Hydroton's 1st hydro grow

So here's the deal, this will be my first hydro grow.

The room:

I'm in the process of building my grow room. My garage has previously been converted into a bedroom and the walls/ ceiling are all insulated. The central AC system has been modified to intake the air through the garage instead of the intake vent in the center of my 2(3)br/2 bath house. I'm almost finished constructing my grow area within the garage, all that is left is drywalling and installation of all the horticulture specific goodies. I have framed out a room 5x8 and built the floor up off of the concrete. I am purchasing a CAP ebb & grow 12 site and will be vegging and flowering from seedling to harvest in this system. The pots will be contained to a 4x5 area in this room, leaving the other 4x5 for resevoir/ control box, work table and stroage of nutes/etc. I also have a 1Kw convertible elect. ballast MH and HPS bulbs, timer, blah blah blah.... will get into specifics as the installation of goodies occurs.

The plants:

Well, as this is my first hydro I'm not gonna spend any $$ on seeds/clones and have collected many bagseeds. I purchased a 72 site peat pod "greenhouse" for propogation and sowed 3 seeds in each of 24 pods on Sunday, the rest of the pods haven't been wet and are put away. I plan on growing the pods out until the seeds are halfway to transplant and cut the pods down to the healthiest single seedling per pod. At transplant time I will again massacre some plants and "weed" them down to the healthiest 12 to place in the ebb and grow. As of this AM (thursday, day 5) I have 7 sprouts. There will most likely be more when I get home.

Time to get going.......be back tomorrow.

OK, morning day 6:

Only 8 sprouts thus far...I'm hoping to have all 24 pods sprouted before long. I had lightly soaked the seeds for 24hrs prior to putting them in the pods, but it smelled like something was wrong before I planted them. I rinsed them off while planting and hope I didn't use too warm of water. Have to wait and see. My tallest sprout is about 1" to 1 1/2". All in all, if I'm only successful sprouting the 8 it's no big deal as my setup isn't quite ready for a proper grow anyway. I will be stopping by Lowes for some 2' floro's and get a thermometer controller and heating pad for my propogation system today or this weekend. No nutes yet... I figure in about 4-5 days I'll probably start in on them @ 1/8 strength and work the GH g-m-b up to a 16ml-8ml-8ml per gallon over a 2 week period. This AM I hung 2 small CFLs (lightbulb replacement type) 2-3" higher than the tallest sprout to start getting the sprouts some soft gentle light.

Thinking back, I prolly shoulda built a propogation chamber before starting the construction of the room...oh well.

Oh, yeah. Before I get too far into this I wanna thank the RIU community for all the great info on here, I've been reading for weeks. Don't worry about me asking questions that can be answered in the stickys...read them several times and am very appreciative of all the great knowledge being shared.

Feel free to chime in with any questions/answers/advise whenever you feel fit, just be sure you are truly knowledgeable and not just spreading hearsay. Thanx!

Till next time......