New room design stage discussion

Building 2 hard wall rooms and I’ve got 1650W of HID lighting and several kw in led lights available gunna stick with just the hids for now 750w MH and 900W HPS. Going with scrog set up in my flower chamber but thinking I might run into issues changing out my pails in mid flower if I went DWC with 4 plants. Thinking of best options simple is always better. Considering other designs. Perhaps an organic soiless grow. I will have 2 spaces both 6’ x 6’. I’m here for your input. Could just to extensive LST instead of a real scrog with the screen and what not. I haven’t built any grow related chambers in a long time.

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You mean because you’ll have to lift the bucket lids to do nute changes? You could go RWDC, several DWC buckets tied together with lines at the bottom.

They all connect to a main res or controller bucket. When you drain the res they all drain, then you just refill. I think a few people on here are running them.

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Cool I’ll have to do more digging

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Im thinking of doing an 8 bucket setup like that. It looks like it will work out really good for me anyway. The only draw back is i can only run 8 different stains. :grin:

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Put a 1" hole in the lid and use a pump to change the res and get a rubber grommet to plug the hole. Simple solution or go rdwc which I’ve been thinking about doing for my veg boxes. A dozen one gal res sucks changing every week lol

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i have noticed that different strains have different nutrition needs, I don’t know if it is a good idea to feed them all the same …

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Dwc scrog made easy

If I had to do my room over I’d put the control buckets (if you went RDWC) outside my room so the chiller doesn’t heat up the room and the water would be cooler if the res were outside the room. Also I could make changes to the system from outside the room.

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I plan on flowering one strain at a time from clone

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I’m considering these options as part of my design

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I’m going to post a diagram if what I’ve come up with so far tomorrow after work. I do however need to consider the benefits of SIL I have roughly 3400 actual watts of LEDs and probably an endless supply of them. I have no knowledge on led growing but something tells me I should sort it out. Who knows what.

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It’s not feed issues I normally run into with multiple strains in DWC, it’s the variation in stretch, height and finish time that are a PITA, especially if you have the one scrog net and/or light rig. Give them shit tonnes of air and a balanced dose of nutes and nutes shouldn’t be a problem. Every now and again you might run into something that might be super sensitive, but then I typically piss these off anyway, life and time are too short to cotton wool anything along, it’s sink or swim here:)

RDWC is the easiest grow setup in the world imho, all your PH/EC checks and water top ups and drains are done from the one separate res. Here is a pic of the typical setup (not mine) that I stole off the interwebs. Mine is gravity drained so a little more involved that this… but for no real reason other than the space I had available. I’ve build a number of these for other people though and they are a cakewalk.

I would go for a larger res that this one has… 70-100 l I think is a good size, depending on how many plants you end up with, a rez of this size can mean one nutrient charge for veg, and one for flower. I have done these with a ball valve in the res that is plumbed in to keep it topped up, you can even automate PH balancing.

The only thing missing in this pic is the air pump… go larger than you think is necessary and go for quality… I use one of these…

Then an air-stone goes in each bucket…

In all honesty if it were me, unless you specifically need the heat from the HID lights LED is the go. Once I had a decent customised LED setup I wouldn’t go near HID again, there are just too many downsides from my perspective. I get to keep my LED rig less than inches away from the canopy and it can even touch it without charring or burning my house to the ground and the heat output is so so so much lower, and also no risk of exploding glass death raining down if something happens to get wet.

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You can do multiple ways of return for RDWC. Venturi, waterfall, traditional like slain posted. I wanna mess around with Venturi, but so far I like the waterfall. Provides a tranquil noise amidst the mechanical hums of a grow room.

I built mine out of 27gal tough totes with 1" barbed bulkheads one on each side running back to a main res that has a pump in it which sends water through a main 1" PVC manifold that feeds 1/2" branch run outs that elbow down to the water. Adds turbulence and replaces the need for air stones.

The reason for a larger main is water takes path of least resistance so it will naturally fill up the larger manifold before sending the water to the branches mostly even.

I prefer 1" manifolds to 2" due to price. Each one is only $1.80 per.

A 6 site 27gal system will run you about $2-220 depending on pump size and it will be WAY better than those undercurrent premade pieces of crap for a fifth of the cost

27gal tough totes x7 = $77

6" Netpot lids x6 = $18

(29) 1" bulkheads = $60

550-1000GPH pump = $30-$50 for active aqua which for a cheap pump isn’t bad. Mines lasted for years.

Polypropylene tubing 1" and fittings and PVC = $30 tops

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… I was going to mention aerating the rez and just using a pump with decent throughput, but thought I had babbled enough already :grin: It is true that the air stones/lines and pump are the weakest link maintenance wise and if I were a little more motivated I woudl have DIY’d an alternative. The scintered ones are the best, but even these require looking after and have a finite life span.

I have only done a small 2 bucket test setup with just the rez aerated, but it worked just fine so I don’t seen any real reason it would not scale up if you have sufficient circulation and oxygen saturation in the rez, it would make life a LOT simpler.
Also no reason why you couldn’t run two pumps on the return and make one of them a needle wheel/skimmer pump with a venturi ( or just use the needle wheel pump by itself) as has been done by @Northern_Loki elsewhere on OG. Many ways to skin this cat.

Lol… this was one of the reasons I was messing about with Vortex/venturi aeration. Even better if it were in a plexiglass tube :slight_smile:

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I was thinking of a return about mid way up the buckets and have water being pushed through a 1" barbed bulkhead at the base with 3/4" nipple on the inside of the bulkhead to a 3/4" threaded tee with a 1/4" ID air tubing cut on a chamfer with various other sizes of tubing to act as a spacer to fill in the gap and as the water enters it will aerate.

The tee is on its back and the branch side is where the air tubing enters the tee. Of course you need a washer lodged in their to cause turbulence to suck air in

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Scrog would be ideal…not for me hydro and areoponics for starters.

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I have seen good venturi’s put together just using different fittings and had planned to do similar, when I looked though I realised it’s cheaper to buy a 1 1/2 " venturi pre made than it cost to buy the fittings! Also being injection moulded I thougth they might be more efficient for sucking air than I could make myself. What I like about both the vortex and the needle pump is they help diffuse the oxygen into the water as does the waterfall of course… The needle wheel shearing outputs water so aerated it looks milky, I am not sure how these go as continuous duty pumps however… Also right, there only a need to aerate as much as can be used by the plants, so who knows exactly how much that is and if were are just going overboard. :grin:

I like aeroponics being a techy type, it has probably the fastest growth I have seen of everything. Unfortunately for me, our water is so full of dissolved solids that it makes keeping it all running a nightmare, especially if it’s running 100 psi to get the 50 microns droplet size. I get about 2 days before I am unblocking nozzles :slight_smile:

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So far this is what I’ve come up with I have more HID lighting as well but figured this would be enough.

EDIT that photo says 55w in the veg chamber but it’s actually 550w

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When I did isolated buckets I switched from air pumps to water pumps with power heads then to self circulation with waterfalls and never looked at an airstone again. I’ll probably keep the same process and explore getting a DO measuring device to see what works best.

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imho for two tubs with four plants in veg, 550 watts is gob loads. I typically veg for the first 3 weeks or so with 2 X 50 watt strip lights and at most they get 200 watts so you will have more than enough.

Re your tubs… the only small thing I would say is that there is no need for the tubs to each have their own supply line from the rez i.e you could simply daisy chain them… so rez>tub1>tub2 and rez>tub1>tub2>tub3<tub4 and then gravity will equalize the levels between them an the rez.
I am not sure if that make sense but I’ll see if I can find a few minutes a bit later on to scratch a few suggestions onto your drawing…

Get what you’re saying but at that point wouldn’t gthe plant further away from the rez end up potentially receiving less notes than the rest because it would only be equalizing from the return from the Rez Unless they all had to flow through each other to drain as well. Saving each one directly from the razr I feel would maximize the amount of oxygen in the l’autre for each plant and also maximize the amount of potential nutrients available to each plant I feel like if there was less active agitation in the reservoir then there’s a possibility that they won’t all gets equal parts of what they need

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