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

[anon32470837]

Ive been doing more picture comparing over the last few days to see if/how the newest copper treatment is doing. As usual, its not clear at all. Some areas seem to be doing better, but some not so much.

For the most part, areas where there is lots of new growth seem to be getting fuzzies back, but not everywhere and not evenly. In some pictures, in some places, the brown is winning. In other pictures of the same spot - its retreating and the fuzzies are winning.

Here is a comparison of the roots from right before I re-started the copper (left side) and 2 days later (right side).

Pics from today are similar in that its really hard to tell if there is significant improvement or not. The newest roots look great and are nice and fuzzy, but the older stuff is sometimes worse and sometime - maybe - better. The leaves look great with zero chlorosis, and the plant is still growing nicely. Maybe I will need to do like before, and increase the concentration to the point it damages the plant in order to kill off the brown crap.

Compare those pics above to this video I did yesterday. The video is closer to the colors I see by eye, but there is still a ton more contrast in the video than I can see by eye. Sorry its so shaky!

One very interesting thing I Noticed right away was that the root ball actually has three main lobes - one for each nozzle. It seems pretty clear that I am not getting a uniform mist distribution through out the chamber.

Ive been debating how to do the switch over to RO. I plan to drain the rez and clean it as best I can, but its going to need to be sterilized with either bleach or copper. I think what I will do is drain the rez, clean the filters, then refill with RO water, a low dose of nutes, PH etc, then add a ton of copper for a day to sterilize the system. Then drain and re-fill with RO again and let the copper levels drop naturally as the system adds in the fresh RO/nute water.

Every time my pump cycles - about every 12 hours - it only puts about 0.7 gallons of water back into the accumulator tank. The nozzles run off that tank - which holds about 3.7 gallons, so it will take several days to dilute the copper in the tank all the way down. Hopefully, that will kill the UFO (unknown fungal offspring) space alien brown crap - or what ever it is and the system will stay clean after that.

It just occurred to me Im going to have to revise my cleaning routines to use RO water too. Cant clean stuff in tap water or it will be contaminated again. Hmmmmm I may need to keep adding a small dose of copper or shock just to help with that. From all I have read, the spores can low around and are all over the place.

[anon32470837]

By the way - Im having second thoughts on whether its god or bad that the pictures make the brown look worse than it does by eye.

If I had never taken any pictures, I would think the roots were in (almost) perfect health. They really do look pretty darn good to the naked eye. A nice uniform light yellow/tan color with no slime and a nice fresh hay smell. I can see some of the fuzzy hairs on the newer growth areas. Its not really easy to see that the fuzzies are gone in most places now.

The pictures on the other hand show the details much better. All the areas where the flash has made the brown stand out have little to no fuzzy hairs. Its even more dramatic when I look at the pics from the USB scope. Its easy to see the brown areas have no fuzzies and the white areas do.

If I wasnt so hung up on fuzzy hairs, I could almost say screw the brown and just be a happy grower

[MicroDoser]

I get my individual elements from Canna in their Mono range. They do them in 1l bottles but I am sure other companies do them as well.

[anon32470837]

I will check them out - thanks!

[anon32470837]

@MicroDoser

I get my individual elements from Canna in their Mono range.

Canna seems to only offer the mono series in the UK. Shipping to the US is likely $$. Not available at all from Amazon.

As you said, Im sure there are other options, so I will need to do some more looking…

[anon32470837]

Ebay is trying to catch up to Amazon on shipping speed. The RO filter arrived today! I wasnt expecting it until early next week.

I stopped the copper today. Yesterday, I upped the concentration to around 3 PPM or so and left that run for 24 hours.

Now Im back to just some pool shock at around 2 PPM. Im going on the theory that if I knock it back hard with the copper, maybe the chlorine can keep it in check.

We will see if the fuzzies bounce back like they did last time.

[anon32470837]

Its been 24 hours since I stopped the copper and Im already seeing some new, white, FUZZY growth on the roots, and the plant is growing noticeably faster up top! I never did see any chlorosis in the leaves this time, but the growth slowed for sure while the copper was running.

BUT - the new fuzzy growth is primarily where the roots are closest to the nozzles, and therefore getting the most mist.

That seems to indicate two things to me.

1. There is definitely some THING growing on the roots that is killing off the fuzzy hairs. The copper seems to be killing it, or slowing it down - at least temporarily. That tells me its something biological - algae, bacteria or??

2. There are other areas that either remain brown, or are getting more brown, or at least not growing new fuzzy hairs, or not growing at all. Those areas all seem to be where the mist is not hitting the roots as strongly. I think there is some air pruning going on in those spots. They are also where the darkest brown and most shriveled up roots are.

After looking at that video I posted above of the inside of the root chamber, its clear that the roots are growing in 3 lobes that are oriented on, and growing toward, the three nozzles. The areas closest to the nozzles are now turning whiter and fuzzier while the areas furthest from the nozzles - about 1/2 way between the nozzles, and up top - are not doing as well or even getting worse.

Its looking like the lobes are getting to the point that portions of the root mas are starting to get shadowed so that they dont get the full misting and are drying out.

Here is a rough sketch of what I mean.

The interlocking yellow circles represent the lobes of the root mass. The nozzles are still pointed mostly straight up, but tilted slightly so that they create a slight clockwise swirl when they spray.

The red arrows are where the roots are dry and the white arrows are where they are getting fuzzy and growing the fastest.

Its clear that Im not getting anything like perfect, even coverage from these three nozzles. If it wasnt for the brown crap, three nozzles might be fine, but Im worried this uneven coverage will only get worse as the roots continue to grow and the lobes get bigger and more pronounced. Right now, each lone is roughly the size of a socker ball or maybe a little smaller. Im sure they will grow a good bit more over time - especially when I start flowering.

Im not going to change things now unless I have no choice, but for the next grow, I think I need to add the fourth nozzle. Thats going to cut into my nute savings, but I would rather have better looking roots. At the moment, Im still doing great as far as the low over all usage and draw from the rez, so I have room to go up without any problems.

In the mean time, Im going to increase the ON time from 0.8 to 0.9 seconds and see if that helps wet out the dryer sections any.

The plant has grown to cover roughly 1/4-1/3 of the scrog screen. I think Im going to give it another few days, then switch to 12/12.

[anon32470837]

Well, its been about 4 days since I stopped the latest copper treatment. I forgot to mention that I started back with low concentration pool shock when I re-filled the rez with clean water. It will be interesting to see if the pool shock delays the brown coming back. Last time, the brown started coming back about 6-7 days after I stopped the copper.

It took at least a day or more, but the roots have started growing much faster. The lobes where they get the wettest are growing the fastest by a long shot. The roots are now within about 2" of covering the nozzles. The ‘dry’ areas where the roots are shadowed from the spray are getting dryer, and are not growing much at all, even though I am now up to 1.0 sec ON time and down to 55 sec OFF time. It looks like the vast majority of the new growth is nice and fuzzy.

Im still debating how to handle this. I may have to go ahead and change things so I have 4 nozzles, but Im not at all sure where to put them to keep the roots from covering them up! Most of the reports I read indicated that the roots could easily spread horizontally as much as 15"-16" in diameter. Im now up to right at 16"-17" and they are still sending out horizontal shoots, and heading for the nozzles especially, but they are also adding new growth up top in some areas.

One other really interesting thing is whats happening with the roots that did make it to the bottom of the chamber. I expected them to head straight for the drain, but they are not doing that. One or two shoots have made it to the drain, but it doesnt seem like a real effort. Instead, they are spreading out fairly equally all over, and they are mostly very fuzzy. Plus, recently they have started to grow vertically and the root mat on the bottom keeps getting thicker. Its now about 3" to 4" thick in some places. There is still brown mixed in, but that seems to be mainly directly under the root ball above. Im assuming that doesnt get as much runoff, plus its probably had some additional nutes striped out by the time it drips down through the center of the root ball.

I suppose its a good problem to have roots growing too well, but its still a problem.

So far, its looking like running the copper for a few days at hi levels, followed by no copper, is a workable way to handle the brown in a pinch. Im hoping the added pool shock will delay the return of the brown - maybe for a long time. I’ll know in a few days if its working.

I need some time to process pics, but I will post some comparison shots later.

In the mean time, here are some comparison shots. Note that the pics still make the brown look far worse than it does by eye, but where there is a lot of brown, there are fewer or no fuzzy hairs.

This is the root mat. One the left is how it looked the day I stopped the copper - 4 days ago. On the right is tonight.

This is comparing two days ago to today.

This is the root ball from two days ago compared to today. Unfortunately, I didnt start taking the wide angle shots with this view until two days ago. All the older pics are with the normal lens, so they cant really be compared side by side very well.

As you can see, its mostly getting wider. Its also growing thicker from top to bottom, but not by much. In fact, the bottom side is starting to thin out some. Im assuming thats from lack of mist.

[anon32470837]

I almost forgot - I wanted to point out to @SuperiorBuds whats going on with the root mat on the bottom.

It seems to be doing great with no special attention paid to it and no extra media to grow on. I think it may have a higher ratio of fuzzy to non fuzzy roots than the root ball above. You can probably see that there is a roughly circular piece of black plastic covering the bottom of the fabric pot. It is aprox 16" in diameter and collects the runoff water and feeds it into the hole in the bottom that you can see. It then runs into my collection tray, below the pot, after feeding through the sensor for the TDS meter.

Im thinking you may not need to do anything special for the roots that reach the bottom. As long as they get misted, it looks like they will do fine.

I just remembered, you are running much higher flow rates, so this may not apply after all. Something interesting to think about anyway

[SuperiorBuds]

Yeah, I’m really temped to give just straight HPA a try again this time. I still want to stay away from D2W again at least for this time around. (Just in case I need to add the secondary flow later on.)

It’ll be interesting to see if I can still pull off large trees w/ just the HPA setup too.

Glad your roots are recovering! How are the tops coming along?

[anon32470837]

You might want to see how the tests go with your new nozzles before you commit. The flow rates and droplet sizing should be quite different (better I think) from your old nozzles. It might be low enough flow rate, with better droplet sizes, for D2W to work for you.

I still dont feel like I have the ideal droplet size, coverage, flow rate, etc yet - but - I think Im at least in the ball park.

To me the main indicator is that the roots are (mostly) growing sideways rather than growing down. Plus, when the brown isnt fucking with me - I get tons of fuzzy hairs.

Other than being slow growing, the plant is doing fairly well - considering. Im right at 2 months of veg time and the plant is now filling roughly 1/3 of my scrog screen and growing pretty fast at the moment. I figure Ive lost at least two to three weeks of growth while I was doing the copper and heavy shock doses. The plant pretty much stopped growing both times I did the copper and seemed to slow down a bunch when I did the heavy pool shock.

Right now its roughly the same size as my earlier individual plants were at 6 weeks. Ive got maybe 20-25 branches for bud sites, so I think Im going to switch to 12/12 tomorrow. I want to finish this grow early enough to get another one in before the hot weather starts back up next spring.

The main stem is about 3/4" in diameter.

Which reminds me - how big is a “tree”? Ive never gone more than about 1" stem I think.

[anon32470837]

I just finished adding a fourth nozzle. I was able to slightly twist/turn/bend mounts, swivels, etc so that two of the existing nozzles moved a little closer to the one in back. Those two were already a little too far apart and the main “dry zone” was right in front between those nozzles. So I just added the fourth one in between those two.

I had been running at 1.0 ON and 55 OFF for the last couple of days, so I dropped the ON time down to 0.8 and set the OFF time to 60 seconds. If my assumptions on the math are valid, that should be better coverage but with a slightly lower over all flow rate. As usual, I will need to check the roots periodically to see how they react to these changes and adjust as needed.

Im real curious to see if this helps convert my tri-cornered hat root ball into a rounder shape.

[SuperiorBuds]

@anon32470837

You might want to see how the tests go with your new nozzles before you commit. The flow rates and droplet sizing should be quite different (better I think) from your old nozzles. It might be low enough flow rate, with better droplet sizes, for D2W to work for you.

I think my biggest concern is that if I have problems like I did last time I want to be able to transition over to the NFT w/o tearing everything apart and making a mess of the setup. If I can keep the drain in place to the res I should be able to run the aero with low flow (and hardly anything running back to res), then if a problem pops up I can turn on the NFT flow and feed like crazy.

@anon32470837

Which reminds me - how big is a “tree”? Ive never gone more than about 1" stem I think.

I usually call anything w/ a 1" or greater trunk a tree. Just one of those old habits that dies hard haha. In our soil grow I never get to the 1" mark unless it’s our once-a-year outdoor plants, but my hydro experiments always seem to produce monsters.

[anon32470837]

I didnt realize you were going to run a separate water line for the NFT option. I had just assumed you would turn up the nozzle flow rate, but a separate feed line makes sense if you want to regulate them independently.

I just got back from one of our family Christmas gatherings and took a quick look at the baby. Wow! Tons of growth today up top and in the roots. The new nozzle is already generating new growth in its area, plus the rest of the roots are showing new fuzzies.

I cant help wondering if the is due to the new nozzle or is the plant finally getting over the copper and starting to grow like it should? I’ll take it either way.

I have been adjusting on/off timings now that the new nozzle is in place trying to get back to a good point where the droplets that collect on the roots look right. Im starting to get a feel for what size droplets are good or bad. The best seem to be the very small ones scattered all over.

If you have large droplets collecting on the tips of the roots, thats too much flow and/or not enough dry time. The roots will try to grow into those large drops on the tips, and that takes them right to the bottom of the chamber.

Im currently at 0.7 seconds ON and 60 sec off.

[anon32470837]

I need to re-read the instructions on my LITFA bottle. Im about to get in trouble. Im bored, and this could be bad for my poor plant. I cant find anything that really needs to be done. As a result, I am having powerful urges to fiddle/mess with/adjust/tinker/experiment/re-build SOMETHING!!

To distract myself, I went back to looking for better ways to get 50 micron droplets into a root chamber. I decided to do some more looking into HVLP sprayers. Along the way I found a PDF with info on droplet sizes with HVLP spray guns. Im not all the way up to speed on all the acronyms, so I dont fully understand all of it yet, but this section below got my attention big time.

It looks to me like an HVLP gun could put out the droplet sizes we are looking for when spraying water.

The other thing I ran across was that the ultrasonic foggers run at about 1.2 mhz. I thought the megahertz range was well above ultrasonic, but I dont really care. Seeing that made me wonder if you could use a lower frequency ultrasonic generator to produce larger droplets? I dont know anything about ultrasonic transducers. I seem to remember they are frequency specific because they use crystals. Are there tunable versions? It could get expensive to experiment…

[anon32470837]

Grumble grumble fuss and fumble! I am getting lazy and now I regret it. I wrote down all my notes and calcs on nozzle flow rate testing in a spiral notebook. I had every intention of copying the whole mess into the word doc I use as a grow log - but I didnt. Now I cant find those pages!!

The reason Im upset is because I just put together a spreadsheet so I can easily see how changes in on/off timing, and the number of nozzlesin the system, effects the over all flow rate. The problem is, the spreadsheet predicts a much lower flow rate than reality - about half!

I suspect I have made a simple math error, or false assumption, or a bad measurement somewhere in the flow testing process - or in this spreadsheet. Without those original notes I have no clue where the error is.

Also, I dont think I re-did the tests with the new 70 PSI springs and modified ADV valves, so maybe that is where the problem is.

I will have to repeat the flow tests I guess Thats not going to be real easy with this huge root ball.

Anyway, for what it may, or may not be worth, here is the spread sheet. I think some of the results are interesting. The ‘good’ flow rate values seem to fall within certain ranges that look to be somewhat consistent. At least the spread isnt as large as I thought it would be as far as the range from too dry to too wet.

Looks like I cant up-load the spreadsheet itself? I can email it to anyone who is interested.

hmmmm maybe I can just change the extension? The “PDF” below is actually a ZIP file. Just change the extension and un-zip it.

flowrate.pdf (9.1 KB)

[anon32470837]

Its been seven days since I stopped the latest copper treatment and started back with the 2-3PPM pool shock. Thats how long it took last time for the brown to start coming back strongly.

So far, things are still looking good. Im seeing daily new white fuzzy growth, so I am happy with that part. I am assuming its the pool shck thats keeping things going good, but who knows for sure.

On the other hand, there are still large areas with no fuzzy hairs and in some places the brown is spreading. Im not at all sure why its growing in some places but not others.

Im tempted to try heavy local chlorine spraying by hand in the brownest spots. Still debating that.

With the added nozzle, Im seeing wetter roots of course, so Ive been lowering the timing cycle. Im now at 0.6 seconds ON and 65 sec OFF. I started that last night and Im seeing new, fuzzy, horizontal growth.

I Like horizontal growth. Thats tells me Im in the ball park timing wise and mist wise.

[MikeM]

Man this thread is such a damn inspiration. Really have enjoyed your journey here - I’ve called my S.O to check out your pictures/vids on more than one occasion, excellent project!!

[anon32470837]

Wow! Thats an awesome complement! Thanks

[anon32470837]

Time for another root tour vid. Its still shakey, bit its only a minute long I like this as a way to visualize the entire root mass. i find it easier to visualize how things are going over all much better than just individual pics. The pics are still best for details though.

One detail I saw in the vid that I couldnt see in the pics is that the rear nozzle is about to be buried in roots. Im going to have to get back there and do something. For the moment, I will just bend the nozzle so it points more straight up.

Here is a side by side. On the left is 11 days ago, center is 5 days ago, right is today.

Here is a closer shot of the ‘dead zone’ thats in front between the original two nozzles. This area now has a nozzle between the original two that is centered on this dead zone. Its interesting to me that the brown roots dont seem to be putting out many new white shoots. Instead, the areas on both sides are sending horizontal shoots into that zone.

The matt on the bottom continues to grow as well. I am now having to move shoots away from my drain every other day or so.

Earlier today I sprayed some concentrated pool shock on to the brown areas. I really soaked it hard. Its only been a few hours, so no visible changes yet.