Ahh Bio-Bucket Plants Dieing

[terminalc]

Ya I ended up trashing the whole system. What exactly did you change to not get rot. I had a lot of other problems environmental, electrical, high water temp, etc. the first time. I am going to try it again someday hopefully soon but want to do a bit more research this time and not cut corners, have everything perfect from the start. Does anyone think this was the brown algae?

 

[gmanwho]

my 2 cents on bio-buckets

my 2 cents on bio-buckets

terminalc, i ran a bio bucket system for 5 runs, not enough to get it completely dialed in, but enough to have an opinion on it. 1st & 2nd run lost everything to brown algea(no stones no chiller0, gota chiller and 2 big air pumps,3rd run ok, 4th ran better, 5th run was like 3rd run so i stopped.

Gotta get airstones in there, gotta get temps lower then 70. Alot of power running is why i shied away from the system as well. I got brown algae still with lots of air stones.plants werent falling over after 100 days, but noticed light brown algae when i pulled the plants at harvest. i also had a 3500gph external pump, 1/3hp chiller set to 68-70(which i read somewhere recently 65 worked well for someone posting on here). Buckets where light proof & thermally sealed with reflective bubble wrap from lowes. top reflective covers to cover the lava rock when plants are young with little canopy.

i also believe i had wayyyyyyyyyy to much lava rock, i had 8" nets pots. I had the most ridiculous stretch then flower times, 110 day flower on a 60-70 day strain. I believe it was due to the high amount of lava i had in the system. the lava house alot of bacterias, good and bad, when they eat each other they produce a nitrate based food. which the high levels of nitrate casue crazy stretching and delayed flowering. then the nitrogen even in the flower nutes added too much.

with colonization time before hand,i think maybe just a light dose of pk /13/14 thru the whole run might be something to try, 3 mill gallon,running at only 300-400 ppm. the nitrogen will be supplied by the bacterias. maybe hydroton instead of lava rock?

thou i can say i tried 6-7 different strains between 5 runs, 4 strains did not perform that well, it wasnt a wash, but 1 strain was RIDICULOUS. The trich coverage was outstanding. And i thought i ran that strain perfect before.

I think in the future i will try again a smaller setup (had 14 buckets going 2400k) But what i can say that i believe is good advice, run another type of medium as well, so if the buckets fail, all your work isn't lost.

By the 3rd run things were easy, stable ph, stable temps, explosive growth. could leave 3-4 days and the system would be fine. Auto water add back a plus.

That 1 strain, the way it performed will draw me back to bio-buckets, I've been growing 10 years, lurking on these boards & other sites for 10 years, Seen photo after photo, NOTHING compared to how this strain turned out. the strain was from bag seed and was named Early Pearl, but no early pearl photos in veg or bloom where accurate. the closest thing i saw was MOD's menega-tois (spelling, a threesome).

 

[stinkyattic]

Couple more hints:
-Consider adding an airstone that is actually plunged INTO the root ball to eliminate anoxic zones within
-Consider shorter veg time to prevent plant/root mass from becoming too large for the bucket
We have a user over at canncom, Weedhound, who has a couple very educational DWC logs detailing her troubles with very large root masses in a system too small to sustain them. Hers was Waterfarm style, but some concepts are worth applying to any containerized hydro setup.