600W Dwc Discrete Cabinet Scrog - 2nd Run

I cannot stress enough the quality of information in that thcfarmer link above. This is required reading for anyone doing dwc. Period. Every time this guy posts or responds I am learning something new and important.

The most interesting point so far is the relationship of plant size to root size. The further your plants roots spread out horizontally, the more the plant will do the same. Duh I know but never thought about it like this. This is why this guy puts each plant into a bucket, and then that bucket into it's own tote, which allows the roots to really spread out further around the bucket.

More evidence that the main chamber in my setup should have no more than one or two plants max.

In looking at recirculating systems, i really hate giving up limited real estate for large, low-profile reservoirs. Would it not be possible to have a smaller low res, say 25 gallons, that itself recirculates to something taller like a 55 gallon drum?

Something like put a pump in the small res pumping sauce into the 55 gallon drum. Equip the small res with a float valve so that, when the level drops, it pumps sauce back out of the drum to refill the res.

Seems like a good idea rife with gotchas, but essentially, something like this should work to functionally extend the size of a low profile reservoir without giving up more floor space. This may not be the way to do it, but there has to be a way. It doesn't seem that complicated, yet I haven't seen anyone doing it so I must be missing something.

Essentially, we have a res circulating out to smaller buckets. Why not add another level where a larger res recirculates to smaller reservoirs, which in turn sends out to the buckets to make one big system.

and just happened upon this:
http://www.arduino.cc/

could be very interesting if it's cheap. looking into it soon.

as long as you mix up everything into the main reservoir, and then filled everything else, this shouldn't be a problem. If you are going to do recirculating DWC you could just have an external reservoir hooked up to your buckets/totes, that would be fine. That is how most RDWC works. This root theory holds a lot of truth to it, but you have to realiz thatyou don't have the room for plants like that, unless you are doing just two plants. I did only 2 plants on this round with bigger buckets, and I think I pulled the same weight as I would with 3,4, even 5 plants under the same 600w bulb, I might have even pushed passed my .7g per watt threshold and into .8, but we shall see. I will be posting pictures of my crop later. I cropped my Grape Krush and Strawberry Cough at 10 weeks, tonight. I know I said I was killing the Strawberry Cough almost a month ago, but I decided to give her another chance and I am glad I did! I got a bare minimum of a 1/4 lb per plant, I am hoping I got more like 5 oz per plant. Strawberry Cough topped into 8 major spears, and 2 sub spears. And the Grape Krush is just a mighty Christmas tree with solid nugs to the stock.

That hardware looks pretty interesting, and pretty affordable. I couldn't possibly wrap my brain around it, but I would be willing to throw money at that project.

I have a 55 gal drum if you want it btw, it's taking up space.

yeah i'll give it a shot soon i think. it will be a re-re-circulating dwc system. this is for the tent, but if it works out i'll do something similar for the cabinet. ha .. there's one way to get me on board your low ppm cheap nutrients train. start using a couple 55 gallon reservoirs.

the blue dream in the main cab is going yellow from the bottom up. the last cycle did this as well so i'm thinking it may be strain specific. watch for it on the BD and let's see if it does the same thing to you. i will probably bump ppm up again significantly in the next few days to see if this makes a difference. i'd do it now but the ph has been locked at 6.2 all day. I don't want to mess with that.

working on the tent more tonight. this is going to be a very nice tent when it's all said and done. putting in a 4" drain around the two sides that don't zip. that way buckets just attach to the side of the tent with one drain line, rather than 16 individual one inch hoses.

really need to get a drip system set up. i need to poke 1/4" spaghetti line into a 1/2" poly line. Tried this by poking a hole in the 1/2" then poking a barbed connector through, but it will certainly leak. should i be adding a little gasket type stuff around the penetration? maybe the 1/2" line i have is too rigid for this and I need squishier hose?

Shitty active air whatever CO2 reg started freaking out again last night. Took it back and finally got them to exchange it for a similar Sentinel unit. No problems so far.

How often do you post pics?

as often as i can get to the cab.

at the moment, it look like a tent has vomited in the room, and access is limited

ah, sorry to hear that.

If it's going yellow from the bottom up consider molasses. It is the plant transferring sugar from the fan leaves to the nugs. Molasses or any good molasses based carb or boost will give you sulfer, calcium, magnesium, potassium, carbon, and of course, carbohydrates, everything your plants need right now. Hi-Brix from Earth Juice is the first, cheapest, and easiest thing that comes to mind. Next is straight up molasses from the grocery store. 1 gal of Hi-Brix was 16 bucks last time I was at the grow shop. Also could just be strain specific, because BD is extra tasty, eats up extra sugar.

interesting point. i'll throw some in tomorrow. was going to skip it this time since i'm not refreshing all the benficials. just checked my notes and i didnt document it, but molasses went in to the last batch of nutrients. i hadn't been giving the benes anything to eat, and man i could immediately tell the difference with some sugar in the sauce.

Flush for start of Week 7:

12 gallons RO (lazy, left a bit in there)
add 130ml cal/mag, ppm 300
add 50ml pro-tekt silicate
add 140ml liquid karma
add 112ml big bud
add 85ml hygrozyme
add 250ml VermiT
add 130ml each sensi bloom a & b, to ppm 1150
ph 5.9 unadjusted. again. nice!

ran out of sensi bloom so we'll further bump ppm tomorrow with a fresh jug.
also about drained the big bud. 1l just about perfect for 2x 10 week runs in this cabinet

azamax drenched everything again. really laid it on thick, pre-flush. let it chill and wash around in the res for a couple hours before flushing. gnats just getting out of hand again, stepping up measures. will follow this up with some SNS 203, a more hippy insecticide thing. pretty much like gonats or something like that.

ppm had been locked at y6.2 all week, ppm 1300, res temp from 65 - 72 daily. Currently 75f post flush. Cooling it down asap.

otherwise everything looking great. looking like it will be much more dense than last time, with some nice looking colas on the way!

I also just bought SNS 203, let me know how it works.

Dig this, I am in run 4 or 5 and I am just now running out of my first 1 L bottles of House & Garden. I can probably get half way through flowering one more time. But during my move I have halted my flowering garden. I swear to god, if I have to I am going to force a Technaflora starter kit down your throat. I'll really buy one for you if it gets you off that AN bandwagon.

Your BD looks good dude, reminds me of a cornfield, lol. It's ridiculous how close they are, that 1x1 screen gets some crazy scrog-action going on. My BD is still fighting low ppm's every step of the way, and I'm slowly bringing her up a little bit higher, so I can flower her as soon as I move my garden.

I didn't add but maybe 20-30ml of blackstrap molasses, pre-mixed with some water so no chunky madness. Sure enough, yellowing has slowed and parts are going green again. Not sure if its the blue dream strain going deficient at certain points (it did exactly this at about the same time last cycle) or my wacky mixology in the sauce.

Gnats still in effect, although slowed a bit with the azamax the other day. SNS 203 tonight. No sign of aphids yet.

Aphid plants have all made a complete recovery now. Must be putting down good roots again as they are all showing new growth and responding very well to the new tent. There will be no more losses. Matter of fact we'll need to top/trim/FIM/etc this week.

And let me just say, flushing with 75f water fucking sucks. So much for my source of cool RO.

Still haven't bumped ppm back up and the blue dreams are slightly protesting. PPM dropping, don't see that often in my cab .. har har. PH should be stabilizing from the flush upswing today. Started a thread about the post-flush PH rise and still no real info as to why it happens. Somebody clue me in, this has got to have a basic chemical explanation somehow. PH was up to 6.9 early yesterday, 6.2 - 6.1 by midnight and about the same now. Curious to see how the PH battle is going to go this week.

Next flush is for Overdrive sauce.

Oh and hell yeah, I love the 1" scrog screen. And I could have filled it probably another 25% on this run. Not really happy with how the fill came out with two of the six plants covering 50% of the screen. That's why the left side is so much lower than the right. The right side has got large spots on the screen with 4 - 5" between stalks. We can do much better. That being said, the plants on the right are busting out some nice colas that I probably wouldn't have seen had I scrogged it for another week.

How long have you been using the same bottles of nutrients? Have they all been replaced since you started AN? Maybe one of your bottles are no good, unlike this delicious Snickers bar I'm eating. That could be the pH problem.

Is there a cool place like a dark corner of the garage you can store water? If you keep enough of it around you can store it until it cools off. Otherwise it's more frozen water bottles.

And I am so fucking glad you saved the SFV OG and your BD. Gnats are serious fuckers, you really need to scrub down everything to get rid of the eggs completely. Spray down the top of your reservoir. and the walls of your room around your plants and the reservoir. Also spray the floor.

Fucking A', scissor hash has me all sorts of fucked up, I can't organize my thoughts. So I'm going to go ban some moldy plants from my garden.

Btw, I loooove hearing that I was right about the molasses, feels good man.

nah remember i dump the stuff in there. my bottles are never more than two or three months old.
keep meaning to order the ph perfect from canada but never do in time.

picked up new bottles today, bumped ppm up to around 1450. ph was beginning to come down, adjusted with 2.5ml AN ph up from 5.3 to 5.9. It's been locked there all day.

I really am starting to wonder if the crazy ph dive only happens on certain weeks of flower. we'll see! it's been rock solid lately. also note i've been flushing weekly so that could be doing the trick. perhaps, like humans, six girls crapping in a small tank will need frequent flushing.

sns 203 makes the whole room smell like a day spa. or maybe a pet groomer. i mixed 56ml to 1 gallon water and drenched the net pots in the chamber, allowing the runoff to enter the res. it's all hippy shit in there so not worried about it contaminating things. did the same to the stuff in the tent. tent stuff got a foliar spray of it.
it also makes the res bubble, looking just like soapy water. not super heavy froth but enough to keep an eye on it.

have not seen a single gnat even buzzing around since the sns 203 was applied, but its only been a few hours.

also ran out of CO2 today dammit. this new regulator doesn't go as low as I need, so I'll have to get clever and tube some of the overflow into the tent. maybe i can skip having to buy another tank.

ph 5.9, 1450ppm, 68f res

Well then old nutes isn't the problem. Maybe it is just the reservoir size, or possibly the varying temperatures? The sns 203 says on the bottle that it is good for soil drenching, so I imagine it is fine in your reservoir.

Next chance you get, you should snap a shot of your root mass in your DWC and the clones you got going in the tent and post it up.

asap

just a quick note on the gnats. they are big time attracted to increased CO2 levels, and my problem began (or got much worse if it had been festering) when I started boosting CO2 in the cab. They know plant life will be found in a cloud of CO2, and as the cabinet fills up and exhaust into the room, it's just a big gnat attractant.

Wonder how this applies to other pests. Seems like it would be fairly common sort of duh thing.

Poor a whole tank of co2 in there and no insect survives. 10,000ppm is lethal, so stay out of the room.

found an aphid looking fat and fucking healthy as i repotted some sfv. so there are still there dammit. knocked down, but not out. Gave another drench of SNS 203, as well as a foliar spray. Azamax again tonight or tomorrow. Going to have to switch to something that will actually kill these things rather than just fuck with them.

flush on sunday, ph rise until tuesday night, ph drop wednesday to around 4.3, ph drop slows thursday, low of 5.3, it will be arrested and stable when i ph up again tonight. Same exact pattern as last week. Look for stable ph tomorrow if i'm right. and if i am right, could this still be ph drop due to too many plants in the drink? if this were the case, would the ph drop not continue rather than stabilize over a day or two? we will see.

tent about finished, pics etc later tonight i hope. just need to get the drippers working. can't just tag spaghetti line into the 1/2" intakes without any back pressure, so will need to set up a 4th pump just for the drippers.

i wonder if hydroton would be any less likely to harbor an aphid infestation than coco? really don't want to give up coco, but if it's a big difference in insect attraction or whatever then I just might. New pots in the tent are 10", 75% hydroton with 25% layer of coco coir/croutons (cant get the good croutons only for some reason) on top.

SFV roots are kicking ass, extending a good 8" below the rockwool already. This is all brand new, fuzzy and fungalfriendly looking root growth, especially since most all of these plants lost the bulk of their root mass in the azamax hot tub two weeks ago.

veg chamber all cleaned up and sterilized. Not sure if I want to put any of the plants with potential aphid problems back in there. I might just start fresh with some new clones if a tempting strain comes my way soon. otherwise i'd put the remaining BD in there. Need to take some clones soon. Hoping I can get some SFV and BD clones off of those plants without bringing any aphid eggs etc. Azamax hasn't killed em all in the medium, but it seems to be doing a great job keeping them off the leaves and stems. Have not seen a single one up above the coco since the first azamax foliar spray, before the hot tub.


edit later: dumped the rest of the azamax bottle into a gallon of water, probably around 25ml. drenched the 10" pots. saved a bit for a gallon of light foliar strength, with which i gave them another foliar. will do the same again tomorrow then drench with the rest of this gallon.

here's something useful for once:

researching air pumps, seems lots of complaints about these $10 active air two-output pumps that i'm using 3 of. many reports that they put out very warm if not hot air, which then heats up even more when the lousy pressure can't quite put out enough power to get through air stones without backpressure.

if this is the case, then a better air pump might bring res temp down 2 or 3 degrees, right back into my sweet spot.