Al B. FAQt

al,
So do u think adding permilite or somthing to that effect with my soil next time will help with the drainage prob. i tried hydro grow and i was terrible took plants and put them in soil...wich is what i am growing now. they are over 6 ft 4 weeks flowering and there is also not much heat getting to the pots from the lights also not helping with the soil drying out.
i know u are not a soil guy what do u recommend adding though to help with drainage and drying .
thanks
snipsnip

snipsnip said:

al,
So do u think adding permilite or somthing to that effect with my soil next time will help with the drainage prob.

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What's permilite?

i tried hydro grow and i was terrible

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If you have the right equipment, hydro is easy peasy. Stick around, the next time you want to have a go with hydro, you ought to be able to find enough data around here to make it go pretty well.

took plants and put them in soil...wich is what i am growing now. they are over 6 ft

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yikes, how tall were they when you stopped vegging? Plants continue to grow vegetatively, though with the veg habit tapering off, for the 1st 4 weeks of flowering, when they will stop gaining vert height and throwing out branches. As you are finding, tall plants are not the indoor grower's friend.

i know u are not a soil guy what do u recommend adding though to help with drainage and drying .

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About all you could do, and I don't recommend you do so, is repot them with some less absorbent materials. If you repot with them this far into flowering, I strongly suspect you will stunt them and get less yield than if you just let them be. Harvest what you get at wk 10 and try something different next time.

snipsnip said:

al,
So do u think adding permilite or somthing to that effect with my soil next time will help with the drainage prob. i tried hydro grow and i was terrible took plants and put them in soil...wich is what i am growing now. they are over 6 ft 4 weeks flowering and there is also not much heat getting to the pots from the lights also not helping with the soil drying out.
i know u are not a soil guy what do u recommend adding though to help with drainage and drying .
thanks
snipsnip

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That would help a lot. I would recommend a 50 50 mix, but it's perlite.

Hey Al, what u growing in the veg patch this year?
I grew a ton of mellons last year. Didn't check em for 2 weeks cuz it was raining every other day. By the time I made it to check em they were all toasted by powdery mildew. It would rain at night, and get real humid in the am when the sun came up.

they were about 1.5 ft when i flipped them
i have about 50 clones
16 are about readdy to go into flower
and 34 still trying to root
i will be flowering at 8 inches for sure.
i think i might ty flood and drain ....i have about 5.5 ft of head room i have to do dome figuring ...maybe reses outside the room or somthing.
thanks for the help
snip

CustomHydro said:

Hey Al, what u growing in the veg patch this year?

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hmm

tomatoes: Beefsteak, Roma, Grosse Lisce, cherry
Kitchen herbs: basil- Greek, Italian, Thai & purple, tarragon, coriander, dill, garlic chives, onion chives, parsley (Italian), dill, Vietnamese mint, peppermint, rosemary, thyme
eggplant
passionfruit
butternut pumpkin
cucumber, Lebanese
beetroot
sweet corn
spring onion
spinach, English
snow peas
green beans (Blue Lake stringless)
capsicum (aka bell pepper)
leaf lettuces - rocket (aka rocquette aka arugula), Lollo Rosso, Mignonette
sunflowers (I love toasted sunflower seeds )
habañero pepper

I grew a ton of mellons last year. Didn't check em for 2 weeks cuz it was raining every other day. By the time I made it to check em they were all toasted by powdery mildew. It would rain at night, and get real humid in the am when the sun came up.

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fack. I'd have hit them with a lime sulfur spray in late afternoon and reapply after each rain.

I could have saved em hey... I knew sulfer something would do it... I saw what the sulfer burner did for your plants...

Anyways WOW! u grow all that too, u are a gardening machine! U grow all that from seed? U have a nice setup outdoors as well as indoors. Must be workin a monster patch to support all that! GL with everything, and have a good spring. I'll throw u a link to my grow in a few weeks when I get the SOG going, just to c what u think...

CustomHydro said:

I could have saved em hey... I knew sulfer something would do it... I saw what the sulfer burner did for your plants...

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yep, PM hates high pH & sulfur raises the pH on the leaf & stops it dead.

Anyways WOW! u grow all that too, u are a gardening machine! U grow all that from seed?

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No, I'm a slacker and I buy seedlings.

U have a nice setup outdoors as well as indoors. Must be workin a monster patch to support all that!

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It's not that big, about 4m x 6m, but can be very productive...


early in the season




a bit later




view from the other end




How about this 12 foot cherry tomato plant? 450+ fruit.

GL with everything, and have a good spring. I'll throw u a link to my grow in a few weeks when I get the SOG going, just to c what u think...

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k thx, looking forward to it.

Al B. Fuct said:

How about this 12 foot cherry tomato plant? 450+ fruit.

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WTF!!! I have never seen anything like that in my life.
Those leaves are gian-ormous!!!
Mine were barely neck high stretched out. Amazing, just amazing!

I'd love to see what size buds u could grow outdoors!

heh, I tended that cherry tomato plant with a stepladder. Next time, I'm growing them horizontally...

I'd love to grow outdoors, no way in hell will I risk it, tho.

annnnnd right now, while I'm jaw jackin' witchy'all, these...




are NOT getting put in HERE:





Just finished replacing the stacked concrete block wall with the timber & posts, total bastard digging post holes in solid sandstone... but it's done and I gotta get planting!

I put this in its own post but after reading your instructions I am going to include it here as well..


I have read about 147 pages of your FAQ and it is impressive...

I am going to name my first male child Al with his middle name Bfuct...

Anyway, I was thinking about your vortex cavitation issue when the pumps stop and get air stuck into the pump chamber. As you said, simple is better.

So.... Why don't you just poke a tiny hole in the side of the pump line just above the pump outlet? It should not affect the filling of the tray significantly and once the pump shuts off and the vortex finishes then the tube should leak nutrient water into it to the level of the resevoir.

My only thought would be that the hole would eventually clog, but it may minimize the issue.

I dont know if anyone has ever suggested this fix... Let me know...

That's a very good idea, but I think the hole would have to be in the impeller cavity, because that's where the air bubble is.

I have since solved the problem by orienting the pumps so their outlet points upward. When I was having the problem, the pumps were lying on their side due to excessive fill hose length, which was necessary to be able to move the pump to a corner of the tank when draining. I shortened the hoses, oriented the outlet upward and the problem has not recurred.

Thanks for thinking about this one, tho!

Hey Al, what type of ballast do you use digital or old school? I need to buy a 600W and don;t know the difference. Thanks, love this thread by the way....

And what about brand of bulbs, does this matter a whole lot, just curious what brand you use.

Hi al, thanks for sharing your knowledge.
so i just finished reading an article about a hot shot grower up in canada, who bought an isolated house and turned it into a grow setup, he mentions how he tried to get a local electrical supply to sell him electricity off the meter i guess, but they didnt want to. So he stole it basically, i was under the impression that stolen energy could somehow be traced. if done safely, could this work without anyone noticing?, forget about possible meter checks and stuff like that.
anyone with information, pitch in.

Holmes ... NADA very bad idea.
the power company knows how much power gets used and when that doesnt match up to there billing records they start to narrow it down and sooner or later they find you stealing power.
and when they do they will have a warrant to search your place. so not only do you go to jail for growing but you get extra time and a HUGE fine for stealing the electricity.
always pay your power bill on time and everthing will be fine.

also on a side note Al B. nice looking garden . the cherry tomatoes ... very impressive.
aslo i am glad you chose not to be a mod. when people help out for the love of helping out is a lot different than when it becomes something you do because you feel obligated to do.
i think you are right in that sooner or later that feeling of obligation would have made your time her more of a ball and chain.
get your garden right and help out when you can. we will of course miss your valuable input while you spend time in your own garden and grow op but thats better than having you gone for good.
i own a music related forum and used to love helping people out but sooner or later people get to treating you like you owe them something because you are a MOD.
needless to say i hate my own site to such a point i rarely ever use it anymore.
we will all just be greatful for the time you do spend with us and your excellent advice.

thanks, im too chicken to do anything like that. But i still want to know how they know. they have meters at a residence to READ them for power consumption, if they know how much is being used from say a meter before the meter, then whats the point of having a meter . Not only that, millions of watts are used up in large cities by the minute, the power used for a small room, i imagine would be like finding a needle in a hey stack.
So how do they know?

DeweyKox said:

Hey Al, what type of ballast do you use digital or old school? I need to buy a 600W and don;t know the difference. Thanks, love this thread by the way....

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Ballasts are current limiters. It's far easier to accomplish this (in an electronics engineering sense) with a coil of copper wire on a laminated iron core than it is with semiconductors, as is done in electronic ballasts. A coil of copper wire will always be more reliable than semiconductor junctions with control circuitry and a bunch of soldered connections. It's not at all unusual to see 20 yr-old plain ol' 'magnetic' ballasts, mine are 10 yrs old.

Electronic ballasts save about 9% in AC mains power used due to the absence of eddy currents which occur in the laminations of an iron cored ballast inductor, causing said laminations to get warm or hot. While the price of electronic ballasts is coming down, it'll take a long time to recover the cost difference between a mag and an electronic with the relatively minimal power savings.

I've tested a Lumatek 600 side by side with a std ballast, using the same HPS bottle. There is no difference in the luminous output from the tube with either ballast, despite some sales claims of up to 30% more output from the electronic.

And what about brand of bulbs, does this matter a whole lot, just curious what brand you use.

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I wouldn't buy the cheapest tubes in the shop. I've had some Chinese bargain barrel 1000 HPS bottles which, brand new, only delivered 80% of the output of an 18 month old GE Lucagrow- and I'd never have known without a lux meter as the Chinese generic tubes LOOKED pretty bright. I'm using the GE bottles for now, thought I'd try some Sunmasters when I relamp next year. I've used Sylvania 1000s before with fine results as well.

holmes said:

Hi al, thanks for sharing your knowledge.

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no prob

if done safely, could this work without anyone noticing?

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First of all, there's absolutely no safe way to steal power. You can't turn off the service you're connecting to and have to wire it hot. Second, if bridging out a metered service, it's one of the very fastest ways to be detected, 3 months max. I can't speak to 'isolated' whole house grows, but I see whole house busts go down about 2-3x a week in my area.

holmes said:

So how do they know?

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You're right that there's lots of unmetered paths between your local substation (which does have metering) and the service legs in each neighbourhood. If the line tech suspects a problem, he just puts an amprobe on the service drops he knows should be there and subtracts those figs from the total load on the leg. If his maths don't add up to the total load on the leg, he knows the difference is being skimmed off. The techo can also throw the main switch on all the panels on a leg and check to see if there's still a current draw on the leg.

In other words, yes, the techo has to go looking for them, but 'leaks' can be found in a system audit. Power theft relies on security by obscurity and depends on the techo being a slacker.

It's never a good idea to steal power. Grow small and grow for years.