hey its cheech & chong coool!
Yep- and they're
still funny.
Mind you, Shelby Chong, bless her little cotton socks, is playing 'opening act' for the fellers on the latest tour... and sorry, regardless of how much she adores and cares for Tommy... she's just
NOT a comedian. If you go to see 'em, you can afford to be about 30 mins late.
i was gonna use the cold air exhausted from my radiator to vent into the attic
this will potentially cool my whole attic down, reduce my AC usage during summer
then in the winter i can use it for heating the attic, again reducing heat coasts in winter time
I see.
I think I'd use a big attic vent fan to remove the hot air from the attic air surrounding the op. Very common, nothing at all criminal about those. Yes, there will be 'bright' spot on FLIR at the vent fan dump point, but it sure wouldn't constitute probable cause. Cops in the US can't
legally FLIR scan your place without a warrant anyway. As such, they sure couldn't use a FLIR scan to get a warrant, either. I'd use your cooler to remove heat only from the grow room. Put the chiller module outside the attic airmass, perhaps in a garage below or something so the heat transferred out of the attic need not be again moved by the whole-attic exhaust fan. .
Have you ascertained whether you'll actually need to warm the attic ambient air in winter? Solar heat should keep it rather close to acceptable, at least in daytime, depending on the outdoor temps. I think I'd only worry about warming the grow room itself- if it needs it.
I use a dehumidifier 24/7 in winter and during lights-off in warmer times. The heat it emits is usually enough to keep my winter lights-off temps acceptable.
I'm really interested to know if 27C is OK as mine is about 23C and I've been worried about getting root rot. Or does the 20C only apply to DWC, not to dripper or flood/drain and things like that?
27C is as warm as a nute soln should ever be allowed to get. Cooler than that, down to about 16C, is of course better in terms of retaining dissolved O2. 23C should be fine. If that's as warm as it ever gets, I don't think I'd be going to too many heroics to cool it any further.
Tray-based flood systems don't generally have many problems with nute soln temp as the tanks are shaded, located below the trays. The solution gets cooled a bit when it is pumped into the tray and picked up by the pots of media, too. Drip systems also cool the soln a bit when it is distributed to the pots of pellets. However, one should run airstones in the tanks of either to maximise dissolved O2 in the nute soln.
DWC/bubbler systems or any other sort where light energy is striking the reservoirs, or any other sort which have continuous pumping via a submerged water pump (i.e. NFT) suffer the most from overwarm nutes and might need some tank cooling.
I started off putting the bottom of my RW cubes 1/2 -3/4" above the flood line. Most of my cubes were dry to the touch and the plants were so bad they only grew about a gram.
New clones, with a decent spray of root out of the cube bottoms, which have just been introduced to pellets should have the pellets around the cube (not the cube) hand watered for about the first week. This will encourage the roots to seek into the pellets. If you keep wetting the cube, roots won't seek into the pellets. Keep handwatering pellets around the cube until you see roots out of the pot drain holes. When you're sure the roots have knitted down into the pellets, you can be assured that flooding will be sufficient from then on.
Then I started putting the bottoms 1/4 - 1/2" above the flood line and the plants seemed to do better. Is this too close?
I usually quote 1/2" clearance because the floor of most flood trays isn't flat. It's common to see about a 1/2" bow in trays, near the centre drain holes. If the cubes are uniformly 1/2" above the deepest flood level, you can be sure that none of the cubes are getting saturated. However, this does mean that the pots on the perimeter will have their cube bottoms 1" above the flood line. It should only take a few days, a week max, for roots to knit an inch into the pellets, but you may have to handwater for that period to assure that nobody goes dry until that happens.
So the root rot is deffenatly from over watering?
Almost always, yes. Root rot is caused by deprivation of O2 from the rootzone, which both starves roots of O2 (potentially killing them outright) and also creates conditions favourable to pythium and fusarium. Dead roots can be food for pathogens.
If you're applying H2O2, as you say you are, O2 deprivation should be minimal, even if the watering is a bit excessive. Regular application will also keep pathogens suppressed. If your cubes are
definitely above the flood level, you should not be saturating the cubes and drowning the roots within them. Roots in pellets can tolerate quite frequent flooding because the pellets don't absorb much water and there's lots of airgaps between the pellets. If you have all those bases covered but are still getting root rot or poor root development, it's a bit of a mystery. However, one thing you can be sure of is that the poor development of the plants is traceable to the poor root development.
When I grew in RW it was 4" cubes that only got flooded about an inch. FWIW they did give much better yields but still only about 5g per cola.
Hmm. Interesting that the poor productivity occurs in a completely different medium. What's the chances of you having a lying pH or TDS meter?
I have my mothers setup on a tray just like my flowering tray, but I only flood them 3 times a day.
What medium do the mums run in?