I finally went out to the room last night and I discovered I had made a mistake.
When I flush my res I switch my timer from 1m OFF to 3m OFF to conserve solution in the accumulator and prevent the system from pumping from a dry res or taking up my flushing agent. Unfortunately it seems I forgot to switch the timer back to 1m OFF while I was on vacation.
I was out looking at the plants and what I thought was āa little yellowingā was actually quite a bit. And all of the branches on the OC that were extremely strong when I left were now leaning from the weight of the buds. I tied a few things up for now to keep them off each other and ordered some yoyos.
Normally I would have had a trellis in place here, but thatās one thing I didnāt rebuild for this run. Iām still not 100% sure if it was the lower watering frequency or if the weight of the buds just became too much, but I swear these branches are much weaker than they were when I left.
The girls are really starting to smell with the OC taking on a strong citrus profile. Hopefully theyāve recovered today after switching the timer back because I really need to defoliate one more time to open up the OC more.
While the plants werenāt too bad, there were no white roots showing last night. Normally I see inches of new white roots daily, before they get stained by the nutes.
I am 100% sure I am not dialed in here. I had switched to the 1m OFF when the girls were showing serious signs of under-watering early on. I tested a few other variations (2s ON, 2m OFF ā 3s ON, 3m OFF ā etc), but I never really got exactly what I was looking for. I believe the other issues I had were causing me to adjust the wrong thing, though, so next time around Iāll be running clean clones either direct from seed or straight out of the aerocloner. That should really help me get things dialed in.
As I said I had ran into a lot of problems early on with the system. I had planned on breaking this out separately but I realized it was too hard to determine what was caused by what, so I will go ahead and lay them out here one by one with the final changes I made to get me through this run.
Purple Stems
When the plants were very young we noticed the stems had turned entirely purple. More purple than I had ever experienced before. Magnesium was the suspect, but I knew my water / nute mix was balanced because I have grown monsters with this same solution before.
What I determined was I was having problems keeping the pH balanced, causing nutrient lock-out. Since I was using a small res and still tweaking the timings with D2W I was going through a lot more water changes than normal. With no recirculation and low EC for the clones I was having a hell of a time keeping the pH in check.
Droopy Leaves
My initial timing had me running 3s ON and 5m OFF ā but the girls were showing severe underwatering. Going much higher flow rate helped eliminate the problem, but that also caused more water use than I had expected. The small res was needing filled daily at this point.
High Root-Zone Temps
One day when checking on the roots I opened the lids and it literally felt like a sauna in there. I went ahead and bought some thermostats with remote temp sensors so I could monitor things closer.
I was surprised to find that the root zone was running nearly 20Ā° hotter than the room itself! Since the grow beds are well insulated and sealed I figured the only thing I could do would be to cool the water down, which in turn would cool the root zone.
Excessive Water Usage
With everything else going on I found that the D2W was just becoming annoying and I was having to manage water a LOT more than I ever did with my E&F setup. Instead of checking water once every 3 days I was having to check things 2x a day. This wasnāt going to work the way I had expected, so I needed to find a solution.
The Changes
In an effort to solve multiple problems at once I went ahead and picked up a chiller and decided to make the lower 1/4th of the grow beds into an ebb and flow setup.
I still had the old submersible pump from my previous iteration and my loop siphon was still in tact so what I ended up doing was feeding from the submersible through the chiller, then splitting that out into feed hoses into each grow bed. I filled the bottom portion of the beds w/ hydroton to help retain some water (and lower the amount of water required to hit the siphon).
The drains from the grow beds were then rerouted, instead of draining off to waste they would instead converge into my siphon and feed back into the res. Since I was going to have more water flowing I also swapped out my small res with the larger res I used last time.
These changes helped me get root temps under control via the chiller and recirculating water, eased the burden of managing pH by giving me a larger volume of water to balance, and allowed me to switch to a 1s ON/1m OFF cycle w/o fear of losing the water to waste.
Next Steps
Iām still not 100% sure which route Iāll take with my next run yet, but I will not be going back to D2W. Right now in my mind there are 3 ways I can run this next time around.
HPA Only
With some of the changes Iāve made and lessons learned I still think full HPA is possible. By running the drains direct back to the res w/ no siphon I could keep the benefits of a larger res and hopefully be able to keep pH in check. My only concern here is the underwatering problem I ran into.
HPA + E&F
Keeping the system how I have it today with the lower portion filled with hydroton and the upper 3/4 running true HPA. I need to reroute some fill/drain lines and make a few other changes, but this eliminates the fear of underwatering by letting them heavy feed from the lower portion while getting great nutrient uptake in the upper portion of the roots.
HPA + NFT
In this type of setup I would run a film of water down the 4 walls of each grow bed and since they are actual sinks it keeps the film straight down the drain. Then the middle of the beds would be HPA, but the plants could heavy feed off the bottom film once they reached it. (And I could set this up on a separate timer, if I wanted.)
Additional Updates
Thereās a few things I have went ahead and purchased for the next run, knowing I want to change some things. First up is the way I have the water cooler plumbed into the system. Right now Iām running my nute soup through the chiller and to the plants. In the future I will add a second separate res w/ itās own water. That will use the submersible pump to feed through a chiller coil that is submerged in the nutrient res.
Since I will be scavenging my submersible pump I went ahead and picked up the parts Iād need to eliminate the pump in the nutrient solution. I was also having issues w/ small roots being flushed back and clogging up the filter bag, or having to stick my hand down in the soup to change the speed of the pump. I picked up a controllable external pump for my needs as well as all of the filters I would want in-line. This will cover me if I do decide to keep the E&F or NFT systems in place next time around.
The two filters I picked complement each other (40 and 100 micron screens) and contain external cleanouts to help keep the system in tip-top shape.
While I was picking up parts I also upgraded my air pump to a stronger one. The previous pump would bubble the water slightly, but this new one churns the water like itās boiling ā way more air getting mixed into the solution.
When this run is completed I will be looking closely at the roots to help me decide which route I want to take next, but no matter which way I go I have all of the parts on hand to change over and restart.
I ran into that same issue recently. Turns out its my water that is the problem. I have well water that normally has an EC of around 80 uS. However, it must also have a lot of carbonates in it because the PH shoots up wildly when ever I aerate or agitate the water.
I could take plain tap water that started at 6.7 PH, and aerate it for 15 minutes, and it would be close to 8.0. Just putting it in a jug and shaking it would raise the PH.
This wasnt so bad when I was running full strength nutes at around EC 1.3 or more, but when I tried cloning with low EC levels, it turned out to be almost impossible to keep the PH in the 5.8 range. In just a few hours the PH would shoot up to 6.7 or so - no matter how much PH down I used or how often I added it, the PH just kept going up within a few hours as long as I was aerating.
The other side effect was that it took a ton of PH down to lower the PH from the 6.7 range down to around 6.2. For my rez, typically about 60-80 ML of acid. BUT, adding just an additional 1 or 2 ml would drop the PH from 6.2 to 4. I had a heck of a time trying to keep it in the 5.8 range.
Like I said, higher nute levels were not nearly as much trouble. I assume the nutes were acting as a buffer. This was with a 15 gallon rez.
Maybe your water has similar issuesā¦
It came up in this thread. There are some links to explain it in more detail.
I forgot to comment on this. Those are some very interesting ideas! Do you think it will be possible to have fuzzy aero roots up top, and normal hydro roots on the bottom? Ive read that its possible for the roots to change from one type to the other, but I dont recall any mention of the two types co-existing on the same plant.
I almost did something similar to your HPA+NFT idea, but with LPA. I got sidetracked by this HPA thing before I could try it out though.
Sort of the same for me. My water has a very low ppm (around 100 or so), but very high pH (both values depend on if weāve received rain recently or not). Mine doesnāt change when I aerate the water, but it fluctuates very easy ā a lot like RO water. Thereās just not enough buffering in the water to maintain a stable res, and by the time I got it balanced it was time to add more water to throw it off again.
As long as I have a big enough res and I recirculate I can manage the pH a lot easier, but once I had a small res w/ high usage it was a major pain in the ass.
I couldnāt find a solution either, which is why recirculation and a bigger res was my answer. Not a real solution, but the bandaid prevents the bleeding.
Weāll know soon enough when I harvest. Right now Iām running HPA + E&F so when Iām done I will be able to dig into the roots and see what they were doing. I know that as it stands the top part (aero) are what I posted the pics of in the roots thread ā theyāre a big ball, free-standing and spreading out. Once they hit the hydroton they actually crawled along the top of it across the whole bed, as well as dug down deeper into the clay. Itāll be interesting to see what the inner part of the upper roots looks like, though, before I can really make a determination of what I want to do next.
Last night when I went into the room I found a few things had shifted. It looks like when my tender came over while I was gone he took a peak at the roots. This dislodged the water line that was feeding the E&F portion and caused it to drip onto the floor. It also shifted the plant in its collar, which caused the plant to want to try and fall over from the sheer weight of the buds.
Hard to tell here, but you can see how sheās leaning pretty badly and the collar is trying to pop out of place.
This was never a problem in the E&F setup with the roots supported in the hydroton. I assume had I built my trellis this would have been less of an issue, as well. (Also having a way to peak at the roots w/o moving the plant would have been a smart idea for the lids.)
Right now Iāve strung a slip-knot around the main trunk and pulled her back towards the wall to stabilize her. The yoyos will be here tomorrow, so I will take a lot of weight off from her then. Hoping that helps, but finding a better solution to stabilize a huge, heavy plant thatās floating in air is going to be a challenge.
From the top sheās looking pretty good, though. I did go back through and give her quite a haircut last night, cleaning up a lot of the excess fan leaves that were blocking light from getting lower into the canopy. I probably stressed the shit out of her last night, but hopefully sheāll recover quickly.
I got a bit annoyed trying to work around the scrog last run but that probably had more to do with making the one plant 5x5 then it did the trellis itself.
Iāve been revisiting this version of the system in my head for some time now. On top of giving myself peace of mind with having a backup water source for the plants, I believe this system will also help me stabilize the root zone temps. Right now this is the direction I am leaning. (I just need a new, lower-profile res so I can drain direct w/o a siphon.)
The only thing I have outstanding now is keeping the plant stable. My thought here is to build a root trellis that is attached to the lid of each grow bed. It will hang down slightly and will give a large area for the plant to hang onto.
My hopes is that this will not only stabilize the plant, but also help expand the root mass higher in the chamber, giving me even more vertical roots and less of a large central mass.
Here is what the trellis material looks like. (One of the few products Multiponics actually delivered.)
That trellis is an interesting idea. Dont forget to allow for the hatch to look at roots
I think Im going to have a door in the top of my chamber as well as a side door in the fabric pot. Im still working on options to seal them up so there are no air drafts, or leaks that could dry out the roots.
One way or another, I want to do some kind of time lapse of the roots growing.
Yesterday was the start of week 8 of flower, so we should be nearly done. The trichomes are still cloudy and Iām not seeing any amber yet so thereās a possibility these will go a week or so longer than normal. The OC has started to yellow quite a bit but thatās normal for this plant at the 8th week. (We harvest this at day 1 of week 9 when itās in the big room in soil.)
The buds have gained quite a bit of density and are hard as a rock right now, even though theyāre smaller than I normally pull with the OC I believe that was more about us not training this plant at all vs how we normally run in soil. Tried to do an apples to apples comparison, but we slacked when these plants werenāt responding well to the HPA setup. The weight has forced us to install yoyos since I didnāt have a trellis setup, so weāve got 24 of those holding up the primary colas across the two plants.
The good news is sheāll still produce quite a bit of smoke and the smell is incredible. When walking in my garage you canāt even tell I have chicks in the brooder, because the plants are so potent.
Additional light rails have already been installed in the room that will allow us to move the whole grow bed setup out into the center of the room. I hated not being able to get behind the plants and this will give me a walkway on both sides.
I also picked up a 35 gallon storage tank that I plan on turning into my new reservoir. Comes with a 3/4" NTT bulkhead fitting already installed and should be low enough profile that I can switch from the siphon back to a straight recirculating system.
Reservoirs are super expensive to ship (sometimes 150-200% the cost of the product itself). Since I live in the middle of nowhere we have to make due with what we have available ā I still had to drive an hour to get to TSC, but itās better than 3 hours to the nearest Home Depot/Lowes. (Or 1.5 hours if I want to cross into Canada.)
Living in the woods has its advantagesā¦and its drawbacks.
I read another Atomizer thread a few days ago, but now I cant find it again. He mentioned something about the wet roots situation, but I cant remember exactly what he said, and I didnt copy it down
It was something like if the leaves are wilting but the stems are not, then something, somethingā¦Im thinking it was too much mist with too long a pause time, but that may b wrong.
But if both were wilting, it was too little moisture over all - I think.
Im going to keep searching for that, because it sounds like good info to know. I was too stoned at the time to realize how good a tip it was!
Edit: oops - thought I was answering your post on my thread!
Iām always on the search for a better res. I started with the totes quite a few years back and ran into all sorts of issuesā¦ leaky bulkheads, weak sidewalls causing the tote to bulge, no way to measure level accurately. I did the normal fixes, silicone the bulkhead, built a frame for the tote, and installed a clear tube for level but it seemed like a lot of work when purpose-built tanks exist for this reason.
For the past few years Iāve been using a sump basin.
This has worked fine up til now, but for this next run I want a much lower profile res so I can eliminate the siphon and drain directly back into the res. This tank also has gallon measurements in 5 gallon increments which is way better then my rough measurement ticks I am using today.
Who knows, Iāll probably end up changing it again at some point. The pet food container idea didnāt work as well as I wanted, so thereās always a chance Iāll switch things up again.
The plants are a few days into the flush now as we enter week 9 of flower. I can already tell that some of the earlier problems with the system have affected the plants. Normally weāre starting prep for harvest at the end of week 8, but I can see these going another full week before theyāre done.
Today is officially the start of the 12th week of flower.
I checked the plants last night and everything looked good to go for harvest, finally. I went ahead and gathered up the supplies then converted the 3rd bathroom to a temporary drying room. Since the room already has a dedicated thermostat for the baseboard heat I only have to worry about humidity.
Hereās a few of the items Iāll be using during the drying.
Humidity Controller
Dehumidifier w/ Continuous Drainage
Drying Hangers
Monitoring Sensors
The smell from the room is absolutely incredible and Iām really looking forward to the harvest tonight. Itās only 2 plants and Iāll have help so it will be a nice change of pace from the normal trim jail we get confined to for days on end.
I will post pics pre and post harvest tonight, including root and trunk dissection. I donāt do wet weights normally but for this test I plan on logging all of the data so I can compare against what we already know about these strains.
Just bought several of those SensorPush hygrometers + a hub. Expensive but the reviews have been good. Being a data hound, I like that they claim theyāll be providing an API interface to the hub data.
subbed for this. Absolute reciprocation on the appreciation of my work just now. This is fucking awesome
