Time for some notes on whats working and whats not.
The ice chest is working great as far as keeping the nutes cool. I can put a single 16oz frozen water bottle in and it keeps the temps below 68F for a full day or more. It will initially drop down to 63-64 and slowly climbs back to 68F. Thats when I add another bottle. If I do 32 oz frozen bottle it lasts almost two days. So far, its been relatively cool in my grow room this year. It has not gotten over 80 yet, but Ive been doing creative things with fans and open windows.
On the bad side, I noticed a nasty smell in the rez yesterday. A real rotten smell which makes me think it was some kind of nasty bacteria. I think maybe the rez was a little too well sealed up and not getting enough O2. So, I drained, and cleaned it with pool shock. When I refilled it I added some more shock so its a steril rez for the moment. I also rigged up a stop which hold the lid open a tiny amount - to allow some more air circulation.
I had been running the circulation pump one minute every 8 hours, but I changed that to 1 minute every hour. At the 1min/8hr setting, I was seeing no rise in PH over time. Its been about 16 hours with the pump running 1min/1hr, and the PH rose from 5.7 to 6.0. So Im going to increase the off time on the pump until it takes at least a day or two to climb that hi and see how it goes.
Hopefully, the increased circulation/aeration will keep the nasty crap from growing. I really dont want to do sterile if I can avoid it, but I may have no choice.
The plants look pretty good to me as far as color and growth, but one of them still looks to have an oddly formed second set of leaves. That could just be genetics.
The nozzles, solenoids and water, and air feed systems all seem to be working perfectly from a mechanical stand point.
The roots are still giving me some trouble though. Ive lost all fuzzy hairs twice and even gotten some browning on some of the roots. I am assuming its from what ever was smelling up my rez, but the mist timing may still need dialing in.
On timing - Im having second thoughts on my idea for using very short ON times. That doesnt seem to be working very well, so Im back to “filling the rez” and using a longer off time = 0.6/45 for now. Too soon to tell how thats going.
The main problem is - its really hard to tell if the root issues are from bad timing or root rot or PH issues or feed issues or or or or something else Im not aware of.
There still isnt a lot of root mass, so that also makes it more difficult to see whats happening. On the other hand, its only been one week, so I may be expecting too much for this early a trial. More dialing in required…