Inside Out Trees, Silo Op, custom RDWC, water cooled

Greetings, everyone- I'm a recent refugee from another site. They said I can't grow and don't know my shit... let's see what y'all think.

I'm about the gear and the setup and the environment, so that's going to be a big focus here. I'll show my nugs, but if you want pretty pot pictures you may be better off elsewhere.

All those who are interested in higher yields from less watts in smaller spaces, stick around awhile...

I just learned the hard way that I must finish a post and submit it, I can't let it sit in an idle page for awhile or I lose my work! Since I'm new, tips on navigation and using the site are appreciated.

greetings o refugee, carry on.

Okay, so starting with climate control in the room; I run a water chilling system that handles my whole op, soup to nuts- and heats my home all winter (in Colorado!), as a bonus. This bonus alone pays for the chiller in three winters, not counting its performance advantage over AC.

The unit is a ChillKing 2 Ton window mount, from the outside it looks and sounds exactly like the 24k BTu Frigidaire windowbanger it's based on. The only difference is that it makes water cold instead of air. So where does that water go to do its business?

One destination is the cooling coil in every RDWC system in the house. The chillers are set to cool water to 59f, which in practice means RDWC will run between 63 and 66 at the end of its day cycle, no thermostatic switch required.

The other destination is an 8" Icebox air to water heat exchange core, with an 8" Canfan blowing air down through it and then down a short length of 8" rigid ducting, to aim the precipitation down at a catchment bucket for recycling into the RDWC system. The fan runs when my Sentinel CHHC-4 wants temps down.

Humidity is controlled AUTOMATICALLY, by the chiller. The environmental controller does not manage humidity, only temps and CO². How this happens is via the concept of dewpoint. My Icebox core remains at the temperature set by the chiller, which then creates within the core a place where the air cannot hold more than 100% of its RH at that 60f mark. Yet, the rest of the room is in the 80s. The result is that the Icebox maintains humidity between 65-75% RH, and the excess moisture rains- seriously- down the ductwork and back into my RDWC.

Letting the implications sink in for a moment, this means that no longer is a large, bulky and expensive room heater called a 'dehumidifier' required to maintain climate control. The fact that a dehuey is no longer required accounts for a substantial part of the increased efficiency of water chilling vs AC... but not all of it. Next time you mentally price a water chiller vs an AC unit, don't forget to price and add a dehuey too. Suddenly makes water chilling look a whole lot more affordable, huh? One of the stated reasons why I got booted from the other site was that I advocate for water chilling to much. Point taken, so listen carefully, as my opinion has changed on this matter; in the 21st Century, modern indoor growers will interestingly use water chilling, due to its economical and environmental control advantages over AC. Or to be blunt; AC IS DEAD FOR INDOOR GROWING. I'm no more wrong about this than people were wrong for advocating an increase in growroom RH just a few years ago. Once that was a radical idea; now VPD theory is common sense. Chilling will replace AC- and I'll bet it will eventually disappear from homes and businesses, too.

noyd666 said:

greetings o refugee, carry on.

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Thanks, brother. Means a lot to me!

Moving on to the setup itself now, the RDWC is composed of a 27 gallon tuffbox Ag each site with four 1" bulkhead fittings. These are offset from one side to the other, creating a slow steady swirl current in the tub and circulating nutes through roots, automatically.

I cut a hole in the lid of the tuffbox to fit the top spacer section of a 5 gallon bucket. This raises the netpot bucket lid up to allow me to fill the tub a bit more, and firmly seats said netpot in place. The lid is covered with a slab of foil covered foam insulation board to keep the interior dark and cool. Water moves throughout the entire system via 1" flexible hose, which is cheaper and a whole hell of a lot less hassle to deal with than pvc!

AIRLESS AERATION; I'm running a side by side with some tubs running airstones and others running a waterfall setup; my RDWC circulation pump runs through a manifold made of the same 1" hose as the tub lines, and every so often a tee to a 1/2" fitting. These run to each tub and the nozzle in the top is a simple 1/2" elbow fitting. A single 1000gph waterpump is plenty to run at least half a dozen sites, perhaps more.

...so how's the side by side going? So far, the plants and roots in the airless system are outperforming those with airstones. I admit that a few airstones is not necessarily enough for a big tub, but I don't see any plants suffering...

The next side by side will be with a diffuser pad. I might up the waterfall game by raising exit velocity with a better water nozzle, too.

TRELLIS; I bought a partial roll of used wire fencing, 4' tall with 2" mesh. I cut lengths of 6'3" and bent each- okay, bent OUT because it had been coiled!- around a semicircle. Two of these joined at the ends makes a lovely 4x4' silo. I hung a single 1kW HPS in the middle. There are plans for a mover in the future, but I have plenty to catch up on before that yet.

As a fun little aside, if you search Google Images with the keywords 'marijuana light rotator', you'll notice a few shots of a hacked up mountain bike hanging from the ceiling, moving hoods. Yeah, those would be my pics, taken of a unit I built and tested for quite some time- and ultimately found wanting.

tty, sound's interesting, got any photo's of set up ? just got rid of double air stone out of my 50litre water drum, put t-piece up near outlet of uv with valve of water pump fitted into water outlet pipe, had to keep part of outlet pipe level to prevent any water blowing out, but is making better surface disturbance and less bloody noise than air pump. and cheaper air with no heat from air pump.

PLANTS; I run only one plant per 4' x 6'3" trellis, although that may change- this whole thing is one big pilot by seat of the pants work in progress, my favorite way to fly!

I grow them big and tall in veg- see upcoming post- and then carry them into the bottom and set their little netpot bucket lid down on the spacer in the tub and- I think this part is important (hindsight will say how much so)- I place the plant against the OUTSIDE of the wire trellis and vine clip it into place. I'm fairly aggressive with reshaping the plant- branches go one side or the other- or they get cut off, no exceptions. The goal is to flatten the plant out against the trellis, filling it up and filling it in. Thus I create the opportunity to spread each plant over as much as 25 ft² of trellis area and grow POUNDS in the process.

noyd666 said:

tty, sound's interesting, got any photo's of set up ? just got rid of double air stone out of my 50litre water drum, put t-piece up near outlet of uv with valve of water pump fitted into water outlet pipe, had to keep part of outlet pipe level to prevent any water blowing out, but is making better surface disturbance and less bloody noise than air pump. and cheaper air with no heat from air pump.

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Yes Sir, what you describe is conceptually identical to what I did, I'm just pissing in more buckets, lol. Speaking of noise, the sound of waterfalls happily gurgling away is so much nicer than airpump clatter that it's worth doing on that basis alone! Think of it as turning your RDWC into your very own Zen waterfall, no silly stones required! Tree included, call it a Zen waterfall bonsai garden!

Gosh, I feel better already...

Okay, pics. Bear with me, I'm new!

looking good , what's the name of plant? any pics of pot set up?

SCHEDULING; the title didn't mention it, but this is a two week perpetual op setup, currently with four bloom zones and soon five. All are sealed and climate controlled as described above.

For veg, cloning is done in a repurposed aquarium tank under 2x2' t5, 24W ea. Once rooted, they're culled and transplanted into 4" square cups and put in the first stage, aka the Bullpen, where I keep moms and assemble groups to move to production. Stages two through four all share a large RDWC system in a 4x8' tent. Stage two gets a 130W LED, stage three sports a 400W HPS in an econowing, and the final prebloom stage gets its very own 1kW MH in a large adjust-a-wing. Since all these share the same tent, there is plenty of light spillage between stages to maximize mutual benefit.

The bulbs are ABOVE the plants, you know, like normal. I just don't top the girls, and in fact I actively discourage and remove excess branching early specifically to encourage a straight and tall classic apical dominance pattern. She gets topped and trained as necessary once she's been flattened out and pinned up against her very own patch of fence, her little fingers free to grow through into the warm electric sunshine...

noyd666 said:

looking good , what's the name of plant? any pics of pot set up?

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I'm workin' it as fast as I can, I swear! Please tell me there's a way to add pics more easily, and edit posts for at least a few minutes for spelling and shit?

I'm doing all this from my Note2, so have a lil mercy on me here, lol-

The girls pictured are Dairy Queen, (spacequeen x cheese, IIRC). They're around five weeks or so, I'll take some more crummy cellphone pics tomorrow @ lights on.

c,on where are they man lol, your good bro only learning myself lol.

noyd666 said:

c,on where are they man lol, your good bro only learning myself lol.

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LOL riiiiight- and if after 5800 posts you're still getting the gang of it, I'm in deep shit!

always something good to learn on this site.

noyd666 said:

always something good to learn on this site.

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Well yeah, that would be why I'm here. Paying a little bit forward here, first. TBH, the number and depth of threads is both amazing and a little intimidating.

Same run taken a few weeks earlier, shows overall setup.

This is the collector bucket for my RDWC, where both the circulation pump and the cooling coil reside.