planning max 36 plants, max 5kw, perpetual, bedroom grow

[farmari]

Hello everyone. I have nothing good to show (yet?) but thought I'd document from the beginning. I have a 14x9ft room. Here are the dimensions:

If that is readable. On the opposite end of the entrance and veg tents is the space currently used for flowering. The 3x3ft tent is my veg tent. It sits halfway in a closet space. Lit by a 600w HPS. Currently have a number of immature plants, clones, and seedlings. All in coco, currently hand watered:

I plan to add a 2x2ft tent as you can see in the room dimensions draw. Small tent for seedlings, clones, young plants, then the 3x3 tent for larger plants. All perpetual.

Previously I was using the 3x3ft tent as my only veg for RDWC trees. I changed setups numerous times but always RDWC the last two years. Except recently have had serious problems with Random Death Without Cause.

What remains of it has been moved into a more horizontal lighting setup. The plant in the middle is all but dead. All fan leaves very quickly shriveled up, while the bud leaves look healthy the buds haven't grown at all in weeks. Here are my three flowering plants:

The plant on the left had the same thing happen early in flowering, but a few weeks ago it sprang back to life. (no clue why any of this happened) Here it is:

The plant on the right was dying in veg RDWC, then began to recover (unknown) but I decided to switch to coco, and to avoid more random death I shoved its root mass and net pot into a 2 gallon bucket, filled and lightly packed with coco. Somehow it has survived and the new growth looks a lot healthier than the old. It has been flowering for 4 days. Here it is:

I'll be back to explain ideas on what system, layout, and lighting configuration will be used. Currently I I'm using 3550w of flowering lighting. 1150w Gavita over the middle plant, 600s over the left and right plants, and an extra 600 hitting each left and right plant at an angle.

Still unknown what the final setup will be like. Coco dtw drip, PPKs, blumats, recirculating drip? Horizontal or vertical? Or both? 130w/sqft or 40w/sqft? A lot of my decision making may be influenced by any input you all might have.

Please feel free to give any comments, questions, random conversation, criticisms, ideas, etc etc... Anything helps! The goal of this thread is to throw some ideas out there, learn from you all, and perhaps get to the point where I'll have done something that others can learn from, learning from both mistakes and successes.

 

[BasementGrower]

did u ever figure out why that plant.. just up an like shriveled up an died?

 

[farmari]

did u ever figure out why that plant.. just up an like shriveled up an died?

Nope! I know that sounds really stupid but it's baffling. One large tree died... another came close to death but is fine now, (big indica on the left) .... another lost all its fan leaves and is in stasis (the plant in the middle) ... around when this started I had two plants in RDWC veg that got sick too... one died and the other bounced back.

I just found this thread by krunchbubble... had the same exact random death as I did: What Causes A plant To Yellow Overnight and Fan Leaves Droop?

I had a plant die the same way 1 year ago too. And in that system I had healthy big plants before and after that one random death. It died while a plant of the same size same strain, put in the same system at the same time was fine and went on to yield a pound. Strange...

Best guess is fuserium stem rot, but i'll have to cut the main stem to find out.

 

[farmari]

Today I set up a recirculating drip. The plant bucket is 2 gallons, coco, and sits on top of a 5 gallon bucket. Excess feed drains into the 5 gallon bucket. The 5 gallon bucket is connected with 1/2" tubing to a reservoir, keeping the two at the same water level. Here you can see the 1/2" drain and 1/4" feedline.

And here is the res. Ignore the PVC. The res was used for multiple RDWC setups and the PVC/uniseal was used for that. What is relevant is the two fittings... one is connected to the 5 gallon bucket, while the other is plugged off for now .... installed for future expansion.

This is the other side of the res. The clear tubing is connected to the water main, with a float valve. Coming out the top are the 1/4" feedline and power cord for the pump. The 1/2" tubing you see is the extra drain not in use. The pump has a tee, with one end waterfalling in the res - this relieves excess pressure on the pump, mixes the solution, and oxygenates the water. The other end of the tee has a closed 1/2" tubing loop, with the 1/4" feedline barbed into it. Tomorrow I'll try to get an idea of what to set the timer to. Pump is currently set for 15 minutes 3 times a day. The 1/4" feed line waters the plant with a 2gph drip emitter.

The plan is to use all this as the beginning of a PPK system. Transplanting this plant for PPK would have been PITA... otherwise I would have done this as PPK instead of recirculating drip for now.

 

[BasementGrower]

no clogged lines? did u check the roots? .. does it smell like shit literally in the root zone?

umm if none of them.. timers ? fucked up on pumps? or how its run? ... what about ROOT APHIDS.. aronud the inside of ur buckets.. ?

im wondering because a friend of mines is doing the same thing. and he has 2 plants under 2 600 ws .. and there un a 4x8x 8 room .. and under screens.. filling the entire 3x8 screen.. but they filled in nice.. started to bud beautifuly.. then all the sudden it stopped budding and started to die.

hes checked every single thing in the room.. replaced pumps.. hoses.. everything that it could have been.. and nothing.. i wana say its some sort of rot.. or fungus. maybe RAs that hes not seeing.. no clue but i dont wana go there to figure it out for him. until my rooms harvested and done lol. i have no bugs and dont need them !

 

[BasementGrower]

hey man.. how confusing and difficult would it be to set up a system like yours for 40 plants in 1 my rooms.. 20 in the other.. and 15 in another.. i wana switch to hydro or something for VEG growth.. i wana see if the growth explodes .. ive done coco.. and soil. and soilless. just not straight hydro. with like hydroton or something .

 

[farmari]

The drip clogged, drying up the plant container, and I felt it an oppurtunity to transplant it into a PPK container. Now all the plants except the big one on the left have PPK tailpieces. The buckets underneath each plant bucket are connected with 1/2" tubing to the res, to recirculate and to keep the tailpiece under water.

In this first attempt I don't have the equipment or skill or experience to make a precise pulse feed. Currently I'm manually turning the pump on to pulse feed the plant on the right, and hand watering the 4 small plants.

One of the main goals for the next few months of flowering is to test genetics. More small plants will be added to flowering soon.

The plant on right is 2 weeks into 12/12. The small plants are at 3 days.

And lastly the remaining RDWC plant...

 

[farmari]

no clogged lines? did u check the roots? .. does it smell like shit literally in the root zone?

umm if none of them.. timers ? fucked up on pumps? or how its run? ... what about ROOT APHIDS.. aronud the inside of ur buckets.. ?

On the RDWC deaths, no clogged lines. My sense of smell is poor, couldn't tell on smell. The roots looked fine when things started to go bad, but when removing the two lifeless plants I noticed a lot of the roots were all limp and a little more colored than usual. Like a wet mop rather than a stiff white rootball. No slime, hydroton with no critters. Perhaps just root rot? It's confusing as I've successfully harvested trees with similar limp roots before (though usually theyre healthy white roots) and in the past had a plant randomly suddenly die with perfect roots.

The big indica in my last post is from that same system put into flowering the same time as the two that died. Still budding at 80 days, maybe because it almost died during the start of flowering before the other two went sour.

hes checked every single thing in the room.. replaced pumps.. hoses.. everything that it could have been.. and nothing.. i wana say its some sort of rot.. or fungus. maybe RAs that hes not seeing.. no clue but i dont wana go there to figure it out for him. until my rooms harvested and done lol. i have no bugs and dont need them !

Yea that would scare me hah... Is it DWC? How is the system aerated? (gph, solution volume)

hey man.. how confusing and difficult would it be to set up a system like yours for 40 plants in 1 my rooms.. 20 in the other.. and 15 in another.. i wana switch to hydro or something for VEG growth.. i wana see if the growth explodes .. ive done coco.. and soil. and soilless. just not straight hydro. with like hydroton or something .

Yes a PPK style seems a bit crazy for moderate to high plant numbers, at least if using one container + bucket underneath per plant. With small plants you can use large totes or trays and put multiple plants on top of them. How many square feet for these 40 plants?

I already miss straight hydro... chose coco as an 'emergency' alternative for now. Maybe ebb flow would be nice... much like rdwc but far less random death risk?

 

[farmari]

The canopy is approx 9ftx3ft. In reality about 9.4ftx3.5ft, at about 110 watts per square foot. 3550 watts.

This plant is now at 28 days 12/12, and covers approx 3ftx3ft space.

These four plants next to it cover the middle 3ftx3ft 'sector'. They're 15 days into 12/12. All PPKs, without a proper pulse feed. The PPK bottom feeds while I manually turn on a pump in the res to top feed them 1-3 times a day. Having problems with water overflowing from the lower buckets during a top feed, from not draining back to the res quickly enough. Apparently 1/2" tubing is too small or coco is falling through the wick screen and causing partial blockage(s)...

And lastly four more plants in the 3x3 left 'sector'. At 12/12 for 8 days. The one to the near left is an autoflower that is at about 50 days from germination. These are all being handwatered, though three of them have tailpieces... I've yet to add PPK buckets for them.

All 8 smaller plants in this 9 plant setup are from seed. Lights on canopy temp stays around 78-85F, lights on RH 30-40%, lights off its 70F and 55-60% RH. Hoping to find a keeper or two from these genes

 

[BasementGrower]

how long are u vegging these things? and what strains are u running christ. i need some trees like that.

 

[high life 45]

Sweet digs!

How long have you had your gavita?

Any comments about its performance?

Nice bushes!

 

[PuReKnOwLeDgE]

The problem you had sounds like stem rot, maybe you planted to deep. Check stems when you see them melt like that. Nice plants

 

[ShortStackz]

Love the big a$$ trees you got going. Not sure if you mentioned it but about how long do you veg those really big ones for?

 

[farmari]

Hi everyone, thank you for replying!

BasementGrower, and ShortStackz, my veg is generally awfully inefficient. It's hard to count veg time because clones sometimes are kept in cloner for over a month due to lack of veg space. (11sq ft tent with 600w horizontal lighting) I've never handwatered before this run... the coco plants were handwatered in veg. The 6 smaller plants were put in 12/12 at 5 weeks from planting the seeds in coco/rockwool.

I think a 12sqft veg tent with separate space for cloning/seedlings should be enough to provide for a flowering space of 18 plants of 40sq ft flowering space. It was enough to keep a perpetual 4 plant 9ftx9ft RDWC tree room supplied continuously. But it depends on genetics. Indica dominant plants generally are less efficient because of the lack of stretch.

If you're limited by plant count moreso than space, and thus need to spend as little time possible vegging per plant, some would recommend air layering for clones.

Also the tree strains are probably mislabeled and have their flaws so I couldn't recommend them if I knew for certain. The current large plant is a Mr Nice haze hybrid. It spent 2 months in veg... a couple weeks of that was spent nearly dying in DWC before being transplanted to coco. As it came back to life it seems it has 'revegged', even though it was under 24/0 lighting the whole time. The internode length is far shorter than usual. Considering its size when put under 12x12, normally it would be 6ft in diameter, rather than the 3.5ft that it is in reality. Really strange.

I'm hoping I get some good genetics from the seed plants, to use for vert trees again. Unless I get surprising yields with horizontal. I've almost always averaged around .5-.7gpw per 60 days of flowering, both horizontal and vertical, but the vert setups were more efficient because I could use more watts/space for the same amount of veg time/space, and the vert setups had a LOT of room for improvement. If I had a goal this year it's to be at +0.7gpw (per 60 days) with +50 grams per sq ft of flowering floor space.

High Life 45, this is my first time using the Gavita in a traditional horizontal setup. Wish I could comment on results but we'll see soon hopefully! I have used it over a bizarre tree setup before (in a combined horizontal+vertical light setup) and was pretty happy. It has a very particular coverage pattern, wide angle coverage and rectangular. Penetration just under the reflector is comparable to a Super Sun 2 with a 600w bulb, but the light is spread pretty uniformly over a very wide area. I have it in the middle because the light spreads out over the entire 9ft wide canopy. Also I really like its small size... allows for good airflow around it. I run it at the 1150w setting.

PuReKnOwLeDgE, you are probably right! When harvesting the RDWC trees it was easy to rip the plants out of the net pot. The roots looked fine in their buckets but I guess there was rot where the stem turns to roots? And you are right that for all but one of the problem trees they were planted too low in the net pot and the water level was too high. One of them had a low enough water level but I suppose the solution being full of germs could cause a bad infection that it normally would have fought off? I forget the biological term... minimum number of germ cells needed to infect a host.

Soon I'll have the yield total tallied up on the RDWC indica tree harvested weeks ago.

 

[farmari]

Just a little photo update. I'm really happy with the growth rate of the middle plants. I thought they would be too small but they're actually 'too large' for what I had arranged.

Middle plants are at 21 days flowering:

And the Mr Nice at 33(?) days flowering:

The PPK bucket under the Mr Nice overflowed a few times recently. I noticed the 1/2" tubing attaching it to the res had a curl that elevated a few inches off the ground. When I pushed it down, air bubbles flowed into the res. I'd understand air clogging a blumat line, but not 1/2" tubing... trying to avoid that now by keeping the tubing from curling off of the floor.

Also I should have put some sort of screen up on the Mr Nice... some of the middle colas have fallen over. This clone grows particularly thin stems. Perhaps I should have gotten the habit of using silica long ago.

 

[watts up]

Lookin real tasty Farmari, Kickin arse!

 

[farmari]

Hello watts up, thanks for stopping by!

These photos were taken today. All plants are in PPKs now except the one handwatered autoflower.
This being a new system and genetics, am excited to see what sort of weight and quality results.

The RDWC tree harvested a little while back, photo in post #7, weighed in at 17.5oz, after 85(!) days, had the equivalent of almost 1200w lighting it, was 3ft diameter, and yielded about 0.3gpw per 60 days of flowering. I'm happy with it though as I had expected a total crop failure, as it nearly died during stretch while the other two trees with it did die. Odd to take an indica 12 weeks but the buds kept growing...

50 days big plant: (on the bottom left of the photo is Dinafem Power Kush)

37 days 12/12:

30 days 12/12: (the autoflower is barely visible, despite having been germinated the same time as the others)

The veg tent canopy is full, more various seed plants anxiously waiting for a chance to flower.

 

[Milky_Trichome]

nice looking ladies ya got there mang!

 

[forkup]

Update? The ppks are killing it once again, those are some very nice looking girls. Good job!

 

[farmari]

Sorry for lack of update, was waiting to get a precise yield tally, which I actually still don't have! Life has been rough lately, been busy.

But the largest plant was just under 2lbs, around .7gpw/60 days. This is really good for a plant that had about 10sq ft of space, well over 100w/sq ft, and didn't grow large enough to cover all the space. A lot of light wasted hitting the floor. Yes, a plant with about 3gal of ppk coco getting almost 2 pounds horizontal, I'm happy!

Yield for the rest is going to be around .7-.9gpw, again at over 100w/sq ft. Highest yielder being a 12oz plant that was in a 2 gallon coco ppk bucket. So it's possible for a plant to yield over 10 ounces when being vegged to only 1 foot in diameter.

4 plants per 3x3 or 4x4 with +100w/sq ft of lighting horizontally seems like an efficient way to grow now. Veg demands are low as each plant only needs 1sq ft in veg.

My current run is a total failure. The plants were vegged more than large enough but immediately went downhill when being transplanted into the ppk flowering system. Deficiencies came on immediately, growth stopped, and fungus gnats took over. Really sad. I started the run with RO water and dripclean (worried about 1/2" tubing tees getting clogged up) .... don't know if that had something to do with it but I'm guessing the fungus gnats destroyed all my plants roots really quickly. RO + drip clean was dumb in the sense of fixing what wasn't broken. I was thinking that I might get better results with RO because I use so much GH PH Down because of my tap water.

The run documented here that ended a month ago involved tap water, GH PH Down, and Ionic Bloom/Grow.... (no other additives) .... PH at 6.0-6.5 and EC around 1.0-1.4
My tap water has an EC around 0.15, very alkaline though.

Only one fan used, the exhaust fan. Passive intake provided enough airflow on and over the canopy. Very simple.