Silicon Magician
Member
Having moved from a breadbox apartment to a house in order to expand. I needed something new besides bubbler buckets. AFOAF showed me the way. He had been using NFT systems, but he kept getting that common problem where the plants at the top of the slope were sucking all the nutes out of the flow and choking the plants lower down on the totem pole. To combat that problem he installed 1" PVC pipe along the inside corner of the channel in order to provide a steady stream of nutrient rich water directly to each root zone. The 1" pvc just had holes drilled in along it's length to let the water stream out. I had wondered what would happen if each of those holes was plugged with an aeroponics spray head.
In order to cut costs, I decided to go with 5 ft lengths of 4" PVC pipe and instead of using 1" pvc to plumb the inside of the channel I went with 1/2" PVC tubing. I ran the tubing through the pipe and drilled 10 holes and installed aeroponics sprayers in each hole. I attached a 3 way T at the top of the slope inside each channel to give the intial water flow with the rest flowing down the tube to the spray heads.. Each 5 ft tube is drilled to hold 5 plants, and there are 4 tubes altogether leading to a grand total of 20 plants in a 5x5ft area under a 1000w HPS bulb. The flow is fantastic with a very nice film flowing down the channel and the aero sprayers creating a very fine mist to keep the roots moist so I guess it's a kind of hybrid system. I don't know. But the plants seem happy right now.
In order to achieve a steady harvest. I am staggering each channel. 5 clones go in on day 1, followed 20 days later by anotehr 5 clones, 20 days after that 5 more clones go in and so on until I am harvesting 5 plants every 20 days or so, depending on factors.
I will be alternating between two strains. Gorilla Glue #4 and Girl Scout Cookies x White Widow.
I'm hoping that this will finally put me on the track to a steady supply and no more droughts between grows.
In order to cut costs, I decided to go with 5 ft lengths of 4" PVC pipe and instead of using 1" pvc to plumb the inside of the channel I went with 1/2" PVC tubing. I ran the tubing through the pipe and drilled 10 holes and installed aeroponics sprayers in each hole. I attached a 3 way T at the top of the slope inside each channel to give the intial water flow with the rest flowing down the tube to the spray heads.. Each 5 ft tube is drilled to hold 5 plants, and there are 4 tubes altogether leading to a grand total of 20 plants in a 5x5ft area under a 1000w HPS bulb. The flow is fantastic with a very nice film flowing down the channel and the aero sprayers creating a very fine mist to keep the roots moist so I guess it's a kind of hybrid system. I don't know. But the plants seem happy right now.
In order to achieve a steady harvest. I am staggering each channel. 5 clones go in on day 1, followed 20 days later by anotehr 5 clones, 20 days after that 5 more clones go in and so on until I am harvesting 5 plants every 20 days or so, depending on factors.
I will be alternating between two strains. Gorilla Glue #4 and Girl Scout Cookies x White Widow.
I'm hoping that this will finally put me on the track to a steady supply and no more droughts between grows.
. By the end of a 12 week (appr.) run my root mat is massive in my trays and until adding a silk screen on my riser/drain I had to pull roots out every week.
rooted cut right into the tubes and right into flower
we averaged around 1.5 zips per plant and was one plant per sqft, 8 plants per 8.5' tube. Now that was with big ass yielders from back in the day. As soon as OG came out and gdp, the yields from the tubes went down.
.