Root Zone Troubles

I have been doing a aeroponics setup and have been having root zone problems. I switched from semi organic nutes (Botanicare) to 100% synthetic Home and Garden nutes and it seemed to make a big difference but it still has not solved this brown sludge completely. The temp is only going to go much higher and i know my root zone temps are not anywhere near below the recommended 68 degrees. I have been using pure zero TDS RO/DI water and also use dutch masters zone to kill pathogens and silica to improve root strength but still see this annoying sludge. My next step is to splurge on a chiller. I have multiple rez' to chill and i was going to do the cooling coil method in each rez. I have read that copper is bad and I see cheap aluminum coils on ebay and was wondering if anyone has a better option or if aluminum will do the job. Thanks for your input.

Guess we have no true pro growers on this site.

Hi

Don't know too much about this area but Copper is widely used in industry for coils because it is so inert and won't contaminate the water. That is why it is used for drinking water etc.
Why did you hear it was bad?

MadKitty said:

Hi

Don't know too much about this area but Copper is widely used in industry for coils because it is so inert and won't contaminate the water. That is why it is used for drinking water etc.
Why did you hear it was bad?

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That it can leech into the nutrient solution

If you splurge on a chiller I would think whatever it comes with would be good enough. Check out the warranties before you buy.

There is more than 1 way to use a chiller. I need to use it on multiple rez' in this case.

DjHigherThenU said:

That it can leech into the nutrient solution

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Hi, I wouldn't worry about this. Unless there is some anodic or cathodic reaction then the copper won't come into solution - basically you would need something in your res to "encourage" the copper molecules to debond from the chiller and float around in your res. They naturally really don't want to this and won't do it unless you have something really weird in there!

As long as you gave the chiller a really good clean - or ran it in a dummy res for a few days I don't think you would have any problems.

DjHigherThenU said:

There is more than 1 way to use a chiller. I need to use it on multiple rez' in this case.

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What are you smoking?

Muffy said:

What are you smoking?

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I don't smoke smart ass. You obviously don't know much about chillers so save your time responding with dumb comments.

From what I've heard I think there's aluminum, stainless, and copper coils rather widely available
and all three should work fine. I have however heard similar things about copper in hydro application
and when given the opportunity I steer clear of it. There are some stainless models on ebay that
should should work rather well.

I would assume you're not using any bennies in your reservoir since you're aero? If you're not have you
tried throwing in some h2o2 to clean things up? I have tried zone as well, and found that it has trouble
by itself combating bad slime.

Forget the chiller. Drop the Zone, inoculate with beneficial microbes. Read my sig link for proper info. Yes it's for DWC but if you understand the concept you can adjust for aero. In your case I would spray myco + trichoderma fungi directly onto the roots.