I wanted an
easily-removable bucket top and a clean grow area in which to place pots of different sizes. My second attempt at building a basic bucket left me with a bucket with perfectly-drilled holes (if I do say so myself) and only one small hole cut into the side where a complicated and ultimately useless watering apparatus used to live, so I decided those holes would be perfect for a passive intake. They also double as drainage holes... though I'll need to figure something out for when I upgrade to a 3 gallon Smart Pot, because it'll cover the holes and block the passive intake.
I have 5x23W
CFL bulbs, each putting out 1600 lumens for a total of 8000 lumens. I also have a few LED red+blue grow strips on the bucket walls at plant-level to bolster growth in lower regions of the plant when it's bigger. The light bulbs are screwed into socket plugs and plugged into the top power strip. The pairs of bulbs are joined by a 'Y' socket connector, which is screwed into a socket plug. You can kind of tell from the first picture, but it's fucking bright in there.
AIRFLOW
My old bucket top had two small intake fans in the lid and a 100mm exhaust fan at light-level. Since I decided to go with a passive intake,
I flipped all the fans to exhaust, and added a fourth, 120mm PC fan opposite the 100mm fan. I killed a brand new 120mm PC fan in the process, pour some out for one's homies. With all the lights and fans on, after about an hour the temperature inside went down from ~77F to 72F and held...perfect temps :D
WIRING
I stripped the plastic off the ends of each fan and taped them together in pairs - the two smaller lid fans got taped together (BLACK to BLACK; RED to RED), and the two side fans got taped together. Then I took each pair of fans and twisted the two ends together before securing them in a female plug. All four fans are powered by one power supply... for a while I thought the fourth PC fan was too much because it didn't work at first, but after some trial and error, all went to plan - and the LED strips are powered by their own power supply, which is plugged into the same power strip as the lights.
The fans are separate from the lights, which is a nice change from previous bucket versions I used. That's all there is to it!
