Hey hey, day 36 on this flight of the UFO, we’ve reached cruising altitude and things are looking good. We’ll be serving up pictures first, followed by a rather lengthy discussion of reservoirs and nutrients that may be excessive for some folks. Sorry I’m wordy, you might have noticed.
On the left, Strawberry Cough in front, Diamond Kush in the rear… and on the ceiling. She does that.
Strawberry looking sweet
Strawberry tight up to the lights… and loving it!
Diamond closeup
A Diamond top that has grown past the lights, but not quite smashed its head on the ceiling. You can see some downward curl to the leaves up here, but they aren’t “clawing” from nutrient issues, she’s happy all throughout lower down. I’ve seen this from the Diamond before, she does it where she grows taller than the lights. Must be confusing for a plant to have gotten taller than the sun, but you can still see her starting to stack it on up here.
On the right, pair of Diamonds
Basking and stacking in the front row 
Man I have had such a busy week, I really gotta get in there and do some defo, but not tonight. Tonight it’s time to swap the res. Thankfully not as awful a job as in my earlier versions.
First I shutoff the pump, then I just reach into my buckets and pull the stand pipe to drain.
With the plant sites above drained into the res below I just close the feed valve to the upper level and open the valve to the hose connection in the res. Fire the pump back up and it drains easy peasy, and since I’ve plumbed from the natural drain of the sink my res is made from I can get every last bit out. If I want I can even start hosing down fresh water as I’m getting to the bottom, to rinse any buildup down before I refill. The plant sites maintain about an inch of water in the bottoms, so roots stay moist and happy and I have time to work.
When I drain I always check and note the ph and ppm on the way out. When I’m a good boy I check my values daily, or at least every two days, make sure things are humming and I dont need a top up. I always top up at least once a week, and try not to go more than two weeks without a full swap. But life gets busy and things are humming along nicely and you forget for a few days and…
Out comes the res dump at 250ppm and, shamefully, 4.2ph! Aaack! They got really hungry in the last few days, I’ve been running 400ppm, and they just wolfed that down. Luckily everybody still looks happy, despite that stupid PH. If I just used my portal gun to sneak into @pufferfishfiend 's garden and steal his Atlas Scientific sensors I would never have this problem, but I guess I’ll just have to be more on top of it till I can afford the upgrades.
When I fill I run a y splitter with shut offs from my utility sink with quick connects. One side runs through a Gardena flow meter and a Dramm Syphonject, then a hose to my reservoir. The other side of the y splitter is just a short length of vinyl hose into the sink. I can shut off the res side and run into the sink until I get my temperature where I want it. I keep a little water flowing in a small cup and a 2 liter measuring jug with the syphon intake sitting in the bottom of it.
When i’ve got the water running at the temperature I want I can turn on the hose branch and start filling the res. I can see how fast its filling on the flow meter and dose my nutrients into the 2 liter jug as i measure them out and the syphon just feeds them inline. It feeds at about a rate of 20 to 1, so I get about 3 liters worth of pick up in the 60 liters it takes to fill my res.
This works out to be a pretty good pace. I start the water flowing to the res, grab the first bottle, pull my quantity out with a big measuring syringe, squirt it into the jug, pull a syringe of water to rinse it, cap the bottle and put it back on the shelf. This is just long enough for the syphon to have pulled the nutrient dose in, i splash a bit of water in to clear and reach for the next bottle. It all goes like clockwork and by the time I’ve dosed everything in I’m at about 50 liters on the flow guage. I used to have to run back and forth across the room so many times, the inline feed makes everything so much quicker. I pH the res while it circulates in the bottom and once its stabilized where I want it I open the valve and start the flow back up to the plant sites. Nice and easy.
So since we’re on the topic of reservoirs I’ve got a wee rant. Dont get me wrong, I like the brand of nutes I run. I get good results with the Green Planet GP3 system, I think their Rezin additive is the shit, the first time I used it I came home and suddenly realized I needed a new carbon filter in one application. Literal overnight difference in the funk factor. They’re a BC company and I appreciate that they’ve been in the game locally since way before legalization.
But they are a nute company, and that means they wanna sell me more nutes, and so like every single feed chart I think I’ve ever seen their numbers are, IMHO, totally insane. And again, just to be fair, I think every nute company does this, and I think my beef is maybe specific to RDWC in particular.
I don’t think it’s in that picture but that PPM line is on a 0.5 scale, which is why I started using that, and my first meter was 0.5 so it’s what I’m used to now. I should probably switch to EC though, probably better for discussing things on the forums. Do people here have a preference? Is this a Sieverts crowd?
Anyhow, the first time I ran DWC I started out at half the suggested strength, thought I was being conservative. By the time I hit week 2 it was burning the shit out of my plants, only I hadn’t grown in a decade plus, and of course it was my first DWC run so I had no idea what was wrong. I chased my tail trying to figure things out for months, vegging and vegging on longer because I didn’t want to flower miserable plants. I kept trying to turn things around before I flipped them, but they just weren’t getting better. I didn’t think I could possibly be burning them, I was only running half strength…
One day I’m in my hydro shop talking to my guy. If you are lucky enough to have a good hydro shop, with good employees who know their shit you are blessed. So many people have terrible hydro store experiences, like the used car lot nightmare. I’ve been lucky, my hydro dude was the kinda guy who’s saved my ass a few times with basic tips that sold me less product but got me better results. He finally told me that he knew RDWC growers who regularly crushed it at 1/4 of what the feed charts said, and convinced me to try cutting my feed.
So I cut it in half again, after almost four months of foolishly going in circles with root zone issues, things I thought were deficiencies, root funk, just awful. I should have killed those plants and started over at least twice, I would have been better off I now know in retrospect. But the sunk cost fallacy is a hell of a thing…
So I dumped the res, filled it at 1/4 strength and sterilized. I felt like I had tried everything already so why not. Three days later they looked like new plants, a week later I finally flipped em. Turns out I had been frying them all along.
So long story not-so-short I’m a believer in real lean feeds for RDWC. I pop my babies into the system around 150-200ppm, get it up to 400ish the next week or so and it pretty much cruises. As flower is getting heavy I’ll get up to about 600ppm, but I never go much past that these days.
I know a lot of people run much harder than this, and a lot of people are into bumping their feed up till they start to see a little tip burn, then backing it off to see how hard they can push a strain. To each their own, I personally am not a fan and haven’t had great results with that path. I’ve known several other growers who feel this way, who have gotten good results, but somehow it seems a lot of people still think we are hurting our yields with this method. There are some fairly stunning examples of growers who share this position though, who get great results too.
(I’m pretty sure linking to other forums here is cool, if I’m wrong lemme know and I’ll fix it)
If you’ve never encountered the legend of Heath Robinson in the forums before I’d guess you haven’t spent a long time trolling through the grow forums chasing crazy ideas. But I dare anybody to read that thread and not come away amazed. There’s other threads of his grows out there if you search, his results are pretty inspiring. He’s had some things to say about a dislike of overly high feeds in RDWC as well, and he clearly gets results. I know I’ve got lots of room to improve my yields but I think my bottleneck is in canopy control and appropriate strain selection for my space, not in under feeding.
So yeah, long res and nute rant, but I’m hopeful that this can be of help to someone someday. My first grow in the UFO was an uphill battle. I wasted lots of time and effort that could have been turned into prime flowers if I had cut my feeds earlier, instead of chasing my tail and even upping them at points. You can always increase if things seems deficient, and I feel like they bounce back better from that than over doing it and burning them, which always seemed to slow them down more for me.
If you’ve struggled with RDWC maybe try cutting your feed rate from what your chart suggests before tossing your system out the window, it changed everything for me!
Thanks to everyone for visiting, hope my uber long posts aren’t boring you to tears yet! 