Adventures in Hydro #2 - LP Aero/NFT mash-up - or - switching to HPA?

[anon32470837]

Here is the latest root comparison LPA vrs HPA after 5 days. At this point, the LPA plant had more root mass than the HPA for sure, but the current HPA plant looks much happier than the LPA plant did at this same point.

One thing that makes this comparison a little unfair is that the HPA roots have had a lot more variation in their watering than the LPA plant did. The LPA setup was very consistent over its entire grow time, but the HPA plant has been subject to extremes of drying out and being drenched. So, its hard to say this is a good comparison, but Im doing it anyway

Here they are again - day 1, day 3 and day 5.

[anon32470837]

I think Im about ready for the fishing trip as far as things running with out me - I hope!

Im still not dialed in on the spray times with the new nozzles, but I know Im getting close because I have fuzzy roots starting to show up again!

The newest shoots are fairly fuzzy, but the older, longer roots are still mostly smooth - especially lower down where the water accumulates as it runs off. Some of the shorter old roots are starting to fuz up a bit. Its still a long ways from perfect, but I am very happy with the progress so far.

Im down to .7 seconds ON and 55 seconds OFF at the moment. These nozzles have a flow rate of about 1.5 ml/second at this pressure.

So, each nozzles does 1.5 ml/sec x .7 seconds = 1.05 ml per cycle. At one cycle every 50 seconds, that works out to 1.05 x 50/60 = .875 ml/minute x 60 = 52.5 ml/hr x 24 = 1.26 liters per day x three nozzles = 3.78 liters per day total through put or almost exactly one gallon per day of use from my rez.

I am very pleased with that over all usage rate. It makes drain to waste very doable. Thats less than half what I would be throwing out every week with a normal rez change with my 15 gallon rez, and lower than if I did a rez change every two weeks. On top of that, I running at less than 1/2 my normal nute strength, so Im saving a good but on nute costs and a lot less work doing rez changes and daily adjustments of PH, EC etc. I still have to check the PH the day after I top off the rez, but its staying fairly stable after that.

The usage rate should get better once I get dialed in all the way, although it will likely go up again during flowering when they start to eat a bunch. At the moment, the roots are staying on the wet side at my current settings. Id rather do that while Im gone. I let them dry out too much yesterday and got some brown tips. It happens pretty fast!.

[anon32470837]

They survived! Im back from 5 days of pike fishing, and everything seems to have gone well while I was gone. No mechanical issues, and nute usage was right in line with my calculations. Not only that, but one of the babies is growing quite a few fuzzy roots!! I am very pleased.

The other clone finally popped roots while I was gone. Most of those are not fuzzy though. It looks like one of the babies is getting significantly wetter than the other.

The interesting, and somewhat concerning thing to me is that the roots look great on both - BUT - the plants dont look all that good to me. In fact, the second clone that just started to show roots, looks really bad up top. For now, Im going to increase the lighting to try to speed up some new growth.

[sk1]

Yay, I got a fuzzy too

[anon32470837]

hehehe. Ive got a bunch of those too

[MicroDoser]

@anon32470837

Basically, its whole ‘thing’ is to provide the absolute thinnest possible layer of water/nutes to the roots at all times. The theory being that a super thin layer of water will self aerate and stay at 100% DO all on its own.

I think I already do this. I made my own system (as I tend to do) which is VERY good at avoiding the horror of Pythium. Before I got my chiller I would often see tank temperatures in the high 20s C to low 30s C yet no sign of root rot. I attribute this to the very high amount of aeration possible with my system.

It is a vertical system where two inline central heating pumps (to get decent flow at 8ft height) feed a 22mm pipe connected to four spurs, each with threex15mm outlets spaced at about 2 1/2 ft. This means you have three levels, each with four outlets one in each corner (with a tap on each for regulation) that feed three rings of trays, made from guttering. 1m of guttering with an end, and a gutter end. Tap at one end, water flows to gutter end (ensure a 2-inch drop over length) then down the square pipe into the gutter end of the gutter below. Bottom gutter feeds back into the tank.

The taps will only put out just enough water to cover the roots. When the roots grow, the level of the water rises with them. The water waterfalling down the downpipes and gutter ends aerates it so much I do not need air stones or anything else.

Have to make dinner now but I can post some photos later if you need more info.

[anon32470837]

Sounds like an ideal NFT setup. Pics would be great!

[MicroDoser]

This is the basic format. Tap one end, water runs along the flat-bottomed gutter, drains out of the other end. Rinse, repeat. I would imagine you could get four levels high without too much water ending up in the bottom one if you had the height. Bottom one drains back into the tank. Please ignore the state of the paint It ends up shaded by plants so there is no need for mylar or anything to aid reflection.

Close up of the tap bit. Note relatively low flow.

Pump halfway up the side to increase pressure and flow at the top. Washing up sponges muffle vibration in the wall.

Fan hung centrally at the top, lights in cool tubes hanging in middle extracted from the bottom. In a 6ftx6ft room, 8.5ft high I have 3 x 600W HPS.

Wiring kept well away from water, goes out of the room through the ventilation ducting hole.

Water is not very deep initially, ends up nearly to the top of the guttering at end of flowering as roots slow the flow and grow deeper. Top of water always only just over the roots. Last cycle I got 1.104GPW and you might be able to see that I do not have room for the fourth section at the top because of a ventilation box inclusion meaning I have 11 lengths, not 12, also one whole side is half-length because there is a door there. I estimate I could get roughly 1.3 GPW in 11-12 weeks from this system (14 days veg) if I could put full-size lengths on the door side, and use the wasted space that is boxed in. I put two plants per length (one on the short lengths) for a total of 19 plants.

I have developed this over the last ten years to be very automated. The only thing I have to do manually is to fill the nutrient buckets and prime the pumps although I think this year I will automate the pump priming.

No need for any medium, I use the corrugated plastic tank top stuff cut into lengths to cover the gutter held on with cable ties. To hold the plant until it gets big enough, I use the neoprene discs from an aero propagator then throw them away at the end. Ventilation is key, there are a lot of plants in a small space so the air needs changing quite a bit. Both for humidity and temperature.

One last thing, I hang fencing about 1ft inside the guttering in a square so when the plants grow inward to the light they naturally find support there. This does mean it is a fill and forget system, it is very very difficult to get to the plants and in the last half of flowering, impossible to do so.

[anon32470837]

Thanks for posting those pics. That looks like a great NFT setup. So are you doing this as a vertical grow with the light in the center?

[anon32470837]

Ive been unhappy with the droplet distribution for a while now. No matter how I point the nozzles, the clone on one side always seems to be wetter than the other one. Yesterday, I changed how they were pointed and also changed the timing to reduce the flow rate. The roots on the good clone started drying out while the other one still stayed too wet.

These nozzles have a longer throw than the Hypros, so I decided to move them down closer to the bottom of the chamber by about 8". That should help in at least two ways if Im thinking this through correctly. It will allow the spray to spread out into a wider cone before getting to the top of the chamber. Hopefully, that will make for a more even distribution. It will also reduce the concentrated spray the one plant seems to be getting from the edges of the cone - I hope. It should also allow for more droplets to end up suspended in the air. Droplets dont bounce. They stick to any surface they hit or to each other if they collide. Having a longer distance to travel should reduce those hits and leave more droplets suspended for a longer time - maybe

More adjusting, waiting, adjusting, more waiting ahead…

[MicroDoser]

@anon32470837

So are you doing this as a vertical grow with the light in the center?

Yes, the cooltubes are attached to the fan and hang in the centre connected together and pulling the hot air out of the room from the bottom. Same spacing as the guttering but a bit higher.

The average plant gets about 4 Oz with the current density. I used to put only one plant per length and got an average of 6 oz. Best plant I had in one was 253G, about 9 Oz.

One good feature is the lights are hidden in a shroud of plant matter so there is hardly any IR emitted through the sides.

EDIT :

You could always run similar to a V engine layout for your misters and spray upleft and upright so everything is covered…

[anon32470837]

@MicroDoser

You could always run similar to a V engine layout for your misters and spray upleft and upright so everything is covered…

I may try something like that. At the moment, the nozzle are positioned near the walls of the chamber and angled mostly pointing up at about a 45 deg angle and slightly to one side. I only lowered two of the three nozzle because it was too much trouble to reach the one on the back side of the chamber. Next time I need to come up with a better way to access all of them.

Since I lowered the two nozzles, the mist does seem to be more evenly distributed, but its still not perfect. Im thinking I may extent the two lower nozzles a few inches closer to the center of the chamber and point them more directly up, but still at an angle. I’ll decide that tomorrow after I see how the roots respond to these latest changes.

I made too big a change last night before I went to bed and the roots dried out some over night. It sure is easy to loose fuzzy roots, but they come back in a few days if you have the settings in the ball park.

The clone with the larger root mass is starting to look pretty good, and is actually tarting to grow - finally! The other one still looks like it needs to be tossed out, but the roots are still ok, so Im going to see how it does over the next few days.

[anon32470837]

Arrrggghhhh!!! I am such an idiot!

Im going to have to buy a whole new case of LITFA, and order a new brain that has extra memory capacity.

When I got back from my fishing trip, the roots on both plants looked pretty darn good, even though the smaller one didnt have much fuz.

Unfortunately, I ran out of LITFA while I was gone fishing, so naturally, as soon as I got home, I had to mess with the timing settings trying to make it just a bit better. Even though I knew better, I changed the ON and OFF times at the same time. Of course, the roots dried out. I upped the flow rates again, and the roots mostly recovered, so of course I then tried adjusting things again - and the roots dried out again. Then I did it a third time. That time the roots did not recover nearly as fast. BUT - I went ahead and changed the position of the nozzles and just to cap things off with a super screw up, I forgot to turn the timer back on. So neither plant got misted for almost 6 hours.

The one thats been struggling is in really bad shape now and the one that was doing great is now just so so. It still looks ok up top, but the roots have large brown sections and dont fluff out to the sides any more. They just hang down and look really sad - like me

[SuperiorBuds]

Ouch man, on the bright side at least it was only 6 hours.

Before I left for New Mexico for a week I flushed and filled the res, and got everything setup for while I was gone. I adjust my timer while I’m flushing to ensure I don’t fill the accumulator with the cleaning solution, unfortunately before I left I forgot to adjust my OFF times from 3m back to 1m which caused all sorts of havoc. My super-strong stems became weak and limp, but they survived. Last run I had the mechanical timer fail on me, this time it was my brain that failed…

[ReikoX]

No, not BOTH the ON and OFF times! Here buddy. This bottle is on me.

[anon32470837]

Thanks man, I need a re-supply bad

But… … Im going to make another change first

Ive decided that a large part of my problem is trying to grow two plants in radically different stages of growth in the same chamber at the same time. One will always be needing different timing, and wetness ratios from the other. So, I have dumped the one that was near dead, and Im moving the good one to the center of the chamber from its current off-center location. Im also going to move the nozzles I lowered back up to a higher position in the chamber. The top most 3" or so of the roots are staying too dry while the lower parts are too wet.

More fiddling and fussing… good thing I enjoy this crap

[HappyHemper]

@ReikoX

Here buddy. This bottle is on me.

Good deal, this is “Advanced” LITFA too!

[anon32470837]

Well, after about an hours work I now have just one clone dead center in the chamber, and the two nozzles I lowered have been raised back up to about 2" below where they were before. So far, this seems to be working much better as far as getting an even distribution of mist to the roots.

It now seems like I have a very over sized chamber for a single plant, but thats fine for now. I need to keep reminding myself that this is all still experimental, and a work in progress

Im thinking that the next major revision for the next grow will be to make two smaller chambers - using smaller, 10 gallon stacked fabric pots - with a single plant in each one. The chambers would be 12" in diameter instead of my current 24", but still 22" deep. That would change the volume from 43 gallons to just under 11 gallons each, for a total of 21 gallons. That will require slightly less than half the volume of mist to fill them both up.

For now, Im going to stick with this layout and see how it goes.

[anon32470837]

Im now PHing the rez down to the 4.6-4.7 range in order to get the water that comes out of the nozzles to be in the PH 5.8-5.9 range.

Over the last several days I have been raising the EC slowly from EC .5 because the plants looked a bit pale and I was seeing some slight intervenal chlorosis. Yesterday I started to see tip burn after a couple of days at EC .8. Im going back down to EC .6. I started adding some cal mag last week at slightly under 1ml/gal (which added to the increased EC) and Ive increased that to about 1.25 ml/gal. So a little less Maga Crop and a little more calmag with an over all lowering of EC. Im still leary of these low EC numbers, but that seems to be what it needs, so Im sticking with it.

I still have not gotten back to where I was after 5 days of pure LITFA. The roots still look pretty droopy, but they are finally starting to branch out to the sides again, but still no fuzzies. It is very easy to screw this up and not so easy to fix it again.

Im about to decide to toss this clone out as well. It is refusing to grow much at all. It may have grown a 1/4" taller in the last two weeks - maybe. On top of that, 90% of the eaves are now single finger. There are a few 2 and three finger leaves and only one with 5. I think maybe these poor babies have been subjected to a few too many failed science experiments, and/or - to be more honest - too many stoner screw-ups. Plus it was taken from a seriously abused mom that is not in much better shape. I think it would be much better to have a healthy plant to start.

I’ll have some new C99 fem seeds soon, so if this baby hasnt taken off strongly by then, I will start one of those seeds and try it.

[anon32470837]

I retired that poor abused clone - but - when I checked the roots closely, there was some fuzzy coming back! So, its possible to recover fuzzies after you screw it up Unfortunately, the plant itself still was not growing at all, so its in the trash

This is what she looks like today - no change from more than a week ago.

I had one seedling left from the unknown un-sexed seeds I started, so I decided to experiment with it before my new C99 seeds get here. They will be here Monday, so it will take another few days to get them ready to transfer to the chamber of root death

In the mean time, I will see what settings this new baby likes when its this small. Hopefully, I can convert this t a chamber of life!

Here is a pic of the clones roots the day I got back from fishing. Lots of pure white fuzzy roots and shoots growing horizontally like there was no gravity.

This was three days ago - after I cut off a LOT of dark brown crap. No fuzzy

This is today after pulling it out. Some fuzzy roots coming back!

This is the new torture subject. Taking it out of a small Dixie/hempy cup and putting it into the stocks. There is no escaping now…(insert evil laugh here)