RDWC - Advice Welcome!

G

gangadoctor

New Member
i've tried pm'ing you but can't so here goes...

hi village idiot. i've been following your posts a lot and i have a lot of respect for you... i need your help mate big time if you don't mind;

let me give you some background...

my setup consists of 3 grow rooms. each is a closed room and contains an air conditioner, dehumidifier, co2, uv filter, 8 20 litre buckets rdwc, and a chiller as well as a few circulating fans and a carbon filter. each bucket has a big diffuser in it run by an industrial air pump. it's taken me a while to get this setup to where it is and i'm really happy with it.

i use dutchpro nutrients consisting of their grow and bloom A & B, take root, multitotal, keep clean, and explode.

my additives include calmag plus, m90, clearex, pythoff, and h202.

my fear is that i think i maybe introducing nutes into my system then sterilising it with h202 and clearex rendering it useless and this is where i need your help please.

recently i purchased some advanced nutrients nutes including voodoo juice, budblood, b52, and a&B. i used them at half the labeled dosages and the whole system clogged up and my water stopped circulating and the roots were full of mucus and slime once again.

my last two grows have been a disaster in my opinion as each time i contracted pythian. i've read so much about it and tried to combat it but have failed. yesterday i took the drastic step of cutting all my roots to within an inch of the net pots after cleaning everything own once again with bleach and h202. i cleaned all the mucus off the roots and the slime and sprayed with h202 and sat the net pots with the stones in a h202 / pythoff 'bath' and watched as the water fizzed.

i then refilled my rdwc with plain water and added the correct dosage of regen a root and wilt guard by american express with some pythoff and also installed a uv filter on the water line. today the plants look wilted and sad. i'm thinking maybe i cut too much roots off but at least the water looks clear. i haven't introduced any nutes yet but am foliar feeding as the leaves are yellowing. that's where i am today and my hope is that they will bounce back and grow some new roots.

from what you're saying it's not worth running a sterile res - please help me set up my system so i can run beneficials - the only problem is i'm in the uk and can't get things like great white and aqua shield or ancient forest. i'm thinking maybe i'm too new at this to be looking at making my own teas and possibly it might be better for me to buy off the shelf products.

the very last thing i tried was House & Garden Roots Excelurator. i've heard so much about it and after cleaned my whole system once again i added that with some h202 and pythoff and within a day the system clogged and the brown slime returned to the roots.

PLEASE HELP
 
re: I need your help!

No worries We will get you fixed right up.

First off we need you to talk to moderator about why you can't PM me. It should be a simple click of the button. I understand not all browsers work well with this site. Try using Chrome on a PC and it should work fine. You just click on my name and a small set of choices appear including private messages. If that doesn't work if you go to your own profile and go to your inbox you can find a way to compose a message. I will send you a test one that you can try to reply to.

Now you have what sounds to be a large scale setup with lots of money invested. I will do what I can but I tend to help small home growers. I feel no one should go big time until they have a solid foundation of home growing and once they do they wont need my help.

I have done large scale but like most large scale grow ops I did that in soil. I only do Hydro in small scale where it can make a real difference.

It is all the same...we can get you working but I am trying to prime the pump here. I may go off on you about things like adding CO2 before you have a stable growing operation. Just adding CO2 doesn't help. It only works in a sealed environment which means you need much more sophisticated controls and a spare "lung" room to do it correctly. Just adding a CO2 generator to a room that isn't hot enough or humid enough and doesn't get to high enough PPMs is just wasting money. There is a lot of science behind this. You have to get the CO2 level WAY up there for it to actually make a difference. That can only happen with a complicated setup. It only is cost effective (as in improves the total harvest enough to pay for itself) in a large grow. Something well beyond a personal grow.

If you really want some help start a journal and update me and I will subscribe and we can talk about your situation there.


You are setup to run sterile and running sterile is very easy. Running a good natural living res is not difficult and I can show you how but it sounds to me like you have a catastrophe on your hands. In that case I would sterilize the whole darn thing first. we can go living after we clean up the mess. Living res does not mean dirty. We still need everything in the grow operation to be sterilized coming and before use all the time. All it means is we have stuff in the res that has symbiotic relationships going on that make things better.

The plants can go a good long time in the air and you can even mist them every 30 min while you are cleaning. So I would drain the system, take it apart and clean it and put it back together and start over.

If you run sterile it is probably better to run straight chemical fertilizers not organic products. I can't tell what DP is just by going to the web site. Maybe it is there but I would have to hunt some more. I did search the net and it gets mixed reviews. most people just comment how expensive it is. Did you say you are in Europe?

The brand really is irrelevant. They are all basically the same. You have to know about how plants work and then it all makes sense. I can make any nute line turn out good results. I can even make very cheap lines not made for cannabis turn out outstanding results.

Before I do any more damage start a journal, explain your setups with pics (there are many kinds of RDWC and most that you find on the web are not RDWC). We may need to make design changed to how you are recirculating. And then with a clean proper circulating setup lets look at the plants conditions and see what kind of a meltdown we need to recover from.

cool?

:thumb:

and yes you probably cut off too many roots...but roots grow fast in hydro. they will come back quickly if the rest is good to go...and you are still in veg. Once you switch to bloom you are not allowed to make any mistakes. In veg we can fix almost anything.
 
re: I need your help!

Hey VillageIdiot. I think you need a certain amount of post before you can PM. Thanks guys. Have a great day.
 
re: I need your help!

Good deal. Take care and good luck fixing him up.
 
re: I need your help!

I stopped using h202 and now use z7 water treatment and that was the end of my root rot issues.

It keeps everything spotless...
 
re: I need your help!

Thanks...good to know. I don't run sterile so I am going to be at a bit of a loss in the beginning here but I have heard good stuff about Z7!!!

My understanding is that is an enzyme. Have you tried other enzymes and feel this one works better or is this just the only enzyme you have used?


I am not certain but I think H2O2 works with enzymes. I think the issue is getting it in there in the proper ratio with H2O2. Enzymes are not alive. They are a large protein chained with amino acids and the accelerate chemical decomposition of molecules which means the break down stuff. I have often encouraged the use of enzymes in sterile res applications and sometimes people do it. Enzymes work great and the one I use for example breaks down dead roots and turns them back into plant food. That helps with dealing with the rot. If you kill the bacteria and break down the dead material then there is a better chance of getting a clean res at the next change. Most of them out there I think are basically the same. I think it has more to do with appropriate application. I think if done incorrectly as in mixed in the wrong ratios with other things they get swamped out and may not be effective. For me I use Hygrozyme and have seen great results. I have also used sensizyme.

What I have read is that enzymes help the H2O2 work faster (that may not be better) but the pH matters a lot. Not really my area as I run a living res that stabilizes its own pH and I can leave it alone just topping off.
 
re: I need your help!

You should do some tests with z7 and then you will most likely never use h202 again.

h2o2 will clean things at first.

z7 is a enzymes cleanser and will keep everything clean all the way through the grow and is Great for cloning.

There is no need to use h202 in anyway if your using z7.
 
re: I need your help!

What I said was I use the gold standard for Enzyme not some new fancy stuff. It is all basically the same. I doubt Z7 works any better than the best stuff on the market.
 
re: I need your help!

(I doubt Z7 works any better than the best stuff on the market.) I tried the rest and z7 is by far the best...
 
re: I need your help!

hi all, and thanks for your replies.

firstly, one can't send a pm until they've made 50 posts.

i started off with the one grow room in soil then moved to coco and now i'm at dwc. i was quite successful at the latter and have been alright at dwc too for the last 4 grows. i started off small and slowly built up to 3 grow rooms. i'm one of these people who likes doing things properly and am very detailed in what i do and the plan was to have a harvest every 6 to 8 weeks. i also like a challenge and mastering things i suppose. everything was going fine until the root problems and now everything has stalled because all my attention is on overcoming the problem - i refuse to let it beat me!! probably to my detriment lol.

i didn't fully understand dwc and i think i went overboard with the sterile system overdosing to an extent and unbalancing my nutes in the process as well as using some things like super thrive which is predominantly for soiled plants.

re the CO2 - i have a sensor in each room which automatically fires up the gas burner when levels are low.

i've been wanting to start a grow journal for a while but i just don't have the time to regulary update and maintain it. maybe i will.

after reading a ton of information i've decided to run a beneficial setup using compost teas. the difficulty here is that in the UK we an't get some of the ingredients such as ancient forest so i'm having to improvise.

i don't have any photos at the moment so let me give you a description of where i am now;

i have 7 plants in the rdwc and each of them contract slimy brown roots. i think the reason was because i turned my chiller off whilst cleaning the system and forgot to put it back on for 36 hours. i took the plants out and bathed them is a h202 and pythoff solution overnight after initially cleaning all the roots and removing the dead ones. i ended up cutting the roots back so that only about an inch was left under the pots. i sterilised the whole system an refilled it with water. the plants seemed to love the bath because they were all nice and pert again.

i added some pythoff and h202 to the main res and a half dosage of root exceraltor and left them to it over night.

by the time the morning came i noticed my water temperature was over 24c. upon closer inspection the water pump pipe stopped pumping water through the chiller!! and the plants all looked wilted again and the water around the roots had clumps of brown slime again. i took the plants out again and repeated the procedure from the day before and i replaced all the pump pipework for new.

this time i added plain tap water to the setup and phdown and pythoff and h202. no nutes. left it another 24 hrs and guess what - still more slime.

not given up yet lol...

took the plants out bathed them and they looked well again apart from a little yellowing on the leaves. cleaned the whole system AGAIN and this time i just added tap water and nothing else which i've replaced again. i took the plants out completely and put them into a small homemade dwc setup under a cfl. the setup has aeroponic spray heads attached to pipework which continually spray water on the roots 24/7. i've added some advanced nutrients voodoo juice to the water and some ph down and that's it. that was 2 days ago.

today i started a 20 litre bucket of compost tea which will be ready in 2 days after de chlorinating the tap water for a day. my intention was to reintroduce the plants in the rdwc when it's ready but now i'm thinking i might just introduce it into the dwc setup they're temporarily in because it's much smaller and much easier to clean.

i checked the roots today and slime is starting to build up again. i thought the voodoo juice was similar to a tea but maybe not?? maybe that's a good thing as it will allow me to test the tea.

i've got a few pictures i can add but i have no idea how to??
 
re: I need your help!

Voodoo is basically one family of bacteria (not true it is more but mostly just the important ones). A good tea has lots of stuff. But Voodoo is good stuff...you just need to dump a bunch in there. And add some Enzymes as well.

The recommended dosing is for preventative maintenance and for doing some good stuff for growth. You have an out of control infection. So you probably need to be more aggressive. You should add a broken down molasses product for the bacteria to breed with and that will help. If you can get the breeding in the res to look like what a good tea looks like when it is brewing then you are on the right track.

So in your side setup add a strong dose of both an enzyme (wherever you got the voodoo will have Advanced Nutes Sensizyme, or the Z7 is supposed to be great! I have heard that from many people) and double down on the voodoo and add some sugars. If it starts looking like it is fermenting we are looking good. It will die down after a few days. Then inspect and see if the slime is still there. If so I would start again and start with first the sterilization you described and then flush all of that stuff out and do the bacteria again.

Run the enzyme in both stages because it doesn't get hurt by the sterilization products.

Pythoff is Chloramine from what I gathered on the web. That stuff will kill any bacteria given the right dose and enough time.

So you may want to run a res for a few days with Pythoff, low nutes, enzymes and some ice bottles in there. After 3 days dump the res, run a few gallons of fresh clean dechlorinated water through the baskets to wash out the Pythoff. Then put in a new res with low dose nutes, sugars, enzymes and or a bacterial tea.


ALSO

When introducing any of this stuff do it through the baskets. Do not dump it into the res and hope it gets up into the baskets. The Pythoff is strong so dilute it first. Make up a bucket(s) of what it you want to have in your res. Then introduce it to the res by running it through the baskets to wash out everything in there.

You don't need to update all the time to have a journal. If you ask a moderator they will move this to a journal and make a new title. It is a better place to resolve a specific long term problem not related to a general DWC question. I guess it is fine to leave it here but we should not be having ongoing conversations in the general forum.
 
re: I need your help!

Ok thanks. How do I contact a moderator and I still can't figure out how to upload photos?


Sent from my iPhone using 420
 
re: I need your help!

IMG_50134.JPG

this is when they were first put into the grow room

IMG_50789.JPG

this is what they looked like in the third week when the pythian took hold

IMG_061228.JPG

this is them in the tent in the single dwc where they still are whilst i'm trying to figure out what to do

IMG_51168.JPG

this is what the roots look like after i chopped them
 

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