Oh yeah, that was the plan.
My pumps are pretty high gph though and the water level is significantly lower in the res buckets, but we’ll figure something out. I’m in no rush.
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Not to open a big can of worms for ya, but would that not suggest that your return lines are undersized? Don’t you worry about an overflow in your plant site buckets? I just wonder, because if it’s already pushing out of your res fast enough to keep the level consistently lower in there then your system seems like it would trend towards imbalance. If you get a clump of roots pulled into your return on a bucket the reduction in flow could cause that one bucket to overflow, even if the return doesn’t clog completely. You wouldn’t necessarily need to replumb everything just yet though, you could probably just turn your pump down a little to balance things out.
Just a thought, I’ve known the joy of flooding in the past! 
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I am backing up @Ginger_Rick, I had issues with small leaks and always concerned about floods if overflows happen. So much so in fact that I completely redesigned my system after only just forking out the cash to build the system i already had. Now the system i have is fairly leak proof. My return lines use 50mm bulk heads and conduit 
May be overkill but I sleep well at night knowing I can pump as much solution around as I want and my return lines will never block up.
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Brothers in arms man, I have done this soooooo many times!! 
Now, if you’ll all excuse me, on a totally unrelated note, I need to go back to digging through Bridgelux strips on Digikey. Y’know, to replace the lights I already have that grow perfectly good dope, with some even brighter more efficient ones, to grow some perfectly better dope!
But I can stop anytime I want. Really, just one more upgrade. 
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Thanks for the replies!
I worry about flooding almost constantly. During the last move around I actually raised all of my power connections to the top of the room, so that if a flood does happen, I just ruin some carpet and drywall as opposed to burning the whole place down.
I think my pumps are just too aggressive, and they’re turned all the way down. I’m shit at estimating volumes and ended up getting 500gph pumps for 15g reservoirs. I’ll pick up some smaller pumps to even out the water level soon-ish.
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Another thing with pumps is that they actually heat up the water by a noticeable amount. So in winter they help to keep the nutrient from getting to cold but on the other side they make the water warmer in summer which is not good. If you have pumps that are over rated then they would probably be a problem in summer with nutrient temps. So if you can afford it then you are probably better to replace them.
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Yeah I was also thinking that earlier after I replied. They definitely heat the water up around 4F, which is enough to push it higher than I’m comfortable with.
Weekly update time.
I’m in the middle of curing my 3rd round of waterproofing on the second RDWC system. I’m so tired of the smell of curing silicone.
The clones seem to be really happy. I haven’t had the monitoring probe in their res at all this week as I’ve been monitoring some issues in the mother RDWC system.
There’s a little bit of nute burn on their tips, but I think they’re dealing with it. I think 0.3 EC is too hot for them in their first few weeks in the RDWC system. I’ll try running the next batch at 0.2 for the first few weeks.
My clone/seedlings are in various different stages. I’m messing around with germination techniques that I like that don’t involve the long term use of rockwool, and no use of rockwool ideally. I’m having mixed results with that.
The mothers are stressing out. At the end of last week I noticed that I was picking up signs of either calcium or magnesium deficiency in both the clones and the mothers. Which is really confusing because my water is hard AF. I added a little CalMagic to the clones and mothers, and the clones responded well. The mothers, not so much.
I think using the hardwater Micro might not be a good idea. Since I way over acidulated the reservoir, and added a bunch of CalMagic, the EC has gone through the roof, which is what I’m attributing the stress that I’m seeing now to.
Today sometime I’ll drain their res and re-dose with non-hardwater nutes, and not go wild with the pH down this time.
I’m also noticing the Gorilla Glue is way more stressed than the Girl Scout Cookies, and that’s true to the clones too. This particular plant seems to be pretty finicky about nutrients and pH, and I’m not digging it. I don’t think I’ll be cloning this particular plant again.
The flowering cab is going great!
On the top, the Hubbabubbasmelloscopes are fattening up. I’d say I have about 14 more days on them for how I like them, then they get the chop. The Forum Stomper stretched out of hand a little, so I flippity-flopped her over and she took it like a champ.
My 16oz cup plants are still chugging along maturing their seeds. I don’t know how many seeds I’m going to get, but more than 6, so this is a win!
On the bottom my White Widow girls are happily getting into flowering, and I’m really liking the canopy on the girl on the left.
I have a few more interesting things in the works that need a little more R&D, but more on that later.
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wow looks like the mothers may have experienced reverse osmosis! Where the ion concentration is so high in solution it actually draws the nutrients back out of the plant.
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Interesting, I didn’t think of leeching nutes out of the plant as being what’s going on, but that makes sense.
lol to tell you the truth I don’t even know if that’s what it’s called when you overdose a plant. All I know is plants use osmosis…so stopping the uptake of nutrients and reversing it is reverse osmosis? I always ask my friends that if their buds come out all fluffy like: “Hey did your EC reach 3.6 and the plant stalled out? Reverse osmosis baby!” I should look it up, maybe they don’t even call it that. Ohhhhhh they are calling it nutrient lockout. My bad.
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It can cause the fluffy buds I’m getting too, eh?
So, I’ve done some brief reading, and what I’m seeing kind of tracks with the history of this system. Remember this plant was previously living in a 2.x EC reservoir and unknown pH (but high), and I switched it to 1.2 total EC and lower pH (6.1 IIRC). It makes sense that the plant dumped all it’s nutes into the water.
I guess if I do a res change and dose appropriately and make sure my pH is right on, I should see a nice rebound in them.
I’ll probably pair it with a defoliation to make them extra hungry regrowing vegetation.
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Remember that stuff I mentioned that was in R&D last week? Part one is done and in it’s testing phase. All that mystery for a lousy ghetto ebb & flow system, I know, what a let down.
The E&F (as it will now be referred to) came about through my reading of various recommended threads on other forums from folks here. Reading about that guy who pulled 20g dried per week out of a 2 sqft space got me obsessing over my cab again, and I started to wonder if I could figure out how to do it with DWC.
The cup germinations in the previous updates were part of that, testing cup designs and seeing what the sqft footprint of each cup would be. The cups were a disaster. They were fiddly, ran dry fast, and needed far more attention than I was willing to give.
Eventually I would up at an ebb and flow set up. This is a tester at this stage.
I’m running 7 plants, one of the clones that is surviving through all the shit I put it through, one of the seedlings that survived the cup attempts, and 5 new strains I’ve never run before, which I’ll give a run down if they survive.
So far so good, the clone was looking under the weather before I put it into the E&F system, and it’s looking better now.
The left side clones had a rough week but I changed their res and they seem to be happier now.
The GSC 2 plant is runty and hasn’t kept up with the growth rates of the others. I’m not sure what’s up with that.
GG continues to annoy me by being so finicky. It suffered the most last week.
The WW has surprised me, it’s become probably my favorite plant. It’s fast to show problems but also fast to bounce back. It’s been great to see the health of my system overall.
The other system is finally waterproof and I’m pre-offgassing and oxygenating. I’ll dose it soon and run it empty until some of the plants in the E&B container are ready.
I gave the mothers a haircut and removed a lot of branches that weren’t going to amount to anything in their current space. There’s a huge gap in one of the canopies as a result that I’ll be man handling one of the girls into.
Otherwise I changed their res too and I think they’re happier? It’s hard to tell with these ones sometimes.
The cabinet is where all the action is. Flowering continues. The HBBSS are being fed with water as I flush them. I’ll harvest them this weekend, probably.
The Forum Stomper got out hand again, so I bent her and repositioned her. So I kind of have a horizontal plant now.
The seed plants are continuing to mature.
And on the bottom, the White Widows seem to be happy enough as well and are flowering away. I’ve given up trying to move branches and will just let the plant do what it wills.
And finally, the last new strain I’ll put into the E&F table, finally poking it’s tail out after 5 days in a cup of water.
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Looking good, someone’s been busy!
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Thanks! It feels weird not having something that needs doing construction wise. I mean, I need to upgrade the air pumps and re-run air line, and replace a tube that’s leaking… and fix the alignment of my light…
Who am I kidding, there’s always work in the garden.
While I have you in my thread, have you looked into any cheap pH/EC probes to work with Mycodo? I started looking on Ebay for probes to add real time monitoring to all my reservoirs for cheaper than $400 a pop, but I’m nervous about how reliable the cheaper I2C stuff is.
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Being that I am on a course of major upgrades and construction I am both eager and terrified to arrive at that point. What am I gonna do with all my free time when I’m not constantly researching and working on the build?
Oh right. I’ll build the next thing!
The circle of nerdiness.
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Oh yeah, I totally want pH and EC probes for less than Atlas and their $400 freaking bux, but alas last time I went looking I didn’t really find much. Admittedly though I haven’t gone looking in a year and a bit because the price of the probes made me decide to move that upgrade further down the list. Hence my constant lusting after your Atlas Probes.
But y’know, a couple years is a long time when it comes to electronics, so I guess I’ll take another look. If there are some cheaper ones available it wouldn’t be the I2C connection that would give me pause, I’ve generally found I2C stuff to e pretty reliable when I’ve used it. With cheaper meters it would be all about the probe itself, is the probe replaceable, is it rated for constant immersion, etc.
But now you’re got me curious so I guess I’ll see what’s out there now…
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I’ve found these guys, they seem to be out of stock of all probes though so I wonder if it’s vaporware:
https://www.ufire.co
I assume you’d have to buy the module + the probe, but that’s $100 for what Atlas want $400 for. I saw on Ebay you can get some as low as $60, but those are brandless Chinese ones.
On amazon just now the lowest I saw was actually about $16! There’s a bunch around the $30ish $40ish mark as well. Most of the complaints I’ve read seem to be about the probe, but a couple people said they worked with other better probes they had so that’s a thought. One reviewer mentioned that the values from his sensor board were a little unstable, but he just through a capacitor on the pin to smooth it out and averaged his values over 10 readings in software. Once he did that he said it was tracking alongside his BluLab meter so that’s pretty good for $40 and an extra capacitor.
For $40 and some time I think I see an experiment on the horizon…
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