jjfoo,
I think Al is an incredible grower and he has his system dialed in. After all, he's a lazy stoner.
A couple points on his cloning. His method marries you to your clones in a clingy, I need daddy sort of way. At a minimum you must water your clones once a day. Sometimes twice a day. Al may as well be using a humidity dome. He has a closed box with a thermostatically controlled fan. He also runs a couple of T5s in there and a heat mat. All those things will contribute to high humidity. The only difference really is his lights are inside of his "dome."
Nothing above is meant to take away from his obviously successful cloning technique. But it's about the most labor intensive cloning method around. Kinda the opposite of what's going on here, no?
zeke,
I just lost 17 out of 20 clones with a technique that works well for me. It happens. Then on the flip side, I had cuttings that sat in the salad crisper for five weeks root faster than freshly cut ones. How green were your stems? Any chance you can try a little older but not quite woody stems? My clones with those stems seem to battle pythium better than fresh green stems.
he is using a big dome as opposed to several smaller ones.