If you don’t plan on making seeds, you might want to pull those males out of there… 
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I have no desire to make seeds. I need medicine.
So, these are full on male plants right, and not hermies?
It looks like the whirly bird is also male, but Im not 100% sure. The maybe balls are still too small.
I am disappointed. It looks like all three are male.
Guess I better go start some new seeds…which ones is the question. I have more of these, but Im not sure about that. If all three are male, thats bad odds for what I will get next time.
I still want to try a CBD heavy strain, so I think I will go for @Sebrings other CBD strain - Dragon Tongue that I got from @ReikoX
You could also just let them grow …
You’ll be nursing seedlings for a while anyway…
And you can let them develop a bit more to confirm that they’re male plants
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Too late -they are in the trash already.
This gives me an excuse to make some more changes while the new seedlings wait to pop.
Im really disappointed though. The roots were dam near perfect.
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If you thought your rainforest environment was challenging before (and to be sure, it is), adding huge amounts of free-floating pollen would not make you happy, I’m sure.
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Yeah, thats a very good point. Glad they are gone. Guess I really should try to get any old polen out of the tent now that I am thinking about it.
Is just spraying with water/soap good enough?
Should be, but I’d make sure to wipe everything down fairly well. Usually works fine for me, unless I do an open pollination, which requires a lot more work as that stuff gets everyfreakingwhere 
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Yep thems some full on dudes!
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Nice clear drawing!
I would raise the nozzle to the upper part of the chamber. Remember roots WILL go for the nozzles, and if they are down low, gravity helps speed up that process. Plus, droplets fall, so if they start out up top, it means more chances they will find a root before they hit the floor.
With the air solenoid between the nozzle, and the final regulator, you will need to pay attention to the type of regulator. The relieving type will waste more air this way. On the other hand, Im not sure it will work the other way. You would need to test it to see or use a non-relieving regulator or dont worry about air losses.
Not a problem, but Im curious why you are using a main regulator that is only 3 bar with a pressure drop valve? It would be fewer parts and simpler, just to use the regulator that comes with the compressor - which should be rated higher than the tank can handle.
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That anti-tamper alarm system ain’t working! 
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Wait! What? Oh crap! I installed the anti-CRS alarm instead of the anti-tamper alarm! No wonder Im all out of LITFA
Note for those young bucks who are not effected due to being too young to have learned anything worth remembering yet - CRS = Cant Remember $hit. Of course it also applies to old stoners who have forgotten more than the young bucks ever knew. Hmmmm actually it probably applies to all stoners… 
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As I think to use an additional external air tank I would like to prevent any problems with mechanical failures so I would use an additional pressure drop valve. At the same time I want to use this valve to drop pressure in the air line if I want to do maintenance (actually this is the main reason).
The main pressure regulator is intended to set pressure to lower value in the main line. I believe it’s better to keep main line pressure high enough to compensate any drops before nozzles but at the same time as low as possible: it will reduce leakage problems and decrease failures consequences: having a hole in 8 bar line might lead to a bigger problems than in 2-3 bar line. I’ve bought a cheap regulator 0-8 bar with integrated filter and 5 micron filtering inserts so I’m going to keep pressure at +0.5 - +1 bar to the highest working pressure I’ll choose.
I would like to try to not touch roots first just as an experiment. Will see if mist be able to go up. If it will go up then having a flat fan nearly at the bottom might - possibly not but might - do air trimming. May be it worth to try “air only” spraying for this reason as an additional cycle. May be it worth to make a deeper chamber. I have two issues with it:
- Can’t find any deep enough recipients on sale for reasonable price.
- I would like to have it vertically stacked, so I have limits on the vertical size of the whole “cell” (including lights and ventilation).
Thinking about doing a chamber by myself from the very beginning, but still didn’t find cheap and convenient material for it.
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@heathen - I will get back to you later today - I need to read your post more carefully.
I need to get to bed, but I wanted to post this real quick . I was looking at a video I made earlier of the new nozzles placement and noticed something I have never seen before - droplets agglomerating when they collide. Actually, this is almost impossible to see with the naked eye as its happening. Something about the LED light from my cell phone in an other wise totally dark room seems to make it show up.
Ive read about this but never seen it until now. Kind of cool. If you look closely at the center of the video, where the streams cross, you can see larger droplets forming as the droplets collide, and dropping straight down to the floor.
Its more noticeable later in the video as the mist builds up in the chamber.
I guess Egon had it right in the ghost busters - never cross the streams!!!
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I think I see what you are doing. I think your making it a little more complicated than it needs to be, but hat will certainly work just fine. One thing - you wont have to worry about pressure drops between the compressor and the solenoid. The major drop will occur between the solenoids and the nozzle. Thats the one you need to concentrate on most. Your supply pressure might drop 50% when the solenoid drops, but if you are at 2 bar, then even a 50% drop should still leave you more than enough to feed the nozzles.
However, that same 50% drop after the solenoid means your nozzle never sees the set pressure - so it could be running well below what you think its running at.
That should work fine as long as the early roots get enough mist. You can always just have longer ON times to insure that they get enough. I am fixated/obsessed with low flow rates, so I went the direct spray instead for the early growth.
Interesting idea, but I doubt that will work at all. It takes several hours to air trim a root. No way you can spray air only long enough to air trim without completely drying out the entire root mass. Take a look at my videos again. Notice how much air movement there is on each pulse. Then remember that my pulses are under one second and only at 5 PSI. They are also blowing into a 55 gallon chamber that allows almost free air flow through the fabric. Inside a smaller plastic container, the air flow will be much more violent. You will not have any sort of zone effect. Dry air will go everywhere instantly.
If you try it, it might be best to only risk a few plants the first time
I think deeper is better, but Id say start out as deep as you can easily and see how it works out.
Im having trouble picturing what you mean by vertically stacked. Do you mean a module that includes rez, root chamber, plant chamber with lights, then start over on top of that?
I forgot you want to start out small and then expand. I have no experience with that sort of thing.
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Darn it! Now that I know this is happening its bugging me. Im trying to think of ways to eliminate or at least reduce the amount of agglomeration thats happening.
Im going to run some more tests and see what I can see… I have several days to kill anyway
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Well, not really independent modules but something like this:
This is really interesting. I actually thought to put there some kind of electronic pressure sensor or at least air gauge to check what is going on on this part. Why is this pressure drop happens? Of course we will need to raise pressure on open so it will take some time (it should be short enough if a solenoid is near a nozzle I think) but 50% after that seems pretty much…
I think to start from something like salad 
just to be sure the system works well.
Chain misting? More solenoids and timers, of course. Or just DIY timer from arduino/esp32/stm32 + solid state relays. But more solenoids are necessary, of course. Or just one nozzle but increase ON time accordingly?
This is pretty much interesting. I remember atomizer post where he said that 100L root chamber needs ~1.3L (or 1.6L?) per 24 hours on early grow stages and 2.3L (or 2.6L?) when plants are grown…
Is it really necessary to spray roots directly? Don’t roots obtain a thin water film in that case preventing them from consuming mist? Your roots look amazing so I believe it works but it is interesting why.
Not directly connected but I would really-really have at least a couple science-based sources of atomizer words. Someone else’s experience is a good thing but if we would base on experience only then what is the difference between us and ancient farmers?..
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Ok, agglomeration seems to be a non-issue. Well, it would be more accurate to say its an issue that I cant do anything to change, so I will live with it
Ive video’ed a series of tests with the nozzles pointed in all possible directions and a series with only one nozzle firing. It turns out there is the same agglomeration no matter what I do. Even the single nozzle firing across the large diameter of the chamber does it. In fact its most visible in that configuration - single nozzle firing across.
After close study of the videos, it looks like its mainly a matter of how much mist is hanging around in the chamber when the nozzle fires. For the first cycle, when there is no mist in the chamber, there is very little visible agglomeration, but the more mist builds up or ‘hangs’ in the chamber, the more large droplets form and fall when the nozzle fires.
So, Im going to ignore this particular “problem” as it seems to be an inherent characteristic of the system. The ideal is to never let the mist degrade to zero, so you will always have mist hanging in the chamber when you fire the nozzles. So no way to avoid this issue and still have a uniform environment.
So, now Im going to re-watch the videos to see which angles work best as far as distributing the mist evenly.
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I think that could work just fine. The only point I would make is you will need to be careful about the root chamber temps in the one(s) on top. Heat from the lights will rise, making it progressively more dificult to keep the root chamber temps under control. You may need to add insulation or ventilation between levels depending on how much heat the lights produce.
The 50% number was just a wild guess just to have a number to talk about I actually doubt there will be that much drop between the compressor and the solenoid, but it could be worse between the solenoid and the nozzles.
Because the fluid, air in this case, is flowing and is compressible, the pressure will drop continuously as you progress from the solenoid to the nozzle tip. Actually, from the regulator to the nozzle tip.
In other words, if you installed your gauge very close to the solenoid, it might read very close to the full set pressure, but as you move the gauge closer and closer to the nozzle opening, the pressure will read lower and lower and it will be lowest right at the nozzle tip. I dont really know the exact drop % - 50% was just a wild guess. It will depend on too many variables, plus I have no idea how to calculate that kind of fluid dynamics situation. For testing, I would put the gauge as close to the nozzle as possible and go from there.
I dont have another gauge thats accurate at low pressures, or I would try that test myself. The only gauges I have laying around are 0-230 PSI (1.6MPa), and barely show 10PSI on the needle.
My reply above addresses this. I dont see any way to stop this from happening. Once the chamber is full of mist, the agglomeration just happens when the nozzle fires. It doesnt matter if its a single nozzle or several. These droplets dont bounce. Once they it anything they stick to it. It doesnt matter if its a wall, floor or another droplet. When two of them hit, they form a new droplet thats the sum of both. I would guess that if the speed is high enough, maybe the droplets would shear apart again after the impact, but it doesnt look like thats happening here, or if it is, I cant see it in the videos.
Yeah, unless you have a huge huge root chamber with lots of open space, there is no way to avoid spraying directly to some degree. That will be especially true later in the grow when the roots start to fill up the chamber. If nothing else, the side spray - which is where the largest droplets are - is much wider than the published specification. On the videos I did the spray appears to have a narrow cone, but if you put your hand in the chamber, you can feel droplets out to at least 45 degrees. Id be willing to bet that if those fan nozzles say they are 45 degree, they will put out at least some spray wider than that, and those will be fairly large droplets.
No, if a droplet hits the root it will stick. It wont matter if there is a film of water or not, the droplet will stick. Plus, that film of water will still feed the plant, and if it is thin enough, it will still be 100% oxygenated, so it wont hurt anything. The only down side to the film, is it will more probably take the form of large droplets that will run down to the tips of the roots and hang there. The root will then try to grow into that drop, which will just lead it to the floor.
Early in the grow cycle, I deliberately over mist to some degree. I want the roots to grow mostly down at first, so they dont go straight for the nozzles.
That is very frustrating for me too. I have tried to find the original NASA study, but have had no luck. No one else seems to have found it either. There are other studies like the one you found, but they are never really directly related to our uses or situation. We are left to stumble along - like ancient farmers indeed - trying to figure out the small details that are so important.
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Ok, the root chamber remodel is mostly done. Just need to tidy up cords and do a little more sealing to prevent light/air leaks.
I didnt really change much at all. I played with some slightly different nozzle locations and net pot locations, but it all ended up pretty close to where I started. The main difference is an all new foam lid/ceiling for the root chamber and a much better designed access hatch. The vertical height increased by 1" so the chamber is now 30" tall and just over 58 gallons. That extra inch of chamber height reduced my grow space height by 1", but Im going to be concentrating on autos and they seem to like staying short, so no problem.
The seeds are in the mini-hempy cups and two have come up and two more are close. It will be several days before they are tall enough to put in the net pots.
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