New Loft Grow Room - Input Appreciated

fortheloveofgrow said:

I think you gotta give your rdwc system at one more run! You've got a pretty complex kit put together and knew there'd be some tuning. Your decision and design processes have been sound and you hit a hiccup. You now have at least some semblance of a working solution and can continue to dial it in. Your lab is probably only a few cycles away from a [nearly!] autonomous industrial goodie factory

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g'day Lofty,

Divide & conquer, nxt time split the crop between 2 systems
That way u have a back up if 1 system fails
VG

verticalgrow said:

g'day Lofty,

Divide & conquer, nxt time split the crop between 2 systems
That way u have a back up if 1 system fails
VG

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Ooooh! Now that is a good idea!

I could easily do one 8x4 tent RDWC and one 8x4 tent hempy side by side.

loftygoals said:

Ooooh! Now that is a good idea!

I could easily do one 8x4 tent RDWC and one 8x4 tent hempy side by side.

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This guy runs 4 plants DWC & gets 7 pounds

https://www.rollitup.org/t/my-latest-vert-garden.898041/

i think thats a great idea, don't give up the original plan until you have something better to take its place, you may even discover ones better for veg, one for flowering? never know till you try

It's good to see the roots all healthy and recovering after the weekend. I'm with the others, next run will be 200% better.

So you're thinking of going perpetual? Lovely, I'll need to try that one day, although it seems like a ton of work. But more work= more/faster bud.

I have a lot of catching up to do but what a great thread . Looks like a nice job done congratulations and yes it is wonderful to see a room done right. I'm a builder and an inspector by trade. Recently completed some nice rooms myself and it's a great feeling

Hey Lofty, lets get an update !

Lol! OK here's an update.

The slime is back despite the bennies. I think these plants are buggered. I'm stuck in a cycle of recovery, slime, recovery, slime.

Using sterile measures (UV, Ozone, chlorine) and low ppm nutes I can get new white root growth but if I turn that lot off then slime finds a way to grow on the damaged roots and eventually takes over. If I leave the sterilisation going then the plants get unhappy and yellow (tried turning ozone off and reducing chlorine but its a balancing act and the slime seems to win before plants are happy).

Here's a shot of roots this morning



To top it off I'm getting bits of dead roots blocking the water pump and RDWC tubes (3 blockages in the past day).

So I'm going to try passive hydro. I transplanted the auto that I started 2 weeks ago into a 5L hempy bucket I made to try it out 2 days back. Here's a pic today:



Seems happy enough. Ignore the water on the floor, I'd just watered and hadn't cleaned up yet.

So... I've taken 20 clones 3 days ago which are in rockwool. I can't see this current crop being salvaged now so I took another 20 clones and put them in the aero cloner just for kicks.




The res is full of RO water with "pool shock" at the "clear rez" concentration. I haven't bothered with hooking up a chiller (I have one going spare! lol) because room temp is only 20C and I'm using a timer to control the water pump so it shouldn't heat up much.

I bought an ANLY repeat cycle timer and mounted it onto a small timber stand. It has dials which allow 0-25 mins on and 0-25 mins off . I'm running it 2 mins on and 5 mins off.

Also aiming to get the LED lighting finished this weekend. I've got 4x 450W light bars in place but am adding another 4x600W. Here's one of the 600w lights wired up:



I have the other 3 built, just need wiring up which will take around 2 hours each. The plan is to swap the cheap COBs to CXBs after a couple of grows (No way I could afford 80x CXBs off the bat). Just haven't got any plants to put under them at the moment

There's only one last thing to try Lofty..

Introducing the Siamese Algae Eater... a fish that eats algea
"It is a voracious eater and will consume not only algae from plants, glass and decorations, but leftover pellets, parboiled vegetables, flake food and live food...They require a large amount of living plants and plenty of room to explore and feed which makes a longer tank more desirable. Owners should keep the tank lid on since they can easily jump out."

lol, has anyone ever put live fish or shrimp to get rid of algea ? haha

Aw sorry to hear that lofty, it must be extremely frustrating for you. Hopefully passive hydro will turn out better!

keep at it man, most people take 3 or 4 grows to just figure out how to properly set a grow room up. you did your research and got it on the first try. it usually takes people a couple of grows after they figure out the room to get the actual growing dialed in. you got at least a three grow jump on most people.
wait for the epiphany, they never come as fast as i'd like, but i find they do come.

Check this out

2100W of water cooled COB LEDs in a 8x4:



2x450W bars with 8 COBs each. Dirty voltage control via buck boosters and resistor current limiting.
2x600W bars with 20 COBs each. Meanwell HLG-600h driven.

2.1kW per tent. 4.2kW total. All water cooled.

I think this is the first large'ish scale water cooled LED grow setup.

Both tents now setup the same. Once these clones get rooted they're going under these bad boys in hempies!

that's awesome, its like how I would do homepot if I had the skill and they put in charge of the lighting section.

sorry bout them roots, but I'm sure you're not alone. maybe you could cut the number of buckets until you get it dialed in and add more slowly. and the Chinese fish sounds cool. though I'm not sure how him would get on with all the nuets-n-such.

in the meanwhile you could just go a coco/pro mix, grow something simple.

Since I have that auto in a 5L hempy so I can move it around... and I'm gonna be running the lights overnight as a test anyway...



It won't know what hit it

loftygoals said:

Since I have that auto in a 5L hempy so I can move it around... and I'm gonna be running the lights overnight as a test anyway...

View attachment 3682718

It won't know what hit it

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g'day Lofty,
What are those black plastic squares on the floor called?
nice job on the DIY lights & take care of ur back
cheers VG

Hi mate,

They are flexi trays:

http://www.growell.co.uk/deep-flexi-trays.html

You can also get "Garland" trays which are plastic and not flexible:

http://www.grotechonline.co.uk/hydroponics.asp?page=garland

The flexi trays have the advantage of folding up so they'd fit through a tight loft access hatch

Back is holding up well. I've started some quality exercise which usually keeps it happy.

Holy crap, I've never seen a water cooled LED setup on this site before, you should definately go tot he LED section and show of your build. nice work!

So I've been a busy bee over the past couple days.

I washed 300L of perlite and 100L of vermiculte. What a pain in the ass!

Have filled up 14x 20L hempy buckets with a perlite base upto the drainage hole and then perlite/vermiculite in a 3:1 ratio. This is exactly Hempy's original formula.... I've read his recommendation to stick to this the first time and then change things after a couple of grows as you get used to it.

So... what was I going to transplant into these buckets? Well I've taken a risk and chopped the bad roots, washed them in chlorinated water and then transplanted them. I managed to get new white healthy roots growing again with lots of sterilisation, this is what most of them looked like before the root trimming:



I trimmed all the bad stuff so there was only a couple of inches left. Will see how it pans out...

Here's a 8x4 tent with all the buckets inside. I'm planning on moving half the buckets to the other tent but at the moment they fit into one, so while they're recovering and small I'll keep them together. After a week I'll move them across.



I've got 1.2kW of lighting running in there at the moment. The difference in room temps going from air cooled to water cooled is phenomenal. 1.2kW watercooled lights keep the tent cooler than 600W of air cooled lights.

I think this is because the heat is being pumped directly out of the tent with the water and then dissipated by the radiator outside. So I'm not relying on air as a medium to move the heat.

Anyway... new plan! 2 weeks for these to root properly and then flip to 12/12!

Update!

So it's been about 12 days since I moved all the plants out of RDWC and into hempies. I've had everything in the same 8x4 tent under 1200w of COBs. Not turned up the lights to max because I was trying to give them a chance to root. Another 2 days and I'll switch to 12/12.

Here's what they all look like:



They're about 8 weeks old now but have been through root rot x3 in RDWC and then had their roots chopped and were transplanted into hempies.

The auto is 6 weeks old and was severely nitrogen toxic about 2 weeks ago as I hadn't switched to bloom nutes early enough. I'd thought the droopyness/clawing was due to transplant/root issues. Anyway I figured it out when buds appeared and very very quickly switched.

The Pineapple Express were both calcium and magnesium deficient. I had also put this down to root issues but have now switched from RO water to tap water (which is 220ppm so should be fine). Hopefully that solves it before I need to add calmag.

Also potted up the mother room about 10 days ago. They've taken really well under 110w of T5!



I'll try to keep them "bonzai" as I'll only be needing about 16 clones every 2 months.

I had 20 clones in the aerocloner and 20 clones in rockwool. They ALL rooted so I've thrown out 20! I potted up 16 into hempies and have put them in the veg room. I only did that yesterday (hence why they're so small compared to the "mothers" I potted up about 10 days back despite being from the same batch of clones).



I dismantled the RDWC system, swept the floor and cleaned out the room with bleach before introducing new plants. I'll be hand watering daily until the roots hit the bottom. I've turned most of the LEDs off in the veg room and only have 200w running at the moment.

Overall I'm reasonably happy with the switch from RDWC to hempy. It takes me around 45 mins to 1 hour of maintenance per day for 32 buckets + 6 mothers in autopots... but once that's done there's no stress for the rest of the day/night. Trying to fight slime in RDWC was just a constant stress even though the actual daily maintenance time was less (more like 10-20 mins) when things were running smoothly.

g'day Lofty,
how big are the pots in the autopot system?
VG