OCCG Hydro - Round 2 - OG Kush

[occg.hydro]

I'm not 100% sure how much they waste. I think it might be a 1:1 ratio of waste to clean but I could be wrong. I saddle clamped my drain pipe and just run the waste down there so I don't really know what the flow looks like. They charge me a flat rate for water every month so I don't see a change in my bill.

 

[swiftgt]

yea i saw ratios of 1/1 and 1.2/1
looks good ill have to clear my credit card!
and have you had trouble with low mains pressure not being strong enough to get a good rate of flow?

 

[occg.hydro]

No problems with pressure at all. You can get a little gauge that goes inline with the filter and it'll tell you if you're cool. I don't think it's usually a problem unless you have a well or something. Do you have any water pressure problems with anything else? How's the flow on the shower?

 

[JBonez]

just bought one of those ro units, did you clamp your cold water feed to a brass, steel or plastic pipe? (the clamp with the pipe piercing needle)

thanks brother, your helping out a lot man, and thanks for the info you sent, i think i will be going your route very soon, with my own modifications of course, but nonetheless!

 

[occg.hydro]

right on man! I didn't use that piercing thing. I went to ace hardware and bought a couple of pieces to give me a Y off of the pipe, an on/off knob and a reducer that fit the tubing to the R/O filter. Major pain in the a** to find all the right parts but I didn't feel like poking holes through metal pipes and stuff. The only hole I made was in my drain pipe for the waste line. That pipe was plastic though and it'll be way easier to replace when I move.

 

[JBonez]

right on man! I didn't use that piercing thing. I went to ace hardware and bought a couple of pieces to give me a Y off of the pipe, an on/off knob and a reducer that fit the tubing to the R/O filter. Major pain in the a** to find all the right parts but I didn't feel like poking holes through metal pipes and stuff. The only hole I made was in my drain pipe for the waste line. That pipe was plastic though and it'll be way easier to replace when I move.

yeah, i was really trying to avoid having to modify the plumbing, but hey, i can tear a motor apart, apparently i can grow mj pretty darn good, should be nothing to mod out the plumbing while im at it.

i tell ya what, ive learned more about things non mj related all because i grow pot, crazy how handy you have to become to grow, i love it!

thanks again brother,

one more question.

do your buckets have any water in them other than the water that drains out do to you having the res lower than the buckets? I was checking out the waterfarm system, it appears to have a dwc/drip setup, like the roots are on a drip system, but still sit in a bath of oxygenated water, could you clear that up for me, sorry man, you must be sick by now, lol. thanks

 

[occg.hydro]

no worries bro! The buckets have about 1.5" of water in the bottom just because I drilled the holes a little high. It's kind of up to you. If you drill the holes higher than that make sure to put an airstone in each bucket like you would with a DWC. I don't have airstones in the buckets, only in the reservoir but not all that much water sits in the bottom. I've definately been thinking about adding them though. I don't think it could hurt at all. Keep in mind that when you up the ppm in your res. it's going to drop a lot if you have more water in the bottom of the buckets because it's going to act like a bunch of little individual reservoirs. The less water you have in the bottom of the buckets the easier it is to adjust everything.

 

[JBonez]

no worries bro! The buckets have about 1.5" of water in the bottom just because I drilled the holes a little high. It's kind of up to you. If you drill the holes higher than that make sure to put an airstone in each bucket like you would with a DWC. I don't have airstones in the buckets, only in the reservoir but not all that much water sits in the bottom. I've definately been thinking about adding them though. I don't think it could hurt at all. Keep in mind that when you up the ppm in your res. it's going to drop a lot if you have more water in the bottom of the buckets because it's going to act like a bunch of little individual reservoirs. The less water you have in the bottom of the buckets the easier it is to adjust everything.

FINALLY! The answer ive been looking for, i figured exactly what you said, i didnt see any air lines going into your buckets and was wondering. Man, i can wait to setup my first hydro grow, im pretty sure it will go smoothly, im way to attentive to mess it up, besides, im pretty sure that if i start at a lower ppm and work my way up ill be fine, I noticed the print out of your ppm,tds, ph and stuff, is your monitor computer controlled? The ph seems to be up and down like crazy, my hanna grocheck is pretty accurate, so i guess i dont see how ph could swing that much, i know as the plants consume, the ph and tds will change. Do you find yourself using ph up and down? i only use ph up since my nutes drop my ph, then i adjust to 6.6 for soil. lemme know brotha! and thanks for helping a fellow grower like yourself!

 

[occg.hydro]

One thing that might be cool to try is putting the drain holes about 1/3 way up the 5gal buckets so each one holds about 1.75 gal of water like a DWC, with airstones in each bucket. You could still do the external reservoir and top drip but have roots like a DWC. There's a million ways to do it. I've kind of been thinking about trying this out on the next grow. The system, overall, would hold more water so I'm wondering if it would be more pH stable than mine is.

 

[occg.hydro]

the pH charts were from my last grow, I made those all in excel. I had a lot of problems with heat affecting the reservoir and the plants, so I kept track of everything in spreadsheets until I got it all figured out. I've noticed that the pH is pretty unstable and takes a lot more adjusting when you're at lower ppm's and then as you up the nutrients and the ppm's increase everything starts to get more stable. I think it has something to do with the nutrients buffering the solution. I've also noticed that at lower ppm's it takes way less pH up & pH down to adjust than it does at higher levels so be really careful with that. It's kind of easy to over shoot your adjustments so take your time and go slow. That last grow was really hard b/c we were having a heat wave and I had a really weak AC so everything bounced around a lot. My temps went from 85 degrees on average (last grow) to about 75 degrees this time around. That made everything waaaaay more stable. My air pump sits on top of the reservoir, right in front of the AC, so it pumps cold air in and keeps the reservoir about 68 degrees. Keeping the water cool is really important otherwise you get problems with algae and stuff. The algae raises your pH I guess. This time around the pH has more of a tendency to go down. I just add more water to bring the pH back up and then add nutes to get the PPM back to where I want it and then readjust the pH one last time with the right amount of up or down (it usually doesn't take all that much at that point).

 

[JBonez]

thanks man, your nutes must not affect your ph that much, i use botanicare pureblend pro, and when i add it to distilled water, the ph is steady at 3.3 at full rec. dosage. I only use ph up as a result, so ive never messed with ph down. I have found a trick, Take a small glass, fill it with your water and add a calculable amount of ph up or down, it will still work, just diluted for easier adjusting, swings in ph wont be so drastic.

i know the sensi two part once added is pretty ph stable, small adjustments im sure, but thats what ive heard.

keeping my res cool shouldnt be hard, so hopefully my ph wont swing as bad.

What gets me is how im going to calculate how much Bloom and supplemental bloom formula to bring tds levels back up, i thinks theres is a formula for adding back, but not sure how to execute it.

 

[occg.hydro]

The plants will do one of three things. They can 1)use more water than nutrients --> pH drops, PPM rises. 2) more nutrients than water --> pH rises, PPM drops. 3) equal amounts of both --> pH stays stable, may rise or fall a bit, PPM stays the same.
I add water to the reservoir every day, so I take a look at what the ppm is doing and if the plants are using more water than nutes I lower the PPM (just add water & adjust pH). If they're using the same amt. of both (PPM hasn't changed but the water level has dropped) I add water and nutrients to maintain the PPM. If they're using more nutrients than water (PPM has gone down) I add water and then top off with nutrients and either bring the PPM back to where it was or bump it up a little bit. I don't really use a specific formula for adding nutrients, I just follow the AN feeding schedule and adjust based on how my plants respond to it. I know there's some people who top off with water and 1/4 strength nutrients as a rule of thumb but I like to make sure that the plants actually need the nutrients before I put them in.

 

[swiftgt]

so hydro have you any pics of your babys today?!

 

[occg.hydro]

Here are some new pics from last night. Got some good closeups of the little buds forming. I dropped the nutrients back down to 1000ppm b/c I was startin to get some nute burn on a few of the leaves. The pic I included was about the worst one I could find. It's not all that widespread, really only a few leaves. I guess I'll take it a little slower with the bloom nutes.

 

[swiftgt]

i like the way you keep every thing spick and span!
looks good,
and i see you went mylar crazy!nice
they seem to be doing very well,
nice and green,
do you just have the one airpump? and is it about a 70gph pump?
keep up the good work!

 

[JBonez]

as always, going phenomenally, mine look about the same (only shorter) but then again, im growing some heavy indica phenos, the only sativa pheno i have is almost as tall as one of yours, but thats it.

Yo OC, btw, i got all my connectors, grommets, tubing and some stuff i needed, other than that i had most of what i need to get this going, next round should be a hydro grow, im just gonna do exactly like you with a few modifications tailored to my grow space (i have a whole room in my house for growing, actually two, one for vegging and one for flowering)

Its nice to see someone react to a nute burn situation instead of posting in the sick plants forum!

Bro, ive given one Bloombastic feeding, and man, im telling ya, ive got little nugs already and im not even at three weeks, so far so good, ill post pics in my journal later tonight, peace.

 

[JBonez]

how do those drippers work for ya? Seems like they dont water the entire rootball, but then im sure the roots grow towards the flow of water.

 

[occg.hydro]

They didn't work for me at all when I was just using hydroton but now The medium is mostly rockwool. They work great with the big blocks. The rockwool seems to wet really evenly. They get watered 4 times a day for 15 minutes, so after about 5 the rockwool has as much water as it can hold and it just flows through the rest of the medium. I pulled the mesh pots up a little bit the other day to take a look and there are tons of nice white roots coming through the sides and bottom of the pots. They look good to me!

 

[JBonez]

They didn't work for me at all when I was just using hydroton but now The medium is mostly rockwool. They work great with the big blocks. The rockwool seems to wet really evenly. They get watered 4 times a day for 15 minutes, so after about 5 the rockwool has as much water as it can hold and it just flows through the rest of the medium. I pulled the mesh pots up a little bit the other day to take a look and there are tons of nice white roots coming through the sides and bottom of the pots. They look good to me!

yeah, i remember you saying that you use the rockwool cubes, how big are the cubes squared ( 1 square inch?) im gonna do the same, if it aint broke, dont fix it, and i can pretty much tell from the overall look of your leaves that youve got it dialed, very healthy and uniformly green, i get nute burn like in your pics too, but i do it on purpose usually to see what my limits are, especially a strain im not familiar with. Cant friggin wait to grow in water.

 

[occg.hydro]

Actually I use the 6x6x6 "hugo blocks" they have a hole for a 1x1x1 block in the top. I put them in the 10" pot and then fill the rest of the space with hydroton. It's worked great so far! They actually saved my a** one night. My roommate knocked the pump plug out of the timer and I didn't notice until I got back to town the next day. They didn't get watered for about 30 hours but still didn't dry up to the point of wilting. Probably wouldn't work out the same if it happened again, with them as big as they are, but it was nice not to come back to a closet full of shriveled up plants.