Variety Grow - Perpetual, "Mini" ScrOG's, DWC in a Cabinet (First Timer)

gumball said:

They are gonna be packing on the growth in no time!! That is some real tough negative pressure. glad to see you just about dialed in perfectly



and this is what will make your grow cab your garage's ventilation system.

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What's so beautiful is that all along, the key to water temps is air temps. I've been poking through some other peoples thread with water temps issues. Just like I used to do, I tried addressing the water and not the cause of why it heats up - the surrounding air. If you insulate, you slow down the energy exchange between air and water. If you keep the air temps down, water temps will follow!

So now that gets me thinking about summer. As long as the air coming in the cab is at a reasonable temperature then everything else will follow suit.

It get's back to AC unit. I could attempt to cool the ambient temps of the garage to 68* but that's not feasible and would be a waste. But if I can create a small plenum (a chamber where the air in the chamber is kept at a constant temperature and then where ever you want to direct cooling you feed from the plenum. For example, let's say I create a box 2'x2'x2'. That's 8 cu ft of air space. If I continually draw my incoming air from the garage through the AC cooling coils into the plenum and then have all of my cabinet intakes feed off of the plenum. Then all I have to do is put the temperature probe inside the plenum and set the thermostat to say 68*.

Of course I'll have to play with it a bit. But I don't have to running headlong into it for now!

I just checked in on the ladies tonight. All is perfect!

So I've been checking these girls out over the past few days. No sign of any nute burn and their roots are all in water and white. I decided to top a few of the girls to start to get a few more main stems with nodes. I really think this will help fill out the screen faster. I think each screen has 50 holes in it and it will take longer to only grow one stem.

I didn't go all crazy. I just snipped off the top tiny four leaves and then walked away before I did anything else!! I guess we'll see tomorrow morning what these gals think about it!

OMG

I think I figured out how to do one major change (not so bad though) that will simplify everything having to do with air temps and make it more efficient!!!

Here's the best side view of the cabinet I can find (ignore the colored arrows).



This idea came to me while mulling over the word plenum.

See how far out all of that tubing is from the back of the cabinet? It's 14" of dead space and in no way can you call this stealth (but that's getting off track). I can't even squeeze into any part of the back once it's pushed against the wall. So why not extend the sides of the cabinet, by tacking on a bit more plywood, so that when the cabinet is pushed up against the wall it creates an enclosed chamber; or in other words a plenum!! It's roughly 40 cu ft which is easily cooled by a 10,000 BTU unit!

Now I can:

• take away the maze of tubing supplying my intakes and all the bends that reduce airflow
• create a few easy light traps and draw straight from the plenum
• take that stupid AC unit I've been tinkering with and install it right into that space
• stick the temperature probe inside the plenum
• set the thermostat to a setting to keep the plenum air temps at say 68*

I think doing this will allow/cause the following:

• work on the back of the cabinet just like I do now. Now that the cabinet is on wheels it much simpler!
• dial in my cabinets to always be able to run at a consistent "outside ambient" temperature without having to monkey with them when things change.
• Hide more things behind the cabinet!
• Sound proofing!
• come up with a method to "cinch" the cabinet tight against the wall. This will give me Earthquake Stability!!! One item that's been on my to do list for this project all along!

Okay this is just concept here and I see a lot of pros. Feel free to add on any ideas you see to give me a "what am I missing" view. You know how ideas sound good when you're high and then the next day hits and you ask yourself "why the fuck did I cut off half the plant last night?"

sounds like a good idea. just keep modularity in mind, you want to be able to grow into the future with your box!!!

Hi dude, Cheers for the link I like everything I've seen so far Is there anything else you may add/mod in your setup? - STELTHY

stelthy said:

Hi dude, Cheers for the link I like everything I've seen so far Is there anything else you may add/mod in your setup? - STELTHY

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Oh heck yeah. Didn't you see my epiphany above? It's actually getting better as I start to consider what my building materials will be. It should be pretty cool so stay tuned.


The daily update: As i mentioned last night, I topped a few of the girls. SOG #2 and #3 both have 2 main stems so I only topped one stem on each just to see what will happen. I tried to get a couple close in shots but I'm not sure it's clear enough. But I was expecting a bit of browning where I made the cuts last night. Instead they all look like they swelled up on the end and is bright green! Hopefully that's a good sign!

Obviously SOG #2 and #3 are head of the class right now. Because of this I've had SOG #1 and BD up close to the light and in the middle leaving SOG #2 and #3 on the outside. Well it seems having them so close to the light is preventing them from stretching out even though there's tons of growth. BD looks like she has 10 nodes just in one inch! Now that the 400w bulb is back in, I dropped the ladies down a bit so they will stretch some more.

Each screen is 5 holes by 8 holes giving me up to 40 individual node sites. It would suck to have 10 nodes come up through one screen hole! So get longer girls!!

You'll notice that the girls are back in training. The screens are light enough to set directly on the plants and puts more even pressure across the whole plant rather than just one point on the stem. I just need them to keep growing flat for now so I don't see a need for making the screens permanently attached yet at least until the plants get bigger and start fighting back.

It was cold last night in the garage at 58*. In the cab Air Temps: lower is 61* and upper is 74*. Water temps are down again to around 63*. Looking at the new growth, tips are just a hint of yellow but no brown crispies on the ends so I think they are handling the PPMs alright for now.

Other than that I told myself to just leave them alone today and don't do anything and just let them grow! Let me know if you see anything I missed.

SOG #1


SOG #3


SOG #2


BD


Topping Shots

There color is returning nicely. It'll be fun to see how they respond.
Daniels

I really like that plenum idea you had... it gives me some idea of how to cool my cabinet in a closet.

oOBe RyeOo said:

I really like that plenum idea you had... it gives me some idea of how to cool my cabinet in a closet.

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It's getting better too! I finished my day work. I think I like this new lifestyle of sitting on a 3 hour conference call in my jammies with coffee, my smoke all while getting paid!!! I have another one tomorrow too! I'm working!!

So now to the store to pick up some parts. I'll give you a clue. It's going to be light weight and I'm hopefully going to throw some surprises in as well. And another clue, it along the lines of the very first drawing I made of the cabinet in my New Cabinet Thread.

Stay tuned to the evening report! I have to do this now in order to light proof the cabinet for some soon to be flowering girls!

Danielsgb said:

There color is returning nicely. It'll be fun to see how they respond.
Daniels

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For sure. It's pretty funny for me to top my first plant. Does everyone ever feel like "this is all I have to cut off?" Definitely makes me think I need to be more careful when handling my girls. Who knows how many times I accidentally "top" some of my past plants moving them around and not even knowing it!

jsgamber said:

For sure. It's pretty funny for me to top my first plant. Does everyone ever feel like "this is all I have to cut off?" Definitely makes me think I need to be more careful when handling my girls. Who knows how many times I accidentally "top" some of my past plants moving them around and not even knowing it!

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im always butchering my plants i am always being told i handle things like a kid still, with a hammer and baseball bat!! for that matter i act like a kid a lot.

gumball said:

im always butchering my plants i am always being told i handle things like a kid still, with a hammer and baseball bat!! for that matter i act like a kid a lot.

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Hey we should all be kids at heart. It makes us happier, which makes us live longer which means more time to have fun and smoke weed!!

But now back to reality, my tanks just icked out. Now it doesn't smell rotten, it's only manifested on the air stones and it washes off fairly easy with a scrub brush. Lastly it smells just like one of my nutes, either Sugar Daddy or the Thrive-Alive B1 Red. The Sugar Daddy is a new bottle and I've used it recently with no ill effects. But the ThriveAlive is from my first purchase 8 months ago and I noticed a couple of chunks of something in the water after adding it this last water change. Not sure what it was but I just picked it out.

Is it possible for nutes to go bad? Is ThriveAlive organic and having a reaction the the H2O2? Something else? Time for searching. For now, I only washed the stones off. The water still looks good and pH is around 6.25. But before I change I want to know what's up. If I can't find anything I'll do a water change and leave out the ThriveAlive and SugarDaddy. Based on the advice from others, I'm only going to use H2O2 for solving problems instead of preventing them so this will come out of the recipe. Besides the tank is only 2 gallons and if anything goes wrong it's just as well to do a water change.

jsgamber said:

Hey we should all be kids at heart. It makes us happier, which makes us live longer which means more time to have fun and smoke weed!!

But now back to reality, my tanks just icked out. Now it doesn't smell rotten, it's only manifested on the air stones and it washes off fairly easy with a scrub brush. Lastly it smells just like one of my nutes, either Sugar Daddy or the Thrive-Alive B1 Red. The Sugar Daddy is a new bottle and I've used it recently with no ill effects. But the ThriveAlive is from my first purchase 8 months ago and I noticed a couple of chunks of something in the water after adding it this last water change. Not sure what it was but I just picked it out.

Is it possible for nutes to go bad? Is ThriveAlive organic and having a reaction the the H2O2? Something else? Time for searching. For now, I only washed the stones off. The water still looks good and pH is around 6.25. But before I change I want to know what's up. If I can't find anything I'll do a water change and leave out the ThriveAlive and SugarDaddy. Based on the advice from others, I'm only going to use H2O2 for solving problems instead of preventing them so this will come out of the recipe. Besides the tank is only 2 gallons and if anything goes wrong it's just as well to do a water change.

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organic and H2O2 is bad JuJu, read several times.

gumball said:

organic and H2O2 is bad JuJu, read several times.

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Yup. It's a kelp extract! What it also tells me it's probably got a shelf life too and what I just dumped in there was bad anyway which meant the H2O2 had a field day with it. I find it interesting that it only really nailed the air stones however there are a few chunks on the roots.

Looks like another water change tonight. I'm out of ThriveAlive and I'll take that as a sign. I'll keep the SugarDaddy in and if it goes south again, I'll dump that as well but since I'm not going to use H2O2 unless I need to flush.

gumball said:

organic and H2O2 is bad JuJu, read several times.

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Boy is this the quote of the year!! Thank goodness I cleaned those air stones earlier. Bad MoFoJuJuNoNoMaMa. All I can say is I hope I caught this in time. Roots looking a bit weird with black chunky stuff that seemed to come off okay with some spray. Also whatever this was still smelled like Fresh Nutes but kinda on the sweet side so I'm thinking something was gonna really bloom bad in the tank. Cleaned everything, again. I even took apart the spigots and sprayed those all out too. I reloaded with new nutes at anywhere between 5.8 and 6.0 pH, AT 74*, WT 65*, PPM 1400. Hopefully they will stabilize and be happy by morning. Top side the leaves look a little low but nothing curling or changing color. Fingers crossed.

I'll be keeping a close eye on them.

jsgamber said:

Boy is this the quote of the year!! Thank goodness I cleaned those air stones earlier. Bad MoFoJuJuNoNoMaMa. All I can say is I hope I caught this in time. Roots looking a bit weird with black chunky stuff that seemed to come off okay with some spray. Also whatever this was still smelled like Fresh Nutes but kinda on the sweet side so I'm thinking something was gonna really bloom bad in the tank. Cleaned everything, again. I even took apart the spigots and sprayed those all out too. I reloaded with new nutes at anywhere between 5.8 and 6.0 pH, AT 74*, WT 65*, PPM 1400. Hopefully they will stabilize and be happy by morning. Top side the leaves look a little low but nothing curling or changing color. Fingers crossed.

I'll be keeping a close eye on them.

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you know you can run your rez with a touch of bleach. like 5-10 drops per gallon. i have read people using it in soil and in hydro. i think, and i aint positive on this, that you can use the bleach with organics. it helps clean things and will evaporate off soon enough anyhow with the oxygenated water.

gumball said:

you know you can run your rez with a touch of bleach. like 5-10 drops per gallon. i have read people using it in soil and in hydro. i think, and i aint positive on this, that you can use the bleach with organics. it helps clean things and will evaporate off soon enough anyhow with the oxygenated water.

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That's a possibility. The thinking is that if I have everything set up properly I shouldn't need to use things such as H2O2 and bleach. One thing I realized after the water change is most of the clean-up (besides the air stones) was concentrated around the spigot opening where my new fill tubes are connected....ringing any bells?

It's the fucking light leak from hell!!! Did you know that a column of water in a tube has the same optical properties as optical fiber strands? Any light that hits the surface of the water column in the tube is refracted down the water in the tube and into the tank and basically is shining like a damn spotlight right on my airstones sitting on the bottom of the tank.

I solved this little issue by creating some fill-tube condoms made out of Panda Film, black side in, and aluminum tape. I just slide those puppies over the fill tubes and darkness ensues.

I'm happy to report that they thrived overnight and here's the pics to show.

SOG #3


SOG #1


SOG #2 - The red arrow is pointing to the spot where I topped.


BD

they do look good, and good catch on the spigot light leak!!

1. Thanks for the link from the other thread to this one, I really like your ballast! I just keep mine "open" instead of making a nice sheet metal case like you did. But even so, maybe I'll add a computer fan like you did to keep everything ultra-flowy.

2. Good call on the clear water tubes acting like fiber optics, I think I'm going to switch all mine over to a solid colour when I revamp my grow areas.

Cheers!

HaHa, your Cabinet uses prophylactics.
Daniels