). And we’ll provide you with a detailed task list for preparing the coli’s for their next round that you can use to employ helpers and better time your clones.

The coliseum reservoirs come with only one top access point per reservoir. We advocate creating additional ports, largely for the purpose of more thoroughly cleaning those structures between cycles. We’ll show you how and where to cut them, and how to create covers to mitigate the growth of algae.

Not all rooms come with their own deadbolt on the door, and landlords don’t always take so kindly to their installation. So, we’ll show you how to modify a cheap car alarm so that it will deadbolt your room’s door from the inside with a keychain remote (minus the annoying car alarm sound, eh?).

We’ll tell you about difficulties encountered with integrating an oxygen generator into the system. Like I said, not all projects go as planned.

We’ll conclude the text with plans for a four coliseum room. We’ll imagine that we have the perfect space and all of the money required, and suggest a dream system that would effectively make up for all of the shortcomings we’ve identified with this current setup.

As you can see, coliseums are very challenging systems. To master their construction, a person must possess a wide breadth of knowledge in things like plumbing, electrical, ductwork and carpentry. However, the person who built this system is not a plumber, electrician, HVAC expert or carpenter. You are not going to find a whole lot of general contracting theory in this book, but you will find a record of what does and does not work. Part of the reason why coliseums are so challenging is because of all of this peripheral expertise that’s required to get them to behave as advertised. You shouldn’t have to be a general contract to build a coliseum system.

When I started documenting coliseums five years ago, I was probably just like you: I had some experience with the more typical flood table hydroponics type of setup. But, other than that, I was pretty clueless about how people were getting coliseums to work. One thing was clear: There was no central repository that people could go to where they could learn everything they needed to know to get these beasts operational. We’ve learned about half of this book’s contents over the course of five years by observing the process of trial-and-error, and the other half from difficult-to-find professional advice. Although it certainly does fill a specific need for information, the manual that comes with the coliseum doesn’t cover the vast majority of issues I discuss in this book.

This lack of good information about how to build and run these systems has stalled a more widespread acceptance of vertical grow systems in general. When people look at the technology, they don’t know what they’re getting into. It’s just a big black (or red, I suppose …) box at this point. And it rightly scares a lot of people. This book will hopefully take all of the mystery out of the engineering side of the equation. Keep in mind that building the system is really just the first step. You’re still going to have to become proficient at generating high yields with short plants, as well as all of the other dramas of urban growing.

True engineers will relish the idea of getting such a complicated system to work properly. But, if your system is part of an actual business, you don’t have time for research and development. You may be paying rent on your room. You will of course have electric bills and chemical expenses. Equipment will occasionally fail. Perhaps you have to buy your clones. Every month you spend building the system or experimenting with an unproven technology or process, and every cycle that fails due to some unforeseen issue is a month that you’re not making money to pay these bills.

The proprietors of this system have narrowly escaped bankruptcy numerous times. They’ve lost entire crops to armies of mites, a full-blown pythium epidemic and mildew so white it looked like snow. They’ve had pigeons try move into their window boxes; they’ve had pressurized aeroponic PVC lines burst in their faces; and they’ve vibrated their building’s structure well enough for neighbors to take notice. They’ve had to move the entire system once; it’s been torn down twice and built a total of three times. They’ve seen electrical systems literally melt in the middle of an aeroponic cycle, and had to replace an entire electrical panel by hooking into live lines without losing their crop. They’ve experienced countless floods and heat spells that drove the room temperature up into the 90’s. They’ve even had people steal plants mid-cycle. For every project you see here, there is another one that failed and has been forgotten. We know that these systems can work because these guys have spent the last five years making them work.

Nobody should have to go through what these guys have gone through. It should be possible to create a coliseum system that works on the first try, and recover the full investment on the first one or two cycles. Now that we know how to generate successful crops, others should be able to replicate this work and avoid their mistakes. Coliseum growing can and should be fun rather than a never-ending lesson in what can go wrong. If you think though that you can get this system to work on the first try without ever having grown before and without first reading this book, then I would express some caution. Every single person who buys a coliseum, or who is considering the purchase of one, needs to read this book.

Good luck. And welcome to the future of growing.

sound like it gonna be a good read for those just doing a vertical grow never mind the coliseum. when the price on the coliseum comes down I will purchase on but at the current price point I cannot justify it.

I hear you, brother. They can be costly systems. The system featured here has easily broken the six figure mark over the years of investments, believe it or not. But there were R&D decisions in there that led to that situation, and it didn't really have to be that way if there had been better access to information. Mistakes can be very costly. The concept behind the book is to show people exactly how to possibly recover their investment in just 1-3 cycles.

And it's worth noting that it's not yet really known what the maximum yields are with coliseums (despite some loose talk in that regard), and even after five years of experimentation. We're all more-or-less still in the learning phase with vertical grows.

I think of the coliseum like a Corvette: definitely not for everybody, but for some, pretty perfect. Now, if you could buy a Corvette, and just by driving it around for 6 months or so, gain the abilty to pay it off in total, then it's perhaps not as shocking a price as people perceive it to be. When you optimize for square feet, you can recover investments pretty quickly.

I've literally seen people step into that room and tear up. The coliseum can be a magnificent sight to behold.

You will hopefully have some good photos of the grow.

Yes I have a carbon filter,canfilter 75 with a 8" vortex fan,it's always "ON" I use it to clean up the air of the entire room,so everything that goes out is filtered,so when my in & out fans are running no smell is going out, and clean air in the house too,even days before harvest.

how long until your book publishes?

Yeah, I intend to post some images within the next 2-3 weeks. It basically doesn't exist until there are shots, right?!

I'm trying my best for February for completion to coincide with Arista's introduction of the Coliseum in Europe. The bulk of the text was actually written as things were being figured out. It's mostly revising, formatting and integrating images by now.

I hear that this machine that they use to spin these molds is other-worldly. I was hoping to get some shots of it into the book, but it sounds like they're afraid of people like you guys figuring it out, and replicating it.

Ha!

you got that right, all I need to do is see it close up and will figure out a way to replecate for personal use, they need not worry about us selling thier idea, just using it.