February 2, 2010 • 17 mins
When drug dealers want to grow marijuana without getting caught, they often set up a "grow house." These buildings look like any other building, and they often fool bystanders. Tune in and learn how to tell if your neighbors are running a grow house.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
works dot com. Wow, hey guys, and welcome to the podcast.
This is Alison, the science editor at how stuff works
dot com, and this is Robert Lamb, science writer for
help Stop works dot com. Today we'll be talking about
(00:24):
if you live next door to a grow house, some
signs that you might or might not. Yes, of course
they're right off the bat. First thing, Uh, what is
a grow house? We're of course talking about a marijuana
grow house. And this is exactly what it sounds like.
It is a marijuana growing operation that has been taken
indoors because if there's a wall up, then people driving
(00:45):
by aren't necessarily going to be able to see all
those plants growing. If a helicopter flies over, they're just
gonna see your roof. You know. Anytime you're growing a
high priced illegal crop like this, Uh, it's inevitably enough
growing indoors. Also, in an indoor in environment, these guys
can can have more control over exactly what goes into
their crop in terms of light, uh CEO two nutrients, nutrients,
(01:09):
temperatures essentially, right, they can basically be a like a
spaceship for plants, right, Hey, before we go any farther.
Of course, you guys know that growing pot in the
United States and many other places is illegal, so you
want to contact authorities if you suspect anything going on
in your neighborhood. And we're not telling you to go
(01:32):
snoop around your neighbors either, um, for just normal reasons.
That's probably not good a good neighborly thing to do.
And if you suspect that that somebody in your neighborhood
is up to some sort of big illegal operation, then
obviously you want to turn to the authorities and not
go snooping around yourself. Although it is sort of fun
to be Scooby Doo, it's it's occasionally, yeah, fun to
(01:53):
think about, fun to watch this episodes, just don't enact
it in real life. And then, of course nobody at
how stocks Works or Discover or Robert or I even
we're not we're not advocating anything to do with marijuana.
So now that we got that out of the way,
let's keep going with this grow house staff. Yeah, because
the science behind grow house is actually pretty interesting. We
have a whole article on how grow houses work at
(02:15):
the house stupp works dot com. There's a huge market
for it. For one, I mean, there's a huge marijuana
market in the United States. I don't think we're telling
you guys anything that you don't know. Um. I came
across this one stat this guy named John Getman over
at drug Science dot org. He's a former president and
the director of the the lobbying type of organization for
performing marijuana laws in the States. Anyway, Getman says that
(02:38):
marijuana is the largest US cash crop, about thirty five
point eight billion production value in two thousand and six.
So that's talking like way past corn way past soybeans,
way past wheat, sugar beets, all the obvious contenders. And
then of course there's you know a lot of people
like to like to smoke marijuana. You have a built
in market there for it, and just depending on your
(03:01):
on the going market, right, just one marijuana plant can
produce like a thousand dollars worth, uh in the form
of like a half pound. But we know we're going
to get some readers who are going to argue with
that and say it's lower. It fluctuates. It definitely does
fluctuate depending on the quality stuff. For many people. Yeah,
that money is irresistible. H no doubt and and uh
(03:23):
and so these grow houses pop up all over the
place and we're talking and it doesn't even have to
be a grow house actually, I mean you can learn
it can be a condominium and a high rise. I
mean we encounter these everywhere and say, you don't want
to devote your whole home to to the growing of foreriwana.
You can have a little grow cabinet apparently that you
can buy us all on online that was unseale for
(03:47):
strictly a hydroponic operation. Uh. And you have this little
cabinet that you grow your potting and then you can
also have cores for cooking, right or herbs for cooking.
Of course that's what they're after. And grow how is
all are all over the place really US Canada, which
is a most of the most of the research we've done.
I mean, they're a good neighborhoods, yarn bad neighborhoods there, ubiquitous. Yeah,
(04:11):
and and these are some illuminating stats. Um here just
giving an idea of how widespread these are, according to
Los Angeles Times, uh, in the Humbout Humboldt Humboltle County
in the Humboldt County area of California. They estimate that
up to a thousand of the seven thousand, five hundred
homes in the community are grow house operations. Now then, now,
(04:33):
this is an area where marijuana enjoys limited legal protection.
A lot of it's grown for medicinal uses, depending if
you talk to straight is state or federal authorities exactly
and uh, and then according to Cannabis Culture in Vancouver, Canada,
the estimate runs as high as one out of every
five homes, Yeah, are grow operations. That's it's pretty scofican.
(04:55):
And then the other interesting factor that uh, that I
that I've heard about is we all know that the
housing market is a mess, you know, rising for closure rates.
Rental property is really cheap, so it's a buyer's market growers,
it's a grower's market, so it's not hard to get property,
um that's secluded enough to hide all the you know,
(05:16):
equipment that you're going to need for grow operation. And
then if you do go with a rental property, I
mean you may have a property a landlord who's more
of an absent tea type and doesn't come and check in.
But we were talking about this before, and it seems
like the obvious thing to do would be to buy
a property. Yeah, it just seems like if you're going
to invest all this money in an illegal operation like this,
(05:39):
you're not gonna want the landlord potentially dropping by to
you know, to check on the water heater or something, right,
I mean it's not just you know, getting some soil
and you know, sticking a marijuana plant in a pot.
I mean we're talking thousands and thousands of dollars, and
depending on scaled operation, that could even go into the
hundreds of thousands of dollars. So again, we could see
(05:59):
this more being a homeowner rather than a rental type
of type of person. And the other thing is they're
not always residential. This is one of my favorite things.
Um Florida, which seems to have a ton of grow
house news stories. I don't know if they're cracking down there,
if all those orange grows are getting mad about you know,
marijuana being the big crash cash crop. But they found
(06:21):
a grow house in the mall of the Mall of
America's not to be confused with that big old mall
in Minnesota that has a similar name, like right next
to like the Orange Julius Place, and Wow, it was
in a storage room and they found some huge plants,
like three to six ft high, but they didn't find
who was running, said Greg. I guess not. I guess not.
(06:43):
So that's kind of rundown on grow houses and whatever
your thoughts about pot legalization, you still probably don't want
to live next door to one, right, Yeah, it goes
beyond uh, whatever your personal issues may be regarding the
the growing, sale, or use of marijuana, because most of
most of these are illegal operations and as such by criminals.
(07:09):
So so what a criminals have. Sometimes they have scary
dogs and guns, guns, and sometimes criminals get into fights
with other criminals that shoot each other right right right
in cases of that. So so yeah, they're gonna it's
gonna be a basic um illegal element to it, and
they're gonna be criminals around about. And they're not only
going to with their guns and their dogs. They're not
(07:29):
just going to be protecting that um that that crop
from from the police or whatnot. They're going to be
concerned with other criminals because this is essentially a house
just full of money, So you're going to have the
curacy equipment, lots of pot. Yeah, it's gonna it's gonna
have a bull's eye on it for anybody who knows
about it. I mean in Atlanta, that's the equivalent of
(07:51):
having like a house full of price flat screen TV
is just right for the taking, essentially right, So it's
a target, no doubt. And then they also tend to
have quite a lot of electrical issues, right yea, and
uh that's a big one. Yeah. The main reason for
this is that you can't the average home is not
built with this kind of an operation in mind. For instance,
(08:14):
a successful grow house operators, according to Cannabis Culture, tend
to prefer a thousand wat horticulture bulbs for each for
each fifteen twenty plants. And what's a normal lightbulb. Normal
lightbulb incandescence run for fifty watts, and your compact fluorescent
lightbulbs are between nine and fifty two. Your average room
(08:35):
in a house is only wired to handle about a
thousand watts, So if you're gonna have multiple bulbs in
one room, you're gonna have to rewire it. So these
guys have to basically jerry the house to maintain this
kind of electrical use. Plus, uh, there's often a lot
of ventilation equipment, there's extra air conditioning to help control
(08:55):
the temperature and keep it in the in the margins
that they want for optimal growing. So yeah, they have
to often just rewire the entire house to get this
kind of situation going, and professionals who do it, It's true. Yeah,
there are guys who go in and know exactly what
they're doing and set these things up professionally for um,
(09:16):
you know, criminal organizations or whatnot that are investing in it.
But then other guys inevitably are not going to really
have a clue. They're gonna have as much of a
clue about rewiring an house as I do. And you
may not care about that house burning down, but you
will care about when your whole neighborhood burns down, right, Yeah,
Because that's another side of this. Since they do use
so much electricity, and since that sends out, that's just
(09:38):
raises a red flag for law enforcement in the power companies,
a lot of times they're going to pirate their power
and that just adds even more potentially shoddy wiring into
the mix that could catch that house on fire or
put the rest of the neighborhood in danger from from
various electrical failures, electrical accidents. And then of course, once
(09:59):
I of the all that electricity is, it's a big
old carbon footprint associated with it. So you may not
care about the illegality of of a grow house operation,
but it's it's pretty unfriendly to the environment. Yeah, ironically
it's not very green. No, it's not very green. And
then you have all those hazardous chemicals like fungicides and
(10:21):
pesticides that may be improperly disposed of and entering the
community water supply, right, I mean it goes. It's the
same as with the electrical aspect of it. Nobody is
coming in from the city um or the county to
uh to make sure that the grow house is up
to code. You know it's gonna be. It's pretty much
no hole's bar in torrent in terms of safety. So
(10:41):
let's talk about some signs that you may be in
fact living next door to one. Okay, well, I think
the big one, the obvious one is is the smell. Yeah,
the smell sort of a pungent, acrid Christmas e like
you're at a music concert type of smell. Yeah, you
guys are probably familiar with it if you've ever been
(11:02):
outside counting or use public transportation right or e been
to or been to a rock answer? Like we said,
I mean, pot is is definitely out there to be smelled. So,
I mean the smell is a is a big one,
but growers actually try to counteract it. They'll put in
charcoal filters, will maintain that whole clothes growing environment that
we were talking about. And then we've even heard that
(11:23):
the plants some kind of strong smelling shrubs. I don't
know what those would be, and that could just be
something that the HBO series we made up, it could be.
But then it seems like it would be hard to
completely overpower the pot smell of a grow house, like
it would end up smelling like and rosemary, you know,
(11:43):
and not just lots of rosemary, definitely. And then you
have your stereotypical weird comings and goings, although that's not
necessarily going to be the case here. Um, you have
stuff like lack of house and yard upkeep. You have
kids toys lying about the are sitting around the yard,
but kids, that was an interesting one, that great out
of Canada. Yeah yeah. And then you have stuff like
(12:07):
generator noises because if people aren't actually pirating the electricity.
They may buy a big old honking generator that's running
all the time. Right, and you know, owning a generator,
it doesn't necessarily mean that you're you're operating a grow house,
but right, And none of these signs do in and
of themselves, right, But it can be kind of suspicious
if the guy in your suburban neighborhood seems to be
(12:30):
running a large generator behind his house all the time. Yeah. Yeah,
And then you have stuff like condensation on windows. Yeah, yeah,
this is an interesting one for colder areas, right, right,
lots of conversation on the windows, or so. You can
walk out on a snowy day and you look around
in every house in the in the neighborhood has snow
all over the roof and frost except for that one
(12:51):
house where it's where it's you know, completely black on
the top. And that could be due to really high
levels of heat throughout the house which are essentially melting
all the snow off of it. Yeah. And then you
could also have unusual amounts of steam like above and
beyond the washer dryer type of steam you're generating from, right,
Like they're basically smoke stacks. It could be a a
(13:14):
sign to worry about. Um. Also, did we mentioned covered windows. No,
we haven't mentioned covered windows. That's a they're actually two.
Side one is if you see a house that seems
to have lights on all the time, Um, you know,
maybe they're just you know, concerned about tripping over things,
but insomniacs or insomniacs, or maybe they're growing stuff back there.
A lot of places, uh, a lot of these growhouses
(13:36):
will cover up the windows, say with you know, foil
material kind of like plastic wrap too, I think, yeah,
kind of plastic wrapped as well. So if you see that,
that could potentially be a sign that there's some sort
of operation going on inside, or it could just mean
that they don't like the sunlight, or a fit of
government reading their thoughts. Right, that's a big one. Yeah, definitely, definitely.
(13:59):
Oh and this range hoses. Look out for strange hoses. People,
there maybe some strange hoses running from like what we say,
the doors, like out of doors and windows on the
outside of the house. Um, that's kind of suspicious. Yeah. Yeah,
So those are a few of the various signs. Oh
and then of course, if you if your neighborhood experiences
lots of blackouts. Yeah, that could be a sign that
(14:20):
somebody's really sapping the power. Yeah, definitely. Well, the Feds
have some more authoritative and definitive measures of telling if
you're living next door to a grow house, they can
they can actually check the power records, and it seems
like the police and the power companies are in close
contacts are and they're sharing this kind of information all
(14:42):
the time. And power spikes are huge, are a huge indicator,
So that's one thing they definitely look for. And also
sometimes they send out guys like manually to sort of
chick you know, to check on the wires and see
if it looks like people have been tampering with them.
And then there's also kind of the more high chech one.
Also water. Sometimes they can spot them by extreme water usage,
though again they sometimes try and counteract that by like
(15:05):
drilling holes in the little paddles that are in the
water pipes to see how much you're using. Would say,
what would tell us about the high tech one? This
is pretty interesting, pretty pretty interesting, the the infrared use
of INFRED cameras because because again this is a whole
lot of heat going on in a house. So if
you have an infrared camera, you can potentially see, you know,
like from a helicopter, which houses are really burning, you know,
(15:30):
with that heat. And there are a lot of issues
that have been raised about this as to whether or not, um,
that's really legal too, because you're essentially, you know, using
X ray vision to see inside people's houses to see
what's going on. Yeah, a lot of people aren't cool
with that for reasons of privacy and but that's but
it's definitely one of the tools available to law enforcement.
So if you had to pick, and I'm not wishing
(15:52):
this on you, what would it be you have to
live next to you a crack house, be a meth lab,
or see a grow house. I mean, you know, none
of them are really gonna be good for curb appeal,
But I'd probably go with the grow house. Yeah, I
definitely would after reading this. Yeah, because the crack house, um,
(16:13):
they're probably gonna be dealing out of that house and
there can be a lot of people coming by where
is the grow house? These tend to be places where
the product is produced and not distributed, right, so you know,
despite all the risk involved, they tend to be quiet.
In fact, they tend to be a little too quiet,
right right, And then there's a meth lab and yeah,
and that could blow up. Yeah, we don't want to
live next to scary, blowing up meth lab. So that's
(16:37):
about all we got for for grow house operations and
how to tell if your neighbor belongs on that show weeds. Yeah,
keep keep your eyes peeled, and your nose your nose
alert alert. Yeah. If you want to read more about
grow houses and a various legal and illegal substances, head
on over to how stuff works dot com. And we
have a blog to the sign stuff blog at blog
(16:59):
dot house stuff works dot com. That's all we got,
Thanks for listening, guys. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, is that how stuff works dot com.
Want more how stuff works, check out our blogs on
the house stuff works dot com home page
Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
works dot com. Wow, hey guys, and welcome to the podcast.
This is Alison, the science editor at how stuff works
dot com, and this is Robert Lamb, science writer for
help Stop works dot com. Today we'll be talking about
(00:24):
if you live next door to a grow house, some
signs that you might or might not. Yes, of course
they're right off the bat. First thing, Uh, what is
a grow house? We're of course talking about a marijuana
grow house. And this is exactly what it sounds like.
It is a marijuana growing operation that has been taken
indoors because if there's a wall up, then people driving
(00:45):
by aren't necessarily going to be able to see all
those plants growing. If a helicopter flies over, they're just
gonna see your roof. You know. Anytime you're growing a
high priced illegal crop like this, Uh, it's inevitably enough
growing indoors. Also, in an indoor in environment, these guys
can can have more control over exactly what goes into
their crop in terms of light, uh CEO two nutrients, nutrients,
(01:09):
temperatures essentially, right, they can basically be a like a
spaceship for plants, right, Hey, before we go any farther.
Of course, you guys know that growing pot in the
United States and many other places is illegal, so you
want to contact authorities if you suspect anything going on
in your neighborhood. And we're not telling you to go
(01:32):
snoop around your neighbors either, um, for just normal reasons.
That's probably not good a good neighborly thing to do.
And if you suspect that that somebody in your neighborhood
is up to some sort of big illegal operation, then
obviously you want to turn to the authorities and not
go snooping around yourself. Although it is sort of fun
to be Scooby Doo, it's it's occasionally, yeah, fun to
(01:53):
think about, fun to watch this episodes, just don't enact
it in real life. And then, of course nobody at
how stocks Works or Discover or Robert or I even
we're not we're not advocating anything to do with marijuana.
So now that we got that out of the way,
let's keep going with this grow house staff. Yeah, because
the science behind grow house is actually pretty interesting. We
have a whole article on how grow houses work at
(02:15):
the house stupp works dot com. There's a huge market
for it. For one, I mean, there's a huge marijuana
market in the United States. I don't think we're telling
you guys anything that you don't know. Um. I came
across this one stat this guy named John Getman over
at drug Science dot org. He's a former president and
the director of the the lobbying type of organization for
performing marijuana laws in the States. Anyway, Getman says that
(02:38):
marijuana is the largest US cash crop, about thirty five
point eight billion production value in two thousand and six.
So that's talking like way past corn way past soybeans,
way past wheat, sugar beets, all the obvious contenders. And
then of course there's you know a lot of people
like to like to smoke marijuana. You have a built
in market there for it, and just depending on your
(03:01):
on the going market, right, just one marijuana plant can
produce like a thousand dollars worth, uh in the form
of like a half pound. But we know we're going
to get some readers who are going to argue with
that and say it's lower. It fluctuates. It definitely does
fluctuate depending on the quality stuff. For many people. Yeah,
that money is irresistible. H no doubt and and uh
(03:23):
and so these grow houses pop up all over the
place and we're talking and it doesn't even have to
be a grow house actually, I mean you can learn
it can be a condominium and a high rise. I
mean we encounter these everywhere and say, you don't want
to devote your whole home to to the growing of foreriwana.
You can have a little grow cabinet apparently that you
can buy us all on online that was unseale for
(03:47):
strictly a hydroponic operation. Uh. And you have this little
cabinet that you grow your potting and then you can
also have cores for cooking, right or herbs for cooking.
Of course that's what they're after. And grow how is
all are all over the place really US Canada, which
is a most of the most of the research we've done.
I mean, they're a good neighborhoods, yarn bad neighborhoods there, ubiquitous. Yeah,
(04:11):
and and these are some illuminating stats. Um here just
giving an idea of how widespread these are, according to
Los Angeles Times, uh, in the Humbout Humboldt Humboltle County
in the Humboldt County area of California. They estimate that
up to a thousand of the seven thousand, five hundred
homes in the community are grow house operations. Now then, now,
(04:33):
this is an area where marijuana enjoys limited legal protection.
A lot of it's grown for medicinal uses, depending if
you talk to straight is state or federal authorities exactly
and uh, and then according to Cannabis Culture in Vancouver, Canada,
the estimate runs as high as one out of every
five homes, Yeah, are grow operations. That's it's pretty scofican.
(04:55):
And then the other interesting factor that uh, that I
that I've heard about is we all know that the
housing market is a mess, you know, rising for closure rates.
Rental property is really cheap, so it's a buyer's market growers,
it's a grower's market, so it's not hard to get property,
um that's secluded enough to hide all the you know,
(05:16):
equipment that you're going to need for grow operation. And
then if you do go with a rental property, I
mean you may have a property a landlord who's more
of an absent tea type and doesn't come and check in.
But we were talking about this before, and it seems
like the obvious thing to do would be to buy
a property. Yeah, it just seems like if you're going
to invest all this money in an illegal operation like this,
(05:39):
you're not gonna want the landlord potentially dropping by to
you know, to check on the water heater or something, right,
I mean it's not just you know, getting some soil
and you know, sticking a marijuana plant in a pot.
I mean we're talking thousands and thousands of dollars, and
depending on scaled operation, that could even go into the
hundreds of thousands of dollars. So again, we could see
(05:59):
this more being a homeowner rather than a rental type
of type of person. And the other thing is they're
not always residential. This is one of my favorite things.
Um Florida, which seems to have a ton of grow
house news stories. I don't know if they're cracking down there,
if all those orange grows are getting mad about you know,
marijuana being the big crash cash crop. But they found
(06:21):
a grow house in the mall of the Mall of
America's not to be confused with that big old mall
in Minnesota that has a similar name, like right next
to like the Orange Julius Place, and Wow, it was
in a storage room and they found some huge plants,
like three to six ft high, but they didn't find
who was running, said Greg. I guess not. I guess not.
(06:43):
So that's kind of rundown on grow houses and whatever
your thoughts about pot legalization, you still probably don't want
to live next door to one, right, Yeah, it goes
beyond uh, whatever your personal issues may be regarding the
the growing, sale, or use of marijuana, because most of
most of these are illegal operations and as such by criminals.
(07:09):
So so what a criminals have. Sometimes they have scary
dogs and guns, guns, and sometimes criminals get into fights
with other criminals that shoot each other right right right
in cases of that. So so yeah, they're gonna it's
gonna be a basic um illegal element to it, and
they're gonna be criminals around about. And they're not only
going to with their guns and their dogs. They're not
(07:29):
just going to be protecting that um that that crop
from from the police or whatnot. They're going to be
concerned with other criminals because this is essentially a house
just full of money, So you're going to have the
curacy equipment, lots of pot. Yeah, it's gonna it's gonna
have a bull's eye on it for anybody who knows
about it. I mean in Atlanta, that's the equivalent of
(07:51):
having like a house full of price flat screen TV
is just right for the taking, essentially right, So it's
a target, no doubt. And then they also tend to
have quite a lot of electrical issues, right yea, and
uh that's a big one. Yeah. The main reason for
this is that you can't the average home is not
built with this kind of an operation in mind. For instance,
(08:14):
a successful grow house operators, according to Cannabis Culture, tend
to prefer a thousand wat horticulture bulbs for each for
each fifteen twenty plants. And what's a normal lightbulb. Normal
lightbulb incandescence run for fifty watts, and your compact fluorescent
lightbulbs are between nine and fifty two. Your average room
(08:35):
in a house is only wired to handle about a
thousand watts, So if you're gonna have multiple bulbs in
one room, you're gonna have to rewire it. So these
guys have to basically jerry the house to maintain this
kind of electrical use. Plus, uh, there's often a lot
of ventilation equipment, there's extra air conditioning to help control
(08:55):
the temperature and keep it in the in the margins
that they want for optimal growing. So yeah, they have
to often just rewire the entire house to get this
kind of situation going, and professionals who do it, It's true. Yeah,
there are guys who go in and know exactly what
they're doing and set these things up professionally for um,
(09:16):
you know, criminal organizations or whatnot that are investing in it.
But then other guys inevitably are not going to really
have a clue. They're gonna have as much of a
clue about rewiring an house as I do. And you
may not care about that house burning down, but you
will care about when your whole neighborhood burns down, right, Yeah,
Because that's another side of this. Since they do use
so much electricity, and since that sends out, that's just
(09:38):
raises a red flag for law enforcement in the power companies,
a lot of times they're going to pirate their power
and that just adds even more potentially shoddy wiring into
the mix that could catch that house on fire or
put the rest of the neighborhood in danger from from
various electrical failures, electrical accidents. And then of course, once
(09:59):
I of the all that electricity is, it's a big
old carbon footprint associated with it. So you may not
care about the illegality of of a grow house operation,
but it's it's pretty unfriendly to the environment. Yeah, ironically
it's not very green. No, it's not very green. And
then you have all those hazardous chemicals like fungicides and
(10:21):
pesticides that may be improperly disposed of and entering the
community water supply, right, I mean it goes. It's the
same as with the electrical aspect of it. Nobody is
coming in from the city um or the county to
uh to make sure that the grow house is up
to code. You know it's gonna be. It's pretty much
no hole's bar in torrent in terms of safety. So
(10:41):
let's talk about some signs that you may be in
fact living next door to one. Okay, well, I think
the big one, the obvious one is is the smell. Yeah,
the smell sort of a pungent, acrid Christmas e like
you're at a music concert type of smell. Yeah, you
guys are probably familiar with it if you've ever been
(11:02):
outside counting or use public transportation right or e been
to or been to a rock answer? Like we said,
I mean, pot is is definitely out there to be smelled. So,
I mean the smell is a is a big one,
but growers actually try to counteract it. They'll put in
charcoal filters, will maintain that whole clothes growing environment that
we were talking about. And then we've even heard that
(11:23):
the plants some kind of strong smelling shrubs. I don't
know what those would be, and that could just be
something that the HBO series we made up, it could be.
But then it seems like it would be hard to
completely overpower the pot smell of a grow house, like
it would end up smelling like and rosemary, you know,
(11:43):
and not just lots of rosemary, definitely. And then you
have your stereotypical weird comings and goings, although that's not
necessarily going to be the case here. Um, you have
stuff like lack of house and yard upkeep. You have
kids toys lying about the are sitting around the yard,
but kids, that was an interesting one, that great out
of Canada. Yeah yeah. And then you have stuff like
(12:07):
generator noises because if people aren't actually pirating the electricity.
They may buy a big old honking generator that's running
all the time. Right, and you know, owning a generator,
it doesn't necessarily mean that you're you're operating a grow house,
but right, And none of these signs do in and
of themselves, right, But it can be kind of suspicious
if the guy in your suburban neighborhood seems to be
(12:30):
running a large generator behind his house all the time. Yeah. Yeah,
And then you have stuff like condensation on windows. Yeah, yeah,
this is an interesting one for colder areas, right, right,
lots of conversation on the windows, or so. You can
walk out on a snowy day and you look around
in every house in the in the neighborhood has snow
all over the roof and frost except for that one
(12:51):
house where it's where it's you know, completely black on
the top. And that could be due to really high
levels of heat throughout the house which are essentially melting
all the snow off of it. Yeah. And then you
could also have unusual amounts of steam like above and
beyond the washer dryer type of steam you're generating from, right,
Like they're basically smoke stacks. It could be a a
(13:14):
sign to worry about. Um. Also, did we mentioned covered windows. No,
we haven't mentioned covered windows. That's a they're actually two.
Side one is if you see a house that seems
to have lights on all the time, Um, you know,
maybe they're just you know, concerned about tripping over things,
but insomniacs or insomniacs, or maybe they're growing stuff back there.
A lot of places, uh, a lot of these growhouses
(13:36):
will cover up the windows, say with you know, foil
material kind of like plastic wrap too, I think, yeah,
kind of plastic wrapped as well. So if you see that,
that could potentially be a sign that there's some sort
of operation going on inside, or it could just mean
that they don't like the sunlight, or a fit of
government reading their thoughts. Right, that's a big one. Yeah, definitely, definitely.
(13:59):
Oh and this range hoses. Look out for strange hoses. People,
there maybe some strange hoses running from like what we say,
the doors, like out of doors and windows on the
outside of the house. Um, that's kind of suspicious. Yeah. Yeah,
So those are a few of the various signs. Oh
and then of course, if you if your neighborhood experiences
lots of blackouts. Yeah, that could be a sign that
(14:20):
somebody's really sapping the power. Yeah, definitely. Well, the Feds
have some more authoritative and definitive measures of telling if
you're living next door to a grow house, they can
they can actually check the power records, and it seems
like the police and the power companies are in close
contacts are and they're sharing this kind of information all
(14:42):
the time. And power spikes are huge, are a huge indicator,
So that's one thing they definitely look for. And also
sometimes they send out guys like manually to sort of
chick you know, to check on the wires and see
if it looks like people have been tampering with them.
And then there's also kind of the more high chech one.
Also water. Sometimes they can spot them by extreme water usage,
though again they sometimes try and counteract that by like
(15:05):
drilling holes in the little paddles that are in the
water pipes to see how much you're using. Would say,
what would tell us about the high tech one? This
is pretty interesting, pretty pretty interesting, the the infrared use
of INFRED cameras because because again this is a whole
lot of heat going on in a house. So if
you have an infrared camera, you can potentially see, you know,
like from a helicopter, which houses are really burning, you know,
(15:30):
with that heat. And there are a lot of issues
that have been raised about this as to whether or not, um,
that's really legal too, because you're essentially, you know, using
X ray vision to see inside people's houses to see
what's going on. Yeah, a lot of people aren't cool
with that for reasons of privacy and but that's but
it's definitely one of the tools available to law enforcement.
So if you had to pick, and I'm not wishing
(15:52):
this on you, what would it be you have to
live next to you a crack house, be a meth lab,
or see a grow house. I mean, you know, none
of them are really gonna be good for curb appeal,
But I'd probably go with the grow house. Yeah, I
definitely would after reading this. Yeah, because the crack house, um,
(16:13):
they're probably gonna be dealing out of that house and
there can be a lot of people coming by where
is the grow house? These tend to be places where
the product is produced and not distributed, right, so you know,
despite all the risk involved, they tend to be quiet.
In fact, they tend to be a little too quiet,
right right, And then there's a meth lab and yeah,
and that could blow up. Yeah, we don't want to
live next to scary, blowing up meth lab. So that's
(16:37):
about all we got for for grow house operations and
how to tell if your neighbor belongs on that show weeds. Yeah,
keep keep your eyes peeled, and your nose your nose
alert alert. Yeah. If you want to read more about
grow houses and a various legal and illegal substances, head
on over to how stuff works dot com. And we
have a blog to the sign stuff blog at blog
(16:59):
dot house stuff works dot com. That's all we got,
Thanks for listening, guys. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, is that how stuff works dot com.
Want more how stuff works, check out our blogs on
the house stuff works dot com home page
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