Iluvsnow's 1st Grow - DIY Double-Decker Cab - Multi-Strain - DWC - CFL

[PakaCordova]

To combat the root rot you experienced, would adding more air stones throughout the res reduce the chances of that happening? I want to try DWC and as much as it sucks for you, it's a learning experience for me. Learning by other's problems and how they resolved them.

 

[iluvsnow]

To combat the root rot you experienced, would adding more air stones throughout the res reduce the chances of that happening? I want to try DWC and as much as it sucks for you, it's a learning experience for me. Learning by other's problems and how they resolved them.

Your plant is rocking! Looking good. I never said DWC sucks, it just comes with its own set of potential problems. I like the method very much and will use it again in the future, but hempy might work better for me, at least in certain circumstances.

I'll give you the quick and dirty on root rot as I understand it. Unless you work in the clean room at Intel, root rot bacteria is always around. Be as clean as you can, but it really never goes away. It needs three things to propagate: light (even a little bit), warm reservoir temperatures (generally regarded as temps above 72 F), and an oxygen-poor environment. So, a lot of beginners start out with a non-lightproof container (mistake one) put it in a warm closet during the summer (mistake number two) and use cheaper, low-powered pumps and stones to aerate. That is a recipe for disaster that I mostly avoided thanks to the forums here, but I still had some light peeking through my netpots through the tiny cracks in the hydroton about a month into this grow. Now I use electrical tape to cover the top 2" or so of my netpots to act as a light barrier in the res. Just those little pinholes of light in conjunction with my higher temps was enough to get it going. This most recent bout of root rot was caused by the same thing. I defoliated and moved the lights around a bit, and light made it to places where it had previously not been. This coincided perfectly with a winter heat wave of late (I wore shorts a lot of the day yesterday, during what is supposed to be our snowiest month of the year) which pretty much fully replicated the conditions in which I saw root rot appear the first time. Oh well.

If you're gonna do DWC make sure you insulate your bucket as much you can and don't skimp on the lightproofing. If you're gonna grow a big plant like my Khalifa I would suggest buying the bigger netpots that are built into a bucket lid. You can find them on Amazon or at a local hydro shop if you have one. I used a 3" netpot for the Khalifa and it started falling over in the bucket lid.

I would also pony up for a good air pump. I have a GenHydro air pump for the double decker cabinets and a cheaper four outlet pump for the Khalifa alone. Your air stone is just as important and should be changed out every so often. The GH air pump will power up to 12 stones, and one stone per reservoir is fine. My crazy pH swings I was having with my BB in flower ended up being caused by the airstone. I swapped the stone and now the pH is fine.

Since reservoir temps will always be a struggle for me I use some stuff called Dutch Master Gold Zone. It's a magic potion that's supposed to keep root rot at bay when the temps get high, but I can say I have proven it does not work when there are light leaks. There are other magic potions like Hygrozyme, Thrive Alive and others that supposedly do this too. I'm not married to any one product and will likely try Thrive Alive Green next.

As far as the SCRoG and DWC, I think some special considerations are needed. With my Khalifa it's not so bad because the plant is big enough and far enough from the net for me to peel the lid up and peek in. Not so much with the smaller plants. I can peek in, but the plant shifts in the net way too much for my comfort and I've only done it when I absolutely had to. For all intents and purposes, your lid is stuck in place with a DWC/SCRoG setup. That sucks. It's also hard to move the plant around since the bucket weighs ~40 pounds.

The RDWC setups solve some of these issues in exchange for others. You wouldn't really NEED to access each plant's bucket in RDWC since you can just change the main reservoir. You could also add a chiller to take care of res temps for however many buckets your system had. All this is expensive and takes up a lot of space. Another consideration I mentioned before is the potential for water leaks--the final strike against RDWC for me was a journal I read here on 420 where a guy had a grow in his attic, and one day his wife called him freaking out because water was dripping through the ceiling and into their living room. Some plumbing had failed in his system. If I were growing in a garage I wouldn't hesitate to rock an RDWC. Indoors, not so much. I just don't want to mess with potential issues.

All that being said, DWC/RDWC are both highly-proven methods of growing some good plants. It's just like everything else. Pros and cons. I hope this was helpful.

Update coming soon!

 

[iluvsnow]

All right. Update time. Overdue again.

So, I had some trouble with this girl:

When I accidentally cut WAY too much of the root structure off it started throwing out nanners by the next morning:

Here she is shortly after I found those:

I didn't think it would be worth potentially pollinating the others to try to save one of the smaller plants. Time for some butter!

The other flowering BBs are doing fine. I had to swap the air stone in the bigger plant's res, it ended up being the cause of the wild downward pH swings I was seeing. I carefully peeked into the res on the big girl and saw no root rot. I checked trichomes yesterday and didn't see any milky ones, so I guess I have a while longer even though I'm at day 50.

All the action is taking place in the new flowering cabinet. I flipped to 12/12 last night, so it's on!

A Khalifa clone. I supercropped this one and managed to get a pretty decent four-way structure. I'm pretty happy with this one so far, but this strain does not take well to supercropping at all. This plant has seen a lot of electrical tape.

This is a Blueberry clone. I really had no idea when I started training these plants. I started too late, and then all I did was just tie them over. They grew all kinds of weird. My big BB in flower now was trained this way. What can I say? I'm a noob.

Another Khalifa clone. I haven't done any training at all on this one. I'm just gonna let her go and see what happens.

Another BB clone. I topped this one a while back and I'm much happier with it than the other two that I just leaned over. BB seems to take well to topping.

Afghani. Topped once and turned out pretty well. It has a pretty good four-way structure going. I still haven't sexed it.

Here's the whole lot, you can also see the other BB I just kinda leaned over. It's in the middle. They really seem to be eating up everything the Mars lights throw their way. Here's the Khalifa, begging to be flowered:

I also moved the Speed Bud auto and the other unsexed Afghani into the other veg room with the clones. Nothing too exciting there.

Thanks for stopping by!

 

[Sir Budlovski]

Hey snow,
Just thought of add in that I see where your coming from with your info about DWC/RDWC, like you I think its a great grow method and gets awesome results however its a learning curve and really needs to be done as good and proper as possible.
In my most recent grow I was planning on using coco but thought well if I can get a bubble bucket DWC going that would be easier and cheaper.was not the case for me, I ended up light proofing my bucket fairly well, my airpump and stones were also good for a time but starting it during the summer here was bound for problems, res temps got high started causing problems so I ordered some sensizym and that helped heaps, then the next problem my air pump started failing.
Safe to say the girl I had went through a month or so of stunted growth from this, especially when I backed up with a lower output airpump while I was going to get a new one and root slime came back.
So I took the better simpler imo option and just said nope and went to my original plan and got my coco.
Safe to say for me being someone with less time to stress with dwc, wanting good results and an easy grow method Coco is definately what I wanted and needed.
Like you mentioned RDWC takes up room I don't have and even my bucket was taking up to much room in my tent when I wanted to add more plants in there.
I will propably re visit dwc again but not for a long while while I still have like a 40 litre bag of coco haha.


Damn hermies! Always a very risky business playing and trimming roots, you just never know what will happen sorry to hear that happened to you.
But the rest of your ladies look well and I hope they reward you from the hard work and learning your doing

 

[Bonzmoking]

Gday Snow,
Sorry you had to pull 1 of your plants.
However it is good to see the rest are doing well
Happy Gardening to you

 

[iluvsnow]

Hey snow,
Just thought of add in that I see where your coming from with your info about DWC/RDWC, like you I think its a great grow method and gets awesome results however its a learning curve and really needs to be done as good and proper as possible.
In my most recent grow I was planning on using coco but thought well if I can get a bubble bucket DWC going that would be easier and cheaper.was not the case for me, I ended up light proofing my bucket fairly well, my airpump and stones were also good for a time but starting it during the summer here was bound for problems, res temps got high started causing problems so I ordered some sensizym and that helped heaps, then the next problem my air pump started failing.
Safe to say the girl I had went through a month or so of stunted growth from this, especially when I backed up with a lower output airpump while I was going to get a new one and root slime came back.
So I took the better simpler imo option and just said nope and went to my original plan and got my coco.
Safe to say for me being someone with less time to stress with dwc, wanting good results and an easy grow method Coco is definately what I wanted and needed.
Like you mentioned RDWC takes up room I don't have and even my bucket was taking up to much room in my tent when I wanted to add more plants in there.
I will propably re visit dwc again but not for a long while while I still have like a 40 litre bag of coco haha.


Damn hermies! Always a very risky business playing and trimming roots, you just never know what will happen sorry to hear that happened to you.
But the rest of your ladies look well and I hope they reward you from the hard work and learning your doing

Thanks for checking in man. I really should have known better to mess with the roots. The sad part is, I bet the wild pH swings I was seeing in that bucket was probably due to the air stone, which ended up being the problem with my big plant. I probably could have swapped the stone and ridden out the root rot problem until harvest. Oh well. These are mistakes and this is how we learn, right? On a positive note, I'm pretty excited about the butter I made with that plant. It actually smells and tastes a bit like the plant--kind of a Trix cereal (do you guys have that kids cereal where you are?) which is a sweet, flowery, fruity sort of smell. Blueberry butter in blueberry muffins? That sounds like something that needs to happen.

Are you just using coco in pots, or hempy style? I know a lot of growers love coco for hempy. I've never even seen the stuff, but I'm really curious and will probably pick some up in the next few months.

It's crazy how much the air pump matters in DWC! When I first had root rot at the beginning of this grow I had to rush out and pick up that Gen Hydro pump I have because I realized my old pump wasn't cutting it. I'm happy to have had some measure of success with DWC, but I would eventually like to try many different methods just to see what they're all about. I think I'll face a learning curve with all of them. I can't wait to overwater my first plant in soil.

Gday Snow,
Sorry you had to pull 1 of your plants.
However it is good to see the rest are doing well
Happy Gardening to you

Thanks! It wasn't the preferred scenario, but I'm really not too concerned about the plant. I got some butter out of it and learned something in the process.

Have a great day guys.

 

[J189RFC]

Wait, your having airstone problems? But your buckets only look like they are 3-4 gallons? I use a tiny little fishtank airpump with a single stone attached to it. I even accidentally put mollases in my tank last week. I also drilled the holes myself and have never had root rot problems. Did you have pretty high temps in the buckets? I usually end up putting some h2o2 in the bucket, bout 1 drop per gallon. Not sure man. Sorry to hear about your hermi glad that it made some nice butter for you though Next time, if you really like that flavour dry and cure before you make your butter. It helps a ton!

Not sure how an airstone could swing the ph, what kind of airstone are you using? Plants will naturally lower the ph of the medium they are in by my experience. I've also noticed if the ph isn't dialed in it will wander on it's own, don't ask me why!

Everything else is looking great though, keep it up Gonna have a sweet harvest soon!

 

[iluvsnow]

Good eye. I keep my buckets at the 3.5 gallon mark. I pretty much concluded the problem was the airstone after trial and error. When I first noticed the pH issue I flushed for two days with pH water, then when I changed the reservoir again with added nutes, the pH went right back down. I swapped the airstone (an Active Aqua medium-sized cylinder) for the hell of it and that took care of it. It's been stable ever since, and that was about a week ago. I have no idea.

I never checked my res temps but ambient averages high-70s, so I'll just assume it was a little hot. I do have some insulation around my buckets to act as a bit of a buffer. I have used H2O2 in every res change since my initial root rot problem along with DM Gold Zone. It worked like a champ until I had a bit of a light leak, and then it went south. I'm glad you've been able to stave off the root rot gremlin. It's a tricky bastard.

I gave my little harvest a bit of cure I guess--I dried the cut stems by hanging them on a tomato cage in a closet for a couple of days until the stems were crispy, then I cut the buds off the stems and put them in a dehydrator for a few hours, then they sat in a sealed baggy for about a day. I would never do this if I planned on vaping them, but I figured since they were going straight to butter it wouldn't matter too much. Is that a decent way to do it in this case?

Thanks for stopping by and giving feedback. Much appreciated!

 

[Sir Budlovski]

That's right mate will all learn one way or another important thing is you still have other plants to make up for it
we might have thaat cereal don't think so though but can imagine the smell/taste haaha That butter sounds pretty damn nice, last one I made was bagseed plant and it just had a plain weed taste to it, not bad but still not great, I've got a strawberry cough atm that already smells like strawberry hopefully ill be able to make some sty edible with that and I have some blueberry seeds so I might try a similar reciipe to what you have gone with

I'm just using pots atm but wouldn't mind moving onto airports or something similar at some stage, ill just make sure I keep and get things dialled in with pots so far not that its hard, can easily reccomend coco for an easy going grow its a delight to use.

Yep I almost didn't believe it when people said always have a backup air pump but its definately the most important thing, its good you had success with it since going down to other methods should be abit simpler for you when you choose and nowhere near as much of a learning curve IMO. Coco is good would be an easy step for you since phs and nutrients are all pretty similar apart from coco needs extra cal/mag depending on brand you buy.
Yes the overwater or over feeding in soil can really be a SOB dwc there's no overwatering and if you overfeed you can dump the res soil is a mess around for sure on that front. I chose coco over soil cause its very hard to overwater and flushing can be done after watering without stressing it might overwater them.
Anyways mate good luck with future styles you may go towards and hope everything's still well with what your doing and all in you world is great

 

[iluvsnow]

That's right mate will all learn one way or another important thing is you still have other plants to make up for it
we might have thaat cereal don't think so though but can imagine the smell/taste haaha That butter sounds pretty damn nice, last one I made was bagseed plant and it just had a plain weed taste to it, not bad but still not great, I've got a strawberry cough atm that already smells like strawberry hopefully ill be able to make some sty edible with that and I have some blueberry seeds so I might try a similar reciipe to what you have gone with

I'm just using pots atm but wouldn't mind moving onto airports or something similar at some stage, ill just make sure I keep and get things dialled in with pots so far not that its hard, can easily reccomend coco for an easy going grow its a delight to use.

Yep I almost didn't believe it when people said always have a backup air pump but its definately the most important thing, its good you had success with it since going down to other methods should be abit simpler for you when you choose and nowhere near as much of a learning curve IMO. Coco is good would be an easy step for you since phs and nutrients are all pretty similar apart from coco needs extra cal/mag depending on brand you buy.
Yes the overwater or over feeding in soil can really be a SOB dwc there's no overwatering and if you overfeed you can dump the res soil is a mess around for sure on that front. I chose coco over soil cause its very hard to overwater and flushing can be done after watering without stressing it might overwater them.
Anyways mate good luck with future styles you may go towards and hope everything's still well with what your doing and all in you world is great

Yeah, I think pretty much every grow method has some errors just waiting to happen, and I'm pretty sure I'll eventually find a lot of them. Thankfully I took all those clones (which I really didn't even need) so I have some backup in case things go horribly wrong. Now I'm using those smaller plants for some training practice, which is pretty fun so far. Here's what's going on today:

Here's my Afghani, I trimmed a lot of fan leaves off it and tied down the branches, really giving it a good cross shape. I trimmed two days ago and I can already tell the tops in the center have gotten much bigger.

The rest aren't trained nearly as well as that one. Here are some pictures anyway.

I'm two days into the 12/12 flip and the SCRoG on the Khalifa is already almost full. There is a bit of space on the right side, but there's not much of the plant around that area for me to move. This should be interesting.

Have a great Sunday fun day.

 

[iluvsnow]

LED lighting sucks for pictures. These are better:

 

[iluvsnow]

Quick update: The flowering Blueberries will be coming down this week. I've been checking, and over the last few days milky trichomes have been everywhere. No amber yet, but I'm starting the flush now. This would be roughly day 55 of flower assuming it takes a week for flowering to kick in after the 12/12 flip began on 11/29. I really never got a good answer on when to start the clock on counting flowering days.

The SCRoG is so tall on the the Khalifa I can sit under it to tweak the branches in the net. It's pretty handy. I did a pretty good defol Saturday, but you can't really tell. Pics of the other girls for the hell of it:

Have a great day!

 

[iluvsnow]

Man, you can really see how I cooked the Blueberries with the nutes. I didn't realize it was so bad until today, when I finally took a good look at it under regular light. It got the exact same mix as the Khalifa and all the others, and they are doing great. This strain is supposed to be picky about nute levels, which I guess I can vouch for now. I'll make up for it on the others I have going...

 

[akisunni]

Over all, looking very good. You are in the homestretch now.

 

[J189RFC]

Man your BB is looking so much better than mine! That neem oil just destroyed mine. And the one time I actually fed her she decided it was time to revolt. Terribly sensitive yours are looking great!

 

[PakaCordova]

~~

Update coming soon!

Hey man, thanks for taking the time to explain everything. This will help me a lot when I do move on to hydro. I was wondering how people do res changes with DWC and scrogs. It looks like scrogging might be out of the mix unless I have some kind of active water removal method already in the bucket before the scrog goes up. Maybe just a small pump to pull the water out. Thanks again for the detailed explanation.

 

[iluvsnow]

Man your BB is looking so much better than mine! That neem oil just destroyed mine. And the one time I actually fed her she decided it was time to revolt. Terribly sensitive yours are looking great!

Thanks! I don't know if I would have chosen this strain if I had had more options going into this. The BB seeds were the only ones I had access to at the time. They've been a great learning experience for sure.

Over all, looking very good. You are in the homestretch now.

Thanks for stopping back by. I'll be glad to have the BBs done. I'm ready to rearrange some things and get the setup really dialed in. These first few plants are just to see if this whole growing experiment is getting anywhere. So far so good.

 

[iluvsnow]

Hey man, thanks for taking the time to explain everything. This will help me a lot when I do move on to hydro. I was wondering how people do res changes with DWC and scrogs. It looks like scrogging might be out of the mix unless I have some kind of active water removal method already in the bucket before the scrog goes up. Maybe just a small pump to pull the water out. Thanks again for the detailed explanation.

No sweat. I wish I had known about those things before I got my setup going. I would have made some changes for sure. To change my reservoirs I use a $3 hand siphon from Home Depot that I stick in through a hole I cut in the bucket lid. Once the water levels reach equilibrium I just use the bulb on top to finish pumping the water out. It's far from ideal. I looked around for a self-priming transfer pump and it's surprisingly hard to find an inexpensive one that works. I tried one from Harbor Freight and it was junk, all the ones at Home Depot are more than I want to spend.

Another potential downside for DWC is the additional height of the bucket. My hempy pots are about 6" shorter than my DWC buckets. In my original setup that 6" makes a BIG difference--the new flower room has plenty of height, but I'll always take more when I can get it. Please don't take this as me trying to sway your opinion, but like I said--these are all things I wish I had known going in.

Update coming soon.

 

[iluvsnow]

All right. Time for a quick update.

The BBs are coming down some time this week. I'm thinking Friday at this point, but we'll see. That makes one day shy of ten weeks since the 12/12 flip on a strain that's supposed to be 7-8 weeks. I already knew that the breeder recommendations were likely off, so I'm glad I picked up a scope early to check the trichomes. I may harvest the big girl first, then the smaller one later to see what difference the trichome color makes on the effects. Not much new in the old flower cabinet.

Not much new in the upper veg cab. Clones. Afghani. Speed Bud Auto. They're all hangin' in.

The new flower cab has a new resident:

That's a Mars Hydro 96x3 you see right next to my 100x3! My cab is flowered by Mars.

I think I'm good on lights now. The plants are loving these lights. They are super happy.

Khalifa. Looking huge. I've given up on manipulating anymore. I'll probably defoliate again in about two weeks, but otherwise I'll probably leave it alone. Things are starting to change shape, so I should see some buds soon:

I'm 99% sure that the Afghani is a girl. If so, the other one is going away. I really don't need two and this is far and away the stronger of the two.

They are taking off! Here are a couple of other random pics:

I looked back over the pics in this journal and am really noticing how much tighter the tent is. The plants are really going strong.

Am I the only person growing this Khalifa around here? I haven't been able to find anything on it. I found some stuff on Leafly, but that's about it. It's a lot easier to grow than the Blueberry, that's for sure.

Have a great day guys.

 

[PakaCordova]

Everything is looking damn good man!