Hey al b, This is the best thread i ever read!
Thanks.
Im going to do this exact setup and i have a few questions i read through the whole thread and i hope these questions havent been anwsered.
These have all been covered at least once, some several times.
Admittedly, this thread is now too long to be a handy reference, but if you did go through the whole thing, all your questions would be answered. I'll cover them again for your convenience.
I have a 10x10ft room and Im using 4 3x3 floodtables to make kind of a square of 6x6
1-How much wattage of light do you think i should use
HPS lighting works well for flowering at 50W/sq ft or better.
Horizontal tube light fixtures/reflectors (preferably double parabola or 'batwing' type) lay down a rectangular light pattern. Put your tables in pairs and use one 1000HPS over each pair.
2-I want to use a EZ cloner to clone, but that would iliminate rockwool cubes so i was wondering whats the next best way? Can i just use the EZ cloner and when they root put them straight into hydroton rocks? Or what do you think
You could use the 'ez cloner' (wotever that is, presuming an aerocloner of some flavour, I don't know every brand name for such things), but it's very easy to damage roots when they are not contained in some sort of medium. Cloning in RW cubes protects the roots and mechanically stabilises the clone when it is planted into your choice of media.
3-I set up all the ventaltion and filters for the room but i need a seperate area for my mothers how do i do that without blocking off ventalation but not letting light go through? Like if i use panda film that would block off the ventalation. ANy sugestions?
yep -
see here.
Alright Al. what do you reckon to using 25 x 180mm square 6 litre pots on a 3ft x 3ft table? I think the pots would give good room for root growth but at 6 litres per pot thats a hell of alot of medium/water.
Was wondering if more volume on a pot on this sort of op would be a hinderence rather than an advantage.
You can get away with really rather small pots of absorbent media so you can jam in more plants. I don't think I'd use pots much smaller than about 1L in volume, though. Keep in mind that the smaller the volume of media per plant, the shorter the amt of failsafe time where the plant can survive in the event of a pump/timer failure.
You're right, though- bigger isn't always better. The plant will take a certain amt of time to suck up the water stored in the media (depending on the size of the plant). The ideal arrangement is to use no more media than required to support the water needs of the plant through about 24 hours as most of the dissolved O2 will dissipate in that time. If there's so much water capacity that the plant can't take up all the water before the dissolved O2 is gone, they won't grow as quickly as they could with smaller amts of media per plant, which get flooded more frequently with freshly and fully oxygenated nute soln.
Plants in non-absorbent media like pellets or lava rock can be flooded 3-4x daily. The 1 litre minimum size is still a good idea so there's enough room for roots.
