Re: Quest for 1g/w: 1k hps liquid cooled on a 6' mover in a 4x8 tent.
Hey Wheel.
Always nice to see an expert grower using a "new" medium in their grow. Don't give up on em yet. I think you'll see good things to come.
Hey Wheel.
Last question for my future reference. Did you place the hydroton in the inner bucket, or outer bucket?
Thanks again Bro.
SF
I'm so not scared of trying something new, almost to a fault. lol. They do look awefully purrty all white and clean looking.
washing hydroton is a bitch. I used a weak H2O2 solution to do it, but i still have a small amount of old root matter and stuff in there, and some of it still looks a bit slimy, so it makes me nervous that i could add something undesirable from last grow. These inserts will be really easy to toss at the end, but they should either include some kind of spacer with the product, or just make them taller. They obviously know the problems if they are putting out videos to show workarounds. don't be cheap, if you are going to market something at a specific product, then really tune it so it's as good as you can make it. at $8 each you better make it worth it for me when hydroton is mostly reuseable.
Do you see how the bottom of the bucket was acted like a choke point for your root system? they look great, dont get me wrong, roots that look like that are working at a very high efficiency, so you really can get the most out of them, so nice job.
My hope with using a 3"-4" layer of hydroton inside the
inner bucket is that my rootball ill be able to fill out the entire hieght of the flood. . . by using a spacer, the roots are being choked right in the middle of the flood depth by the bottom of the pot. your roots did a great job of coming through and spreading out, but i bet the top half of your buckets are filling slower lately. But obviously you can see that the top half of your roots can take in more food and water than the bottom half that came through the holes. I think the hydroton will let me get dense roots like your top half all the way through. I think it will act like aggregate, like putting rocks at the bottom of dirt to insure good drainage.
If i had money to blow, id put an airstone in every bucket and not car if the roots sit in the water. maybe something i'd try down the line. one of the benefits of an EnF system is how much O2 can get to the roots, with an airstone at the bottom forcing in fresh air, not only would the roots get fresh air, they'd get a breeze. lol. thats a lot of O2. I think it might be very good if you are injecting CO2 and not venting your room. since CO2 sinks, it makes sense that it would displace some O2 from the root zone when the pot fills with air during the drained period. placing the air pump near the top would grab the O2 rich air and push it through the buckets.
Damn brownies have me going again. I ate a brownie 8 hours ago and I'm still done for. Sorry, I'll try not to write novels. lol.
SUBSCRIBED!!..... this is going to be amazing.
for sharing your attempt!!
No problem, welcome aboard. off to a shaky start, but we got plenty of time to straighten these things out before it gets to the all important flower stage.
Refresh my memory, please: What exactly was your purpose in going with that particular medium in the first place? I mean, was there some specific problem with a previous medium that you were trying to solve by using them or was it just to try something new? Not that I'm knocking the latter, exactly. But it that was the reason, did you consider doing some that way and some your usual way as a control?
No, basically I read their web page, it sounded like it would work well and be way easier than dealing with millions of little mars balls. I always drop some on my floor and then step on them. no big deal or anything, but if $150 makes my life a lot easier and it works great, I might be down. I bought them when I had cash, a month or so before my last grow finished. then McB was like, why mess with what works, and I was like yeah, seriously. I've done hydroton before and know how to do it well, why am I messing around again when I'm trying to pull more than I ever pulled before? But money already spent, I decided to go ahead and try it out. With such a long veg time compared to what I'm used to, I'm sure i'll figure it out before I go to flower.
I did consider doing some one method, some the other, but then I thought if one needed a different flood schedule that would be bad. I could have used another controller and had them 12 on one and 12 on another like McB, but with all of them on the same schedule, I think its easier for me this way. Plus that frees up the other controller if I want to do something else with it.
Looks like it's coming along nicely.
Thanks Saturn, welcome. Stick around for the good part.
But something tells me you wont need it this time. I'm watching
H down solution into it. The doser is now incredibly accurate, and I had to fine tune it again. I have it dosing between 5.8-6.2 as the technaflora schedule advises.
+rep if I can
