Looking at some of your leaves in your pre harvest images, I notice sometimes there is a brown dead leaf that had another leaf in front of it and where it was shielded from the light it was still green.
I think we are running too hot, nutrients not temps.
Our systems are very very highly tuned and designed to allow the plants to uptake silly amounts of nutrients and I think it is that they are working so well that is giving us problems.
I am now more sure that for my next run I will be keeping nutrient levels very much down compared to recent grows. I am going back to basics to reduce the possible interactions.
So you have a note of my next steps :
I will be running Canna Aqua Flores A+B, Plant Magic CalMag (at reduced strength 25%), Solar Green Power silicic acid, PH Up and PH Down.
I will not raise my EC above 600PPM (1.2EC), and only go over 500PPM in week 4 of flower.
I will be adding 30% tap water into my tank as it seems the CalMag effect of tap water is as good as a purchased bottle (at least for my local water, we are on limestone), this is around 100PPM.
Water temp will be 20.5C (same as this time)
Dehumidifier will be set to 80% in veg, 70% flower week 3, 60% flower week 5.
Air temps will likely be 26-29C Day 22C night
hehehe I really like your analysis - it make this result look pretty good
Seriously though, I agree there is a lot of room for improvement in future grows. Even if I only get the same dry yield as my last grow, I count that as a big success as far as how well HPA works over the other types of hydro Ive tried.
Between the weeks of heavy copper, and chlorine treatments, leaving the nozzles turned OFF three different times by accident, and twice by design, the over feeding, bad PH, algae, etc etc etc. - Im actually surprised Im getting much of anything. In my mind, its the HPA magic that has saved this grow.
Im still doubtful about getting those kids of yields. Im running the lights at 320 watts, so even 800 gms would put me well over 2 gms/watt. 800/320 = 2.5 gms/watt. If I did hit 1000 thats over 3 gms/watt.
Ive taken a few of those pods apart, and I cant find anything that looks like a seed, so now Im confused. When I processed the bud from earlier grows that had hermies, the seeds floated up to the top in the alcohol and were very obvious little white balls. They sure dont look like normal buds though. The only real surprise on the hermies (if thats what they are) is I didnt see them sooner. I was anticipating them from early on, and thought I was checking closely. Obviously not
Im going to process these just like the rest of the bud. The pods have lots of trics, so I dont really care about the seeds. I dont smoke, so it wont bother me in the end.
Thats another interesting point. Your earlier comment about lights and shaded leaves looking better has me wondering if the combination of too much light plus too hi an EC is double trouble?
I had noticed that most of the older, lower leaves looked much better. Plus the new leaves looked pretty good, but Im now seeing they also looked pretty dark and still had burned tips. All of that makes me agree that the feed levels have been too hi. My trouble started when I first fed them the Advanced nutes at north of EC 1.5, plus a heavy cal mag dose. Early in the grwo, I had kept the level well under EC1.0. Mostly down around EC 0.6 to 0.8 with a max of 0.9. At one point they were looking rather pale, which is why I tried upping the EC. I think I went way too far though.
According to Atomizer, HPA is supposed to require 1/2 to 1/4 the normal concentrations of nutes. That assumes good droplet quality and hang time - which allows for evaporation of the droplets before they get absorbed by the roots. I had that situation early in the grow, but not later when the root ball got tooooo big.
Im going to have to pay closer attention to what he leaves are saying next grow and adjust faster.
I just noticed some of your buds look a lot like some of mine - with what look to me like foxtails. That makes me wonder if this particular nute stress is a factor?
Time for me to get back to trim jail. I got tired last night, so Im only about 1/4 of the way throughâŚ
Possibly, the buds with foxtails are the ones closest to the light as are the leaves with the most damage.
If the nutrient strength is just too damn high it would give similar symptoms as the leaf cannot get enough water to process the nutrients it has.
Just found a âcanna guide to nutrient deficienciesâ. I will post the image for âcalcium deficiencyâ, it has interesting things to say about reasons for a deficiencyâŚ
Same here, although some of the lower buds also foxtailed, but not nearly as many or as badly.
AS I gid down into the canopy while cutting them back, it sure does look like the leaves that were shaded are less damaged, so Im liking your âtoo much light plus too strong nutesâ theory. Seems to fit my situation for sure. Also, a lot of the leaves that are still green are dark shinny green - too dark too shiny.
Im having trouble decoding that comment on evaporation. The way its worded can be taken different ways.
â*Problems with the evaporation caused by an excessively hi EC value, or by excessively hi or low humidity.â
That sounds like it could be too much evaporation or too little as far as humidity, but Im not clear on what the hi EC does?
Good read though! I do have most of those exact things wrong with my leaves.
I took that to mean that if the EC is too high then the plant finds it hard to pull up enough water to keep the leaves evaporating enough and so problems arise.
That the unaffected parts show signs of being overfed supports this IMO.
Some of this is going to be guess work. I have some new kidney stones starting up and I feel like crap, so Im cutting the cutting short. I decided not to process all the buds. Im going to toss out the seed pods and lower fluffy stuff that I normally would keep if it was frosty. I just dont feel well enough to keep going.
So far I have a total of 2039 gms of trimmed bud (wet) that Im going to process into RSO capsules.
I have another 320 gms of bud I cut that is mostly seed pods or light fluffy stuff. I left a bunch uncut. Im guessing maybe 1.5 times that much is still on the stems uncut that I would have harvested normally. That would be roughly 2700-2800 gms total wet weight. That amount should have netted me between 600 and 750 gms dry = very roughly in the 2 gm/watt range.
Im guessing I will net around 450 to 550 gms dry from the stuff I do process, but it will be several hours before I can get a dry weightâŚ
This is what I am leaving uncut. Oh, I almost forgot - I gave my brother three of the medium sized colas so he can try it out smoking before I dry it in the oven.
I did chuckle when I saw what you left on the plant, there are people who would regard what you left on as a decent result.
EDIT :
Just visited my local shop guy who gave me a bit more on what may be the cause of our leaf issues. When I said you were running HPA he was not surprised at all when I said you had the same issue as me. The first question he asked was âDoes he have a pressure release vent in his root chamber?â
On further conversation, it seems that too much pressure in the root chamber can, in a similar way to too high an EC, stop the plant uptaking enough water to allow enough transpiration to keep leaves healthy in full sun. He said the pressure would force nutrients into the root structure leading to an imbalance between nutrients and water in the same way osmosis can do so with an EC that is too high. this may be why HPA is run at 25-50% strength.
Every path I examine, it seems to come back to the same cause and solution. Not enough water is taken in by the roots and this leads to problems for leaves in full sun. And the solution is the same, a less strong nutrient solution
EDIT 2 : [I also mentioned the brown slime saying you thought it was in your well water. His only comment was âRoot zone temperature, itâs not the waterâ which made me remember you had the brown slime worse closer to the top where the temps were higher. Not sure what options you have but tighter fitting or more insulation may help.]
I just looked back at your âseeded unseeded budâ next to the can of drink and it reminds me of some of my lower buds. Is it a lot less dense than a normal bud, pale green in colour, and hardly any stiffness or strength in the stalk, and feels sort of âpuffed upâ?
My buds which have insufficient light or airflow go like that. I find that topping the plant, letting light and air get to them, and waiting up to a week makes them much healthier. Not that I do this, of course, I just chop them and process them with the rest
Last week I had to make an emergency trip as I could not contact my doser, or the PC in the same place. Normally, this is just my router resetting and getting a new IP address but after an hour it was still not up so I drove the 5 hour round trip to my plants.
I found my sockets had tripped when I got there. I reset the fuse and noticed my doser was still not on. I picked it up to look and water flowed out of the front.
Not ideal. Turns out a mixing pump in a bucket had become loose and put a bucket of silica solution out the top of the bucket between the lid and the edge and this flowed onto the shelf below where the doser was.
So I took that one home and brought out the test version. The urgency of needing to replace it meant I really examined the test unit and had an epiphany for a problem that has bugged me for about 4 months which was resetting the pumps to the wrong serial data mode and was stopping me putting that unit into service.
On the plus side, I now no longer need to use gravity fed solenoids (the reason I had to have buckets of solution over other things) and I am using my latest prototype, with peristaltic pumps.
So here is the latest version of my doser. It has capacity for up to 8 peristaltic pumps and 6 are fitted currently, it monitors TDS, PH, RH%, water and air temperature. It auto adjusts dosing amounts to stay within the tolerances set by the user, and seems very reliable and stable so far, still testing though. I want to run two back to back cycles with not a single issue before I will call the hardware cooked and ready. In the meantime, I will focus more on getting the software feature complete, at which point it would be ready to either put on Kickstarter, goFundme or similar to get some realistic amounts of development funding. It is at least 6 months from that point.
Here is the doser auto adjusting EC dosing to stay within 10PPM tolerance. It was maintaining 300PPM while the tank refilled, the trailing plot near the end was when it got full, the dip at the end was me dumping some solution as I realised I was using bloom and I need veg food in there so I will be changing the tank again before I fill the system.
I plan on making it very customisable. If required the customer could just buy a PH sensor, the doser, and a single pump and only control PH (and monitor RH%, air temp and water temp). It would be more expensive than current âPH onlyâ dosers but it could grow with the user, add another pump and you dose PH Up and Down. Add an EC sensor and another pump and you have nutrient and PH control and so on.
If a new grower bought the cheap option, it would grow with them as they grow into growing
I have questions and comments for you, but Im still under the weather - I hate kidney stones!
Some fast notes. I do NOT recommend processing bud when you are in severe pain and stoned. I over cooked one full cookie sheet of bud in the oven, and managed to drop and break one bottle of Ever Clear on my back deck. Oh my god what a mess. Lucky it was outside. The neighbors probably think Im a drunk and a stoner now with these smells!
Anyway, out of the 2039 gms I ended up with 380 usable grams. I had to toss out the third cookie sheet - it ended up weighing 112 gms dry. It looked and smelled burnt and was super crumbly. The other two were 182 and 198 ea. even though they started out almost the same weight wet.
If it wasnt for that dumb move, I should have ended up with around 550 gms for around 1.7 gms/watt. Thats not too bad considering what I tossed in the trash and gave to my bro. I cut off all the remaining canopy left overs you see in that pic above in a trash bag + the other floffy bud. It weighted over 2 pounds - but thats including stems and leaves. He can do his own trimming
Ok, Im going to get stoned again and go back to b edâŚ
Oh - Im not going to try the Fenton Reaction to clean the system. I did some more reasearch and that stuff is used to treat/destroy rubber chemicals and PVC waste material among other things. My accumulator tank has a rubber bladder and all the O-rings and seals are probably rubber or have rubber chemicals. I dont know if it will eat nylon, but if it eats PVC, thats too close for comfort.
So, I am going to do bleach and copper soak for a few days while I get better and sloooowly clean the tent and root chamber.
Oh 0 the other thing I fucked up was dropping the root ball - twice - while I was trying to get it out of the chamber. I managed to crush/compact/dent the crap out of it.
I have pics I will pst later. It didnt look as good as I hoped, but not terrible. There were three small spost that may have been root rot starting - mushy/slimy and dark brwn. Most was just off white with some small areas still slightly fuzzy and very white, and others darker brown but not slimy.
One or both of my solenoid pumps is crapping out. I have not taken anything apart yet, so Im not sure why other than its not an electrical problem. This started shortly after I raised the chlorine level waaaay hi, but I wouldnt expect that to damage the pump. They suddenly got far less noisy and wont raise the pressure. They do flow nicely with no back pressure.
So crap.
Ive been looking at the aquatec pumps for the last hour, and the only ones I see on their website that can do over 80 PSI are the 5850 series - but no one sells the model I need. The highest pressure model I can find is set to 80 PSI max output. I need minimum of 120 PSI, but 130 would be much better because it would cycle far less often.
I emailed Aquatec, but do any of you guys know if these pumps can ALL be adjusted to the higher output pressures? If not, how do you tell which model can or cant be adjusted? Or do you have to buy one that is pre-set to get that hi a pressure? The âmanualsâ they have suck and dont explain anything about adjustments at all. Also, most of the model numbers on sellers websites dont match up to the model numbers on the Aquatec website - which makes it hard to tell what the heck youre buying!
Aquatec # Preset Cut-off Adjustable Range Inlet/Outlet
PSW-240 40 psi 30 to 60 psi 1/4"
PSW-340 40 psi 30 to 60 psi 3/8"
PSW-260 60 psi 50 to 90 psi 1/4"
PSW-360 60 psi 50 to 90 psi 3/8"
PSW-280 80 psi 70 to 110 psi 1/4"
PSW-380 80 psi 70 to 110 psi 3/8"
PSW-2100 100 psi 90 to 150 psi 1/4"
PSW-3100 100 psi 90 to 150 psi 3/8"
Technical Specification:
Wetted Materials: Nylon, Santoprene, Nitrile
Switch Rating: up to 250VAC, up to 15 amps, UL recognized
NSF/FDA approved material
Single Pole, Double Throw
Normally closed
Donât know which or if their pumps are intended to work with those switches or if their pumps can get up to 120PSI reliably or not. I briefly looked at the Aquatec pumps and couldnât find a model specâd up to those pressures.
An alternative may be the use of a Proconn pumphead (attached to a motor), they have a variety of models most and can easily get up to 120 PSI+. Up to 250PSI.
Youâd need an external pressure switch and the motor.
You could repurpose a McCann booster or a McCann carbonator. The McCann carbonators, for instance, include a Proconn pump with a cutout switch set to 100PSI. Get rid of the tank (max working 100psi), swap out the cut-out switch. Used, can be had for about $200. Potentially less for individual parts.
This also looks interesting:
Donât know how to drive those or where they can be had, though.
I saw the switch specs on various sites, but they are not listed anywhere on the Aquatec site that I can find. Like you said - no indication of which pumps they will work with or which pumps can actually achieve the higher pressures. Very frustrating.
I like the Procon vane pumps, but the SS versions are out of my price range - even without a motor.
Ive looked at every single Aquatec pump, and the only one that lists pressures above 80 PSI is the 12 volt, 1 GPM 5800 pump.
But I cant find anyone selling the version I want. What is especially frustrating is the Aquatec site has different spec sheets than what are shown on other sites. For example, I found someone selling a 5853 (130 PSI version) that has a spec sheet that says it is 110 volt - but that spec sheet isnt anywhere on the Aquatec site.
Grrrrr
edit: the 110 volt 130 PSI model has a spec sheet dated 1999. The spec sheets on the Aquatec site have no dates but apear to be newer, so IM assuming the 110 volt hi pressure model is no longer made.
Iâll post a bit more about the pumps shortly but this caught my eye.
Iâd be very wary of ditching the pressure tank, namely because of something they called out in the specs you linked.
⢠8 VANES FOR LOW PULSATION
I would hate for my lines to pulse during a spray. This is exactly what happens to the lines between the pump and the tank now â theyâre noisy as all hell and I can only assume would cause for some weird sprays w/o the tank. The movement of those lines from the pump pulses are exactly why I purchased 3/8" mounting tabs for the lines.
I guess I should have stated that differently, replace the tank. The tank on most of those units seem to be rated at max working pressures of 100PSI. I think Larry wanted to push that to over 120PSI.
And, yes, the McCann unit has a hard lines between the pump and the tank. I did wonder why, I didnât really think of the pulsation.
I remember back a few one of you guys had talked about using paint spray equipment. Iâm not sure on mist size but itâs fairly precise at lower pressure. I use it at work finishing onsite, but I know itâs also set up on production lines. Probably more bulky inside the root chamber and maybe too fussy. I use it because itâs a precise toolâŚlots of adjustment fluid pressure, air cap and needle, volume of air and air pressure. I spray wood dye carried in a light solvent/acetone but run waterbased stuff through them occasionally. Water seems to spray but not sure on how fertilizer solution would react with the equipment. I tried to find atomization size but not a bunch of time atm.
I use binks stuff but lots of good manufacturers. Itâs a bit pricy but Maybe used is availableâŚthe good equipment can be rebuilt easily. Our big spring trade show is coming up maybe I can talk to some of the reps.
Ah gotcha. I do believe that @anon32470837 is running a higher psi tank though. IIRC heâs already running above 100psi.
Getting back to the pumps and max pressures Iâm going to quote myself from a reply I sent Larry.
The important part is the last paragraph there. These are booster pumps that are meant to be hooked to your already pressurized home water lines, they then increase the pressure to allow RO filters to work properly.
Going this route is definitely an option, but once you introduce air youâre talking about AA. Larry looking into this at first when he talked with Atomizer @ RIU so he can comment on where he landed on that. Personally I didnât want to add pressurized air to my already long list of requirements. (Though now that I have a full-garage air system that wouldnât be as much of an issue.) I know youâd get a much better mist w/ AA, longer hang-times and all, but Iâm just not ready to go that far.
Iâve noted the same thing for valves and such. A valve may state a max working pressure of 200PSI but the differential pressure between the outlet and the inlet would have a maximum that is lower, say 100PSI. The valve would fail to actuate even if the 200PSI overall is not exceeded. The differential working pressure usually seems to be in the fine print.
