Oops - forgot the pics…
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I have messed with them enough to know how to work them, but not enough to understand exactly how they work. The pattern is adjustable by something like a proportioning valve, which can pass air to the holes that shape the spray.
The nozzle/needle combo dictate droplet size. Most that were used with the materials I was spraying are medium in the 225-250u range for spray stains, or medium-large at 400u or so for thicker lacquers as far as i remember.
I think it would be pretty easy to use one of those for this purpose. They are a dime a dozen at garage sales, pawn shops, etc.
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The question is, can one be easily modified to put out much smaller droplets in the 50 micro range?
Also, how loud are they? I only used one one time, and its been many years ago. I seem to remember it being kind of noisy, but Im not sure on that. It was in a shop that was already noisy.
Well, my new plan actually works! By placing the air stones in a skinny tube, you can get a steady flow of droplets that look, to my eye, to be in the ball park size wise. I have 1/2" diameter stones, so I put one into a 10" long piece of 3/4" PCV pipe. It puts out a nice flow of droplets that can be seen a couple of inches above the top of the pipe.
That got me all excited, so I did a short flow test. Unfortunately, the results got me all UN-excited again. The flow rate is only 20 cc / hour from a single stone. Compare that to one of the nozzles Im using now at 2650 cc/hour.
So, I would need more than 100 of these to equal one nozzle as far as flow rate. This might work ok for a very small volume - like whats left at the top of a DWC bucket, but not a large HPA root chamber.
Im going to keep playing with this, but unless the flow rate can be increased drastically, its a dead end.
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Im going to have to quit doing math late at night. Especially after taking some of my med capsules!
This airstone idea may not be nearly as far off as I originally said.
My ecologic nozzles put out roughly 0.74 ml/second of ON time. But Im only running them at 0.8 seconds ON and then they are OFF for 60 seconds or so. That works out to about 48 seconds of ON time in each hour. That works out to a flow rate of only 35 ml/hour per nozzle.
This air stone looks like it can do 20 ml/hour, so not that far off at all. Two of them would equal one nozzle, so in theory, I would only need 6 stones to equal my 3 nozzles.
The huge advantage is the air stones would be putting out a steady, constant flow with no wet/dry cycle, so possibly you could get by with even less flow.
This is worth looking into further I think.
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I guess I should post a note over here too. Ive got the dam brown crap back on the roots. Been posting up-dates over here:
So far I have tried heavy duty pool shock treatments with no success. Next step is going to be some algaecide of some sort. Still looking into that.
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It’s been a while, so here is an up-date.
AAARRRGGGHHHH!!! I am feeling really frustrated the last several days.
This brown algae crap is driving me nuts. The heavy duty pool shock treatments (4ea one minute dunks in aprox 200PPM chlorine) did seem to at least slow it down, but they nearly killed the plant at the same time. On the plus side, the new root growth that started a few days later, seems to be – mostly - nice and white and rather vigorous. The roots have started growing fairly fast the last three days or so, but there are still brown sections in various places.
The problem is, I can’t tell the difference between roots that are air-pruning vs ones that have the brown crap growing on them. Actually, you can spot severely air-pruned roots because they turn dark brown and shrivel up, but roots in the early stages of air-pruning look just like they have the brown crap on them.
I’ve been playing with timing trying to eliminate, or at least reduce the large water droplets that accumulate. The main goal being to get some fuzzy hairs to start growing, but I have not been successful. The new roots are growing pretty fast, but I cant seem to get any fuzzies back.
The problem is in trying judge if the mist ratio is too low and causing air-pruning - or - is it the brown crap spreading?
Ive also been keeping up the pool shock at between 2 and 4 PPM. The goal there to help keep the algae from starting up again, but I cant tell is thats working or not. I am getting new brown sections, but is it the brown crap or air-pruning?
The question is – which of those three things is keeping me from getting fuzzy roots? Or, is it all of them together? I suspect its some combination of all three, but I dont know what to do about it.
I know the brown crap kills the hairs. I also know over misting, AND under-misting will keep the hairs from growing. The pool shock got rid of the few fuzzy hairs I had when the brown crap first showed up, so its bad for fuzzy hairs as well.
On the plus side, the plant looks pretty happy now that I stopped doseing it with toxic levels of chlorine. Also, the roots are growing again, and Im seeing some side branching, but its not nearly what I was hoping for.
Anyway, I don’t know what to do about this - short of starting over. The copper algaecide will be here tomorrow. Im hoping it will kill off the algae without killing the plant or wiping out the roots. Then maybe I can get back on track. We will find out soon…
Here are some current pics.
Oh, yeah, there is one other strange thing going on that I have not noticed in any of my other grows. Every evening around 8-9PM, the leaves start drooping. I have not been able to figure out why. The next morning, its all perked back up and looks great. Im running an 18/6 lights now, and they turn OFF at 1AM, and back on at 7AM. So this is occurring about 13-15 hours into the lights on time pretty regularly. There are no significant changes in PH, or temps occurring when this happens, so I have no clue why.
This plant also seems to be growing rather slowly. Its been just over 3 weeks since it sprouted, and it is only about 3" tall. It has two pairs of 3 finger leaves, one pair with five fingers, and one pair with seven fingers, plus a new set thats too small to tell yet.
Ive never grown C99 so I have no clue if this is normal or very slow growth.
These are the roots from three days ago, and then today.
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Cindies are vigorous girls. They will show you as soon as this ugly brown stuff is defeated. Fingers crossed here - good vibes.
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I’ve been waiting for this update, thanks for posting!
Seems that there is way less brown stuff than in the last plant, right? So the shock, however detrimental to the development of the plant, did kill some brown stuff.
Just thought I’d mention - my algae in the perilite of the northern lights in coco that I fed from the infected rez went away. I did not do anything to it - I guess not wet enough.
But how can it grow in an entirely dark chamber ja beyond me. The fucker is photosynthetic, and really small, how does it get enough?
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Thanks! Thats good info. Im not killing this baby. She might die anyway, but Im not giving up 
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Perpaps they found something that eats them.
The only thing that got me rid of nasties at my DWC once and for all was bennies. So try I keep a healthy environment for them.
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Yeah, the pool shock did help, but at a cost.
Interesting info about your going away on its own. Dont know what to make of that though. I cant exactly dry out the root chamber
Good question about how they survive with no light, but that reminds me of something else I read recently that I forgot to mention. Apparently, this brown/mustard algae crap can already be in your well water. So, that sounds like it can do just fine with no light?
In any case, I suspect my well water does have this crap in it. I cant imagine how else it got back in there after the super sterilization I did on the system. Or, maybe its floating around in the air, or I get some on my hands when Im outside or?
Im hoping the new copper deadly nuclear waste toxic poison potion kills this stuff - and leaves the plant in decent shape.
I still have some hope. So far, the brown crap has not actually killed any of my plants. It does cause a lot of stress, but maybe I can still get a harvest of some sort.
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At times like these, I always remember that we do not live in a world that follows the rules of magic (just run with it, it makes sense).
As such, organisms and diseases cannot just spontaneously appear. They have to have evolved over time and be present somewhere to infect a plant or animal. In the same way that just being cold will not magically create a cold virus out of thin air to infect you and make you stay in bed for a week with the flu. So, you become susceptible to something already existing in the environment.
Somewhere, somehow, there is a reinfection vector in your environment. A lot of the time it is pieces of kit, other times it is the room, and more rarely it is bought items or your water supply.
With a reinfection vector, there are strict limits on how effective any treatment will be. You may find your efforts better spent removing that vector than constantly dealing with the symptoms of it.
If you get your water from a well I suspect that the most. If that is the case then no matter how strongly you disinfect, you will be reinfected as soon as the steriliser is weak enough for plants to grow properly. It is a no-win scenario unless you stop the reinfection at the source.
Have you considered going RO for your HPA?
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Ive tried spraying concentrated bennies directly on the roots and also putting them in the rez with zero results. From what I have read, the bennies are killed when sprayed through a hi-pressure system. On top of that, it seems like algae isnt one of the things they eat - at least not this type.
Very good points. I am also starting to think that its my well water that is the source. Over the last two days, the brown crap has taken off again. Thats with me keeping the rez at somewhere between 2 and 4 PPM of chlorine. The heavy dose of pool shock seems like it is slowing it down, but not killing it. I dont see much point in trying more shock at higher doses. Im sure that will just kill the plant by the time I get the dosage hi enough to kill the algae.
So… time to start the toxic copper trials. The chelated copper algaecide I linked to above arrived today.
The bottle recommends an initial dose of 2 oz/5000 gals of water for an infected pool. You are supposed to let that circulate for at least 24 hours.
I wanted to dunk the roots and net pot in a small container that is a bit smaller than 5000 gallons, so I had to figure out how to get a small enough amount into aprox 1 liter of water. Google says one drop is .05 ML. One drop is the smallest quantity I can measure, so thats what I started with.
2oz/5000 gallons = 59ml/5000 gal = .0118 ml/gal. Thats a little less than 1/5 of a drop, which is hard to measure. Since I was only wanting to leave the roots in the solution for a few minutes, I decided to go more than the recommended dose. So I put 1 drop in 1/2 gallon of water. Thats about 8.4 times as the recommended strength.
When I pulled the roots out, there was a lot of brown. It doesnt show up all that well in the pics. I decided to cut off all the really bad parts. That was maybe 15% of the root mass. Then I dunked it in the solution for aprox 5 minutes and put it back in the root chamber. I let the normal nute solution continue to spray while I mixed up a batch for the rez.
For the rez, I added 2 drops into aprox 12 gallons of nute mix. That should have worked out close to the recommended maintenance dose on the bottle. That recommended maintenance strength is 1 oz/5000 gallons or 1/2 the initial strength.
I tested the copper concentration of the concentrated dunking solution, and it was somewhere beyond 1 PPM. Thats the max the test kit can read. The rez tested out to somewhere between .05 and 0.1 PPM as near as I can interpret the colors.
I am tempted to up the concentration in the rez to the higher level, but Im going to wait and see how the plant and roots respond. If the plant hasnt had toooo bad a negative response by tomorrow mid day, I will do a second dunk in the stronger stuff.
By the time I started this process, the plant had already entered its evening droop time, so I cant really tell any effects yet. I will be checking every hour or so until lights out, and then in the morning.
I’ll post results tomorrow.
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Forgot to reply to this.
I thought about installing an RO system last spring, but I decided not to do it. My well water comes out at between 80-100 PPM most of the time, so I decided it wasnt necessary. Plus its going to be a lot of trouble plumbing it in. My grow room is not in a good location to run water lines too without crawling under the house - which I am not really willing to do. Im too old and too out of shape to make that any fun at all
But, now that you have brought it up, Im re-thinking that. Do you think an RO filter would take out the algae? I have no idea how large the spores would be.
If I dont run lines to the grow room, that means a large holding tank in another part of the house. I’ll have to think how and where I can do that. There is also the cost issue. I really dont have the money in the grow budget at the moment.
This toxic copper stuff better work.
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But how much time you gave for the bennies to colonize and start to do the job ?
I am not sure if the aero roots are a good medium for them to colonize, never saw anyone doing bennies with aero.
DWC is realy easy once you have a large root mass.
Here are my roots, you can see the pythium starting to infect the roots:
Then some weeks later:
It works, take some time, but our environments are not the same. The “good” news is that the place where the nasties where all happy eating stuff is actually above water.
Also, bennies + chlorine (or toxic stuff) dont really mix
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Yes I do think that. It can remove chlorine and other elements dissolved in the solution, Algae are quite a bit bigger than that AFAIK.
It would still mean, as you say, running pipework or having a holding tank and pump.
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I know none of this is fun Larry but I am grateful for the extensive way you’re trying to defeat this crap. I still am not sure if this is the same stuff that I battled during last run, but having a documented treatment plan of what didn’t work is just as valuable as what finally does.
Here’s hoping you can finally knock this stuff out man.
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Thanks to all of you for the support and tips!!!
So far, I am seeing no bad effects of any kind from the copper treatment. This morning at lights ON, the plant was back to being all perky and the leaves were reaching for the lights again - just as every morning.
So, I did another 5 minute dunk in the super strong stuff early, and then just now. This morning I also doubled the copper strength in the rez. That brings it up to the full recommended dose for treating an infected pool. I havent checked the PPM’s yet - been to busy getting ready for tomorrow, but I will report back when I do.
Finally got a break from holiday prep work. The copper is now up from the initial level to 0.15 PPM in the rez as near as I can tell with the test kit.
I did one more 5 minute dunk about 8 PM, just as the evening leaf droop was starting. Hard to tell if the droop is worse than normal or not, but I think that will be the last dunk for a while.