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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff

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Speaker 1: works dot com. Wow, hey guys, and welcome to the podcast.

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Speaker 1: This is Alison, the science editor at how stuff works

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Speaker 1: dot com, and this is Robert Lamb, science writer for

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Speaker 1: help Stop works dot com. Today we'll be talking about

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Speaker 1: if you live next door to a grow house, some

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Speaker 1: signs that you might or might not. Yes, of course

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Speaker 1: they're right off the bat. First thing, Uh, what is

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Speaker 1: a grow house? We're of course talking about a marijuana

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Speaker 1: grow house. And this is exactly what it sounds like.

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Speaker 1: It is a marijuana growing operation that has been taken

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Speaker 1: indoors because if there's a wall up, then people driving

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Speaker 1: by aren't necessarily going to be able to see all

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Speaker 1: those plants growing. If a helicopter flies over, they're just

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Speaker 1: gonna see your roof. You know. Anytime you're growing a

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Speaker 1: high priced illegal crop like this, Uh, it's inevitably enough

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Speaker 1: growing indoors. Also, in an indoor in environment, these guys

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Speaker 1: can can have more control over exactly what goes into

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Speaker 1: their crop in terms of light, uh CEO two nutrients, nutrients,

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Speaker 1: temperatures essentially, right, they can basically be a like a

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Speaker 1: spaceship for plants, right, Hey, before we go any farther.

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Speaker 1: Of course, you guys know that growing pot in the

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Speaker 1: United States and many other places is illegal, so you

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Speaker 1: want to contact authorities if you suspect anything going on

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Speaker 1: in your neighborhood. And we're not telling you to go

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Speaker 1: snoop around your neighbors either, um, for just normal reasons.

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Speaker 1: That's probably not good a good neighborly thing to do.

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Speaker 1: And if you suspect that that somebody in your neighborhood

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Speaker 1: is up to some sort of big illegal operation, then

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Speaker 1: obviously you want to turn to the authorities and not

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Speaker 1: go snooping around yourself. Although it is sort of fun

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Speaker 1: to be Scooby Doo, it's it's occasionally, yeah, fun to

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Speaker 1: think about, fun to watch this episodes, just don't enact

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Speaker 1: it in real life. And then, of course nobody at

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Speaker 1: how stocks Works or Discover or Robert or I even

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Speaker 1: we're not we're not advocating anything to do with marijuana.

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Speaker 1: So now that we got that out of the way,

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Speaker 1: let's keep going with this grow house staff. Yeah, because

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Speaker 1: the science behind grow house is actually pretty interesting. We

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Speaker 1: have a whole article on how grow houses work at

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Speaker 1: the house stupp works dot com. There's a huge market

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Speaker 1: for it. For one, I mean, there's a huge marijuana

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Speaker 1: market in the United States. I don't think we're telling

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Speaker 1: you guys anything that you don't know. Um. I came

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Speaker 1: across this one stat this guy named John Getman over

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Speaker 1: at drug Science dot org. He's a former president and

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Speaker 1: the director of the the lobbying type of organization for

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Speaker 1: performing marijuana laws in the States. Anyway, Getman says that

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Speaker 1: marijuana is the largest US cash crop, about thirty five

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Speaker 1: point eight billion production value in two thousand and six.

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Speaker 1: So that's talking like way past corn way past soybeans,

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Speaker 1: way past wheat, sugar beets, all the obvious contenders. And

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Speaker 1: then of course there's you know a lot of people

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Speaker 1: like to like to smoke marijuana. You have a built

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Speaker 1: in market there for it, and just depending on your

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Speaker 1: on the going market, right, just one marijuana plant can

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Speaker 1: produce like a thousand dollars worth, uh in the form

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Speaker 1: of like a half pound. But we know we're going

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Speaker 1: to get some readers who are going to argue with

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Speaker 1: that and say it's lower. It fluctuates. It definitely does

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Speaker 1: fluctuate depending on the quality stuff. For many people. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: that money is irresistible. H no doubt and and uh

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Speaker 1: and so these grow houses pop up all over the

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Speaker 1: place and we're talking and it doesn't even have to

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Speaker 1: be a grow house actually, I mean you can learn

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Speaker 1: it can be a condominium and a high rise. I

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Speaker 1: mean we encounter these everywhere and say, you don't want

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Speaker 1: to devote your whole home to to the growing of foreriwana.

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Speaker 1: You can have a little grow cabinet apparently that you

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Speaker 1: can buy us all on online that was unseale for

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Speaker 1: strictly a hydroponic operation. Uh. And you have this little

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Speaker 1: cabinet that you grow your potting and then you can

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Speaker 1: also have cores for cooking, right or herbs for cooking.

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Speaker 1: Of course that's what they're after. And grow how is

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Speaker 1: all are all over the place really US Canada, which

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Speaker 1: is a most of the most of the research we've done.

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Speaker 1: I mean, they're a good neighborhoods, yarn bad neighborhoods there, ubiquitous. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: and and these are some illuminating stats. Um here just

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Speaker 1: giving an idea of how widespread these are, according to

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Speaker 1: Los Angeles Times, uh, in the Humbout Humboldt Humboltle County

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Speaker 1: in the Humboldt County area of California. They estimate that

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Speaker 1: up to a thousand of the seven thousand, five hundred

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Speaker 1: homes in the community are grow house operations. Now then, now,

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Speaker 1: this is an area where marijuana enjoys limited legal protection.

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Speaker 1: A lot of it's grown for medicinal uses, depending if

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Speaker 1: you talk to straight is state or federal authorities exactly

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Speaker 1: and uh, and then according to Cannabis Culture in Vancouver, Canada,

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Speaker 1: the estimate runs as high as one out of every

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Speaker 1: five homes, Yeah, are grow operations. That's it's pretty scofican.

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Speaker 1: And then the other interesting factor that uh, that I

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Speaker 1: that I've heard about is we all know that the

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Speaker 1: housing market is a mess, you know, rising for closure rates.

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Speaker 1: Rental property is really cheap, so it's a buyer's market growers,

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Speaker 1: it's a grower's market, so it's not hard to get property,

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Speaker 1: um that's secluded enough to hide all the you know,

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Speaker 1: equipment that you're going to need for grow operation. And

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Speaker 1: then if you do go with a rental property, I

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Speaker 1: mean you may have a property a landlord who's more

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Speaker 1: of an absent tea type and doesn't come and check in.

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Speaker 1: But we were talking about this before, and it seems

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Speaker 1: like the obvious thing to do would be to buy

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Speaker 1: a property. Yeah, it just seems like if you're going

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Speaker 1: to invest all this money in an illegal operation like this,

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Speaker 1: you're not gonna want the landlord potentially dropping by to

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Speaker 1: you know, to check on the water heater or something, right,

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Speaker 1: I mean it's not just you know, getting some soil

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Speaker 1: and you know, sticking a marijuana plant in a pot.

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Speaker 1: I mean we're talking thousands and thousands of dollars, and

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Speaker 1: depending on scaled operation, that could even go into the

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Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of dollars. So again, we could see

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Speaker 1: this more being a homeowner rather than a rental type

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Speaker 1: of type of person. And the other thing is they're

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Speaker 1: not always residential. This is one of my favorite things.

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Speaker 1: Um Florida, which seems to have a ton of grow

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Speaker 1: house news stories. I don't know if they're cracking down there,

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Speaker 1: if all those orange grows are getting mad about you know,

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Speaker 1: marijuana being the big crash cash crop. But they found

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Speaker 1: a grow house in the mall of the Mall of

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Speaker 1: America's not to be confused with that big old mall

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Speaker 1: in Minnesota that has a similar name, like right next

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Speaker 1: to like the Orange Julius Place, and Wow, it was

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Speaker 1: in a storage room and they found some huge plants,

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Speaker 1: like three to six ft high, but they didn't find

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Speaker 1: who was running, said Greg. I guess not. I guess not.

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Speaker 1: So that's kind of rundown on grow houses and whatever

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Speaker 1: your thoughts about pot legalization, you still probably don't want

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Speaker 1: to live next door to one, right, Yeah, it goes

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Speaker 1: beyond uh, whatever your personal issues may be regarding the

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Speaker 1: the growing, sale, or use of marijuana, because most of

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Speaker 1: most of these are illegal operations and as such by criminals.

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Speaker 1: So so what a criminals have. Sometimes they have scary

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Speaker 1: dogs and guns, guns, and sometimes criminals get into fights

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Speaker 1: with other criminals that shoot each other right right right

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Speaker 1: in cases of that. So so yeah, they're gonna it's

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Speaker 1: gonna be a basic um illegal element to it, and

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Speaker 1: they're gonna be criminals around about. And they're not only

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Speaker 1: going to with their guns and their dogs. They're not

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Speaker 1: just going to be protecting that um that that crop

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Speaker 1: from from the police or whatnot. They're going to be

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Speaker 1: concerned with other criminals because this is essentially a house

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Speaker 1: just full of money, So you're going to have the

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Speaker 1: curacy equipment, lots of pot. Yeah, it's gonna it's gonna

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Speaker 1: have a bull's eye on it for anybody who knows

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Speaker 1: about it. I mean in Atlanta, that's the equivalent of

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Speaker 1: having like a house full of price flat screen TV

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Speaker 1: is just right for the taking, essentially right, So it's

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Speaker 1: a target, no doubt. And then they also tend to

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Speaker 1: have quite a lot of electrical issues, right yea, and

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Speaker 1: uh that's a big one. Yeah. The main reason for

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Speaker 1: this is that you can't the average home is not

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Speaker 1: built with this kind of an operation in mind. For instance,

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Speaker 1: a successful grow house operators, according to Cannabis Culture, tend

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Speaker 1: to prefer a thousand wat horticulture bulbs for each for

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Speaker 1: each fifteen twenty plants. And what's a normal lightbulb. Normal

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Speaker 1: lightbulb incandescence run for fifty watts, and your compact fluorescent

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Speaker 1: lightbulbs are between nine and fifty two. Your average room

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Speaker 1: in a house is only wired to handle about a

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Speaker 1: thousand watts, So if you're gonna have multiple bulbs in

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Speaker 1: one room, you're gonna have to rewire it. So these

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Speaker 1: guys have to basically jerry the house to maintain this

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Speaker 1: kind of electrical use. Plus, uh, there's often a lot

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Speaker 1: of ventilation equipment, there's extra air conditioning to help control

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Speaker 1: the temperature and keep it in the in the margins

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Speaker 1: that they want for optimal growing. So yeah, they have

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Speaker 1: to often just rewire the entire house to get this

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Speaker 1: kind of situation going, and professionals who do it, It's true. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: there are guys who go in and know exactly what

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Speaker 1: they're doing and set these things up professionally for um,

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Speaker 1: you know, criminal organizations or whatnot that are investing in it.

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Speaker 1: But then other guys inevitably are not going to really

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Speaker 1: have a clue. They're gonna have as much of a

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Speaker 1: clue about rewiring an house as I do. And you

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Speaker 1: may not care about that house burning down, but you

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Speaker 1: will care about when your whole neighborhood burns down, right, Yeah,

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Speaker 1: Because that's another side of this. Since they do use

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Speaker 1: so much electricity, and since that sends out, that's just

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Speaker 1: raises a red flag for law enforcement in the power companies,

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Speaker 1: a lot of times they're going to pirate their power

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Speaker 1: and that just adds even more potentially shoddy wiring into

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Speaker 1: the mix that could catch that house on fire or

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Speaker 1: put the rest of the neighborhood in danger from from

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Speaker 1: various electrical failures, electrical accidents. And then of course, once

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Speaker 1: I of the all that electricity is, it's a big

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Speaker 1: old carbon footprint associated with it. So you may not

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Speaker 1: care about the illegality of of a grow house operation,

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Speaker 1: but it's it's pretty unfriendly to the environment. Yeah, ironically

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Speaker 1: it's not very green. No, it's not very green. And

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Speaker 1: then you have all those hazardous chemicals like fungicides and

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Speaker 1: pesticides that may be improperly disposed of and entering the

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Speaker 1: community water supply, right, I mean it goes. It's the

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Speaker 1: same as with the electrical aspect of it. Nobody is

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Speaker 1: coming in from the city um or the county to

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Speaker 1: uh to make sure that the grow house is up

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Speaker 1: to code. You know it's gonna be. It's pretty much

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Speaker 1: no hole's bar in torrent in terms of safety. So

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Speaker 1: let's talk about some signs that you may be in

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Speaker 1: fact living next door to one. Okay, well, I think

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Speaker 1: the big one, the obvious one is is the smell. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: the smell sort of a pungent, acrid Christmas e like

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Speaker 1: you're at a music concert type of smell. Yeah, you

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Speaker 1: guys are probably familiar with it if you've ever been

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Speaker 1: outside counting or use public transportation right or e been

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Speaker 1: to or been to a rock answer? Like we said,

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Speaker 1: I mean, pot is is definitely out there to be smelled. So,

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Speaker 1: I mean the smell is a is a big one,

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Speaker 1: but growers actually try to counteract it. They'll put in

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Speaker 1: charcoal filters, will maintain that whole clothes growing environment that

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Speaker 1: we were talking about. And then we've even heard that

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Speaker 1: the plants some kind of strong smelling shrubs. I don't

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Speaker 1: know what those would be, and that could just be

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Speaker 1: something that the HBO series we made up, it could be.

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Speaker 1: But then it seems like it would be hard to

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Speaker 1: completely overpower the pot smell of a grow house, like

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Speaker 1: it would end up smelling like and rosemary, you know,

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Speaker 1: and not just lots of rosemary, definitely. And then you

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Speaker 1: have your stereotypical weird comings and goings, although that's not

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Speaker 1: necessarily going to be the case here. Um, you have

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Speaker 1: stuff like lack of house and yard upkeep. You have

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Speaker 1: kids toys lying about the are sitting around the yard,

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Speaker 1: but kids, that was an interesting one, that great out

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Speaker 1: of Canada. Yeah yeah. And then you have stuff like

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Speaker 1: generator noises because if people aren't actually pirating the electricity.

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Speaker 1: They may buy a big old honking generator that's running

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Speaker 1: all the time. Right, and you know, owning a generator,

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Speaker 1: it doesn't necessarily mean that you're you're operating a grow house,

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Speaker 1: but right, And none of these signs do in and

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Speaker 1: of themselves, right, But it can be kind of suspicious

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Speaker 1: if the guy in your suburban neighborhood seems to be

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Speaker 1: running a large generator behind his house all the time. Yeah. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: And then you have stuff like condensation on windows. Yeah, yeah,

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Speaker 1: this is an interesting one for colder areas, right, right,

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Speaker 1: lots of conversation on the windows, or so. You can

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Speaker 1: walk out on a snowy day and you look around

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Speaker 1: in every house in the in the neighborhood has snow

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Speaker 1: all over the roof and frost except for that one

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Speaker 1: house where it's where it's you know, completely black on

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Speaker 1: the top. And that could be due to really high

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Speaker 1: levels of heat throughout the house which are essentially melting

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Speaker 1: all the snow off of it. Yeah. And then you

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Speaker 1: could also have unusual amounts of steam like above and

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Speaker 1: beyond the washer dryer type of steam you're generating from, right,

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Speaker 1: Like they're basically smoke stacks. It could be a a

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Speaker 1: sign to worry about. Um. Also, did we mentioned covered windows. No,

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Speaker 1: we haven't mentioned covered windows. That's a they're actually two.

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Speaker 1: Side one is if you see a house that seems

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Speaker 1: to have lights on all the time, Um, you know,

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Speaker 1: maybe they're just you know, concerned about tripping over things,

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Speaker 1: but insomniacs or insomniacs, or maybe they're growing stuff back there.

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Speaker 1: A lot of places, uh, a lot of these growhouses

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Speaker 1: will cover up the windows, say with you know, foil

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Speaker 1: material kind of like plastic wrap too, I think, yeah,

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Speaker 1: kind of plastic wrapped as well. So if you see that,

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Speaker 1: that could potentially be a sign that there's some sort

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Speaker 1: of operation going on inside, or it could just mean

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Speaker 1: that they don't like the sunlight, or a fit of

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Speaker 1: government reading their thoughts. Right, that's a big one. Yeah, definitely, definitely.

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Speaker 1: Oh and this range hoses. Look out for strange hoses. People,

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Speaker 1: there maybe some strange hoses running from like what we say,

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Speaker 1: the doors, like out of doors and windows on the

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Speaker 1: outside of the house. Um, that's kind of suspicious. Yeah. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: So those are a few of the various signs. Oh

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Speaker 1: and then of course, if you if your neighborhood experiences

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Speaker 1: lots of blackouts. Yeah, that could be a sign that

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Speaker 1: somebody's really sapping the power. Yeah, definitely. Well, the Feds

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Speaker 1: have some more authoritative and definitive measures of telling if

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Speaker 1: you're living next door to a grow house, they can

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Speaker 1: they can actually check the power records, and it seems

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Speaker 1: like the police and the power companies are in close

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Speaker 1: contacts are and they're sharing this kind of information all

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Speaker 1: the time. And power spikes are huge, are a huge indicator,

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Speaker 1: So that's one thing they definitely look for. And also

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Speaker 1: sometimes they send out guys like manually to sort of

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Speaker 1: chick you know, to check on the wires and see

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Speaker 1: if it looks like people have been tampering with them.

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Speaker 1: And then there's also kind of the more high chech one.

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Speaker 1: Also water. Sometimes they can spot them by extreme water usage,

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Speaker 1: though again they sometimes try and counteract that by like

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Speaker 1: drilling holes in the little paddles that are in the

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Speaker 1: water pipes to see how much you're using. Would say,

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Speaker 1: what would tell us about the high tech one? This

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Speaker 1: is pretty interesting, pretty pretty interesting, the the infrared use

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Speaker 1: of INFRED cameras because because again this is a whole

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Speaker 1: lot of heat going on in a house. So if

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Speaker 1: you have an infrared camera, you can potentially see, you know,

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Speaker 1: like from a helicopter, which houses are really burning, you know,

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Speaker 1: with that heat. And there are a lot of issues

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Speaker 1: that have been raised about this as to whether or not, um,

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Speaker 1: that's really legal too, because you're essentially, you know, using

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Speaker 1: X ray vision to see inside people's houses to see

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Speaker 1: what's going on. Yeah, a lot of people aren't cool

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Speaker 1: with that for reasons of privacy and but that's but

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Speaker 1: it's definitely one of the tools available to law enforcement.

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Speaker 1: So if you had to pick, and I'm not wishing

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Speaker 1: this on you, what would it be you have to

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Speaker 1: live next to you a crack house, be a meth lab,

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Speaker 1: or see a grow house. I mean, you know, none

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Speaker 1: of them are really gonna be good for curb appeal,

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Speaker 1: But I'd probably go with the grow house. Yeah, I

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Speaker 1: definitely would after reading this. Yeah, because the crack house, um,

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Speaker 1: they're probably gonna be dealing out of that house and

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Speaker 1: there can be a lot of people coming by where

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Speaker 1: is the grow house? These tend to be places where

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Speaker 1: the product is produced and not distributed, right, so you know,

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Speaker 1: despite all the risk involved, they tend to be quiet.

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Speaker 1: In fact, they tend to be a little too quiet,

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Speaker 1: right right, And then there's a meth lab and yeah,

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Speaker 1: and that could blow up. Yeah, we don't want to

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Speaker 1: live next to scary, blowing up meth lab. So that's

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Speaker 1: about all we got for for grow house operations and

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Speaker 1: how to tell if your neighbor belongs on that show weeds. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: keep keep your eyes peeled, and your nose your nose

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Speaker 1: alert alert. Yeah. If you want to read more about

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Speaker 1: grow houses and a various legal and illegal substances, head

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Speaker 1: on over to how stuff works dot com. And we

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Speaker 1: have a blog to the sign stuff blog at blog

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Speaker 1: dot house stuff works dot com. That's all we got,

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Speaker 1: Thanks for listening, guys. For more on this and thousands

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Speaker 1: of other topics, is that how stuff works dot com.

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Speaker 1: Want more how stuff works, check out our blogs on

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Speaker 1: the house stuff works dot com home page