A soil-free system for the indoor gardener.
Home-growing good cannabis isn’t easy. Marijuana may be hearty, but — like brewing your own beer — it takes education and effort to produce something you’d be proud to share.
Cloudponics’ GroBox offers a turnkey solution. Developed by a Chilean startup, the nondescript, fridge-size wooden cabinet is unlocked with a mobile app. Inside, the 4-foot-tall space has room for about five plants (six is the legal limit for home growers) or about 8 ounces of dried, cured cannabis every four months.
The soil-free system uses the popular General Hydroponics line of nutrients that are pumped from their individual bottles to a reservoir where they’re mixed and sprayed on the roots. Purple and red LED lights are low power and low heat, pulling just 300 watts with no need to dump excess heat. An active-carbon filter keeps your home odor free.
Chilean inventor Nicholas Ruiz, a former civil engineer, and his Dutch partner and CEO, Pepijn van der Krogt, spent four years and $120,000 in Chilean government grants to develop not only the cabinet but also its brains, called a “controller.” This is the device that listens to all the sensors in the cabinet and doles out nutrients to the plants on the right schedule. The controller feeds the status of the cabinet to your smartphone.
GroBox comes with a number of “recipes” for various types of cannabis you can grow, so that the plants always get the right food they need in the right amounts. Sensors monitor temperature, humidity, acidity, nutrient levels in the water and more.
Each 176-pound unit is handassembled in San Diego and ships to anywhere in the world. The price: $2,500 — but at $300 per retail ounce of marijuana, it can almost pay for itself in one good cycle.