Welcome to my growroom
As I said in my intro, I spent a lot of time researching be it u-tube, forms, online articles, I spent 4 months planning this room and lay-out to work with what space I had. Believe me, until you start one, frugal planning on space is not what you want to do.
This is my growroom within a room, it is framed out to be 10' x 5'...I lost 4" to framing & sheetrock, so no it is 116"x56"...4" doesn't seem like much but it makes a lot of difference when inside;
Inside this space I have a 4'x4'x78" tent that the clones are in now leaving me enough space to walk in and attend to everything...less than 2 feet;
So far this is manageable...a little tight but works...so far.
DIY RDWC System
I always wanted to try Deep Culture ever since I first read about in High Times Magazine back in the late 70's. I studied many videos, turnkey products avaialible, and the issues that users had with them. Leakage from uniseals that give out causing a mess, roots blocking returns causing a big mess, algae, temperature problems causing dead or dying plants were common complaints.
I designed my system to uses as much of the natural cooling of a cement basement floor as I could as well as the room it is in to keep temps down without using a chiller incorporated in the system. Everything is setting on concrete to help absorb the heat in the water, the air temp in the room is as cool as it is upstairs by heat or AC depending on the season...so far so good!
To eliminate any leakage, I used bulkhead fittings with silicone to seal the buckets inside and out as well as the 30 gal reservoir, I used black buckets, reservoir, piping and fittings as much as I could to eliminate light leakage, and used a bottom feed with a natural flow top drain incorporated with screens on both the feed and drain openings to stop roots from blocking the system.
The net pots on the buckets are 2" above the waterline, each bucket holds 3 gallons and 1 quart for a total of 13 gallons. In veg I was running 20 gallons every 7 days, in flower I increased it to 25 gallons and expect to go to 30 in a couple weeks because they are starting to really drink!
I located my reservoir outside the growroom and used a external 500 GPH Pondmaster pump and a 792 GPH Mag drive Air pump also located outside the growroom to help keep the water temp down. So far my high water temp has been 70 degrees and is usually setting around 68 degrees.
The system has worked well, I do have some changes that I will make when this current grow is done, one is to re-locate my shut-off valves to allow me to bring my buckets closer together, this change will help me gain 4" on each bucket row and allow the SCROG to turn into a full SOG.
Some of these pictures are from a few weeks back, and some are kinda of dark;
Hope this gives all of you a better idea of this grow in my eye's...I will post some of the other goodies that I am using tomorrow that helps me keep control of this grow...
The ladies seem to love it!
Thanks for all the great comments!
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