Nice write up C!Once you're powered up and it's not passive you're no longer running a Hempy Bucket.
You're running what they call a Dutch bucket or Bato Bucket.
A Hempy Bucket is passive and represents a landmark breakthrough in pot cultivation because for many decades pot dealers and the DEA swore you can't grow pot hydroponically, passively.
Hempy proved you can.
If you keep those roots submerged without a decent amount of air, they're going to get pythium.
The way you'll know it's pythium is the roots get a gray dead color; and when you pull on the root gently the outer part comes off - leaving a little tiny central whisker that stays when the outside comes off.
You should start a thread about your Dutch Bucket because what you're doing isn't a Hempy Bucket any longer. The original guy who first discovered you can grow hydroponic pot passively and not get pythium by cycling the aeration with a drink-down cycle,
used to be furious at people hijacking his threads, turning them into their powered bucket exploration threads, for the obvious reason: it's off topic. A lot of people USE buckets like you're talking about but that's a different type of growing.
You are no longer discussing or working within the parameters that Hempy Bucket's aeration cycling controls: pythium free growing without need of oxygen or cooling the solution with a chiller. So you're going to have to aerate the reserve unless it's got a pretty high surface to volume ratio. If you feed that tray like I saw your drawing - I think it was yours - you'll get it to whatever degree. The stuff will get on roots - well again - that's misspoken it's all over, everywhere, all the time, it's just that in powered hydro you beat it back down with a chiller; or with oxygenation.
It'll start colonies on roots, in a SINGLE point where say, you're running your dwc or whatever sluggish, and there are some roots, the water never circulates through, because maybe they're curled up in some corner, or knotted up in some kinda pre filter cloth, or whatever - pythium will break out just where there's a small place of lowered oxygen and high enough temps that it can metabolize, and it'll try to spread, but won't get anywhere - so it'll just rot away whatever tissue it can as it feeds along it's boundary zone(s).
Pot, especially at one's house, doesn't have all that large a root set but a big plant of some kind could conceivably have some roots in water moving and shallow where temperatures are high, providing energy for metabolism, but pythium's suppressed, because the oxygen level's so high; but - and it's a stretch - there could also be an area a distance away, where the water was still, and had lowered oxygen, but the temperature of it be so cool, the colonies couldn't metabolize fast enough to stay alive to reproduction. So there are two limiting factors on colonies springing up: heat and oxygen levels.
And anywhere along the root body it can survive and multiply a few colonies, it will.
If you've ever had it or had somebody explain it to ya then you know kind of, about that, but then there are people who never had it, and never read a lot about it from different sources, never really saw colonies of it break out in spots along a volume of roots amid some plants.
When the Hempies cycle the water every day or so, the constant cyclings of atmospheric air through the whole thing, really suppress the pythium well;
but as soon as you start keeping any volume of roots wet without some oxygenation, it's gonna shortly be eating away at some of them and if you let it, it'll damage the plants pretty bad. Plants die from it, pretty frequently. Well - obviously what that REALLY means is that if it's allowed to it will but in a cultivation environment you're gonna catch it and rip off the sick roots and start honoring the aeration cycle till it goes away.
You NEED to cycle the wet/dry times. The reason is when you pump constantly from a reservoir you can have a tendency to simply dump it from the hose right on the surface where it falls through the medium but it never really sees a lot of atmospheric air, because it follows a sorta etched-out path of least resistance, down through the center parts of your column of medium; in this case coco but it can be bark/peat, perlite/vermiculite, whatever.
And you'll have a large wetted portion
but there really will just be the main body of your res, circulating in this kinda closed loop, where the main body of all that water, never really sees, the kind of atmospheric oxygen levels you'd need to suppress the mold.
When you start getting to 'can I just run water over it constantly,' you hit the problem that pythium is a really exploitive colony builder - so if you're not washing the entire root system, with sufficient oxygen, that pythium's actively suppressed all through there DUE to that high percentage-oxygen, atmospheric air, the pythium will simply pop up in points where it can exploit the localized environmentals; and the rest of the roots won't get it very bad, if at all. But the plant will be limping and seem somehow kinda feeble to downright sick.
This is how people can predict to you that you'll get it if you don't adequately work to put a lot of oxygen through that medium/water/volume of root.
The stuff will just pop up in little points here and there, and weaken your plants, and it'll be the end of your grow before you dump it out and see a few rotted strands here, and a few there.
That's what happens when you try to simply bathe the roots constantly and it's why you are no longer in the realm of the Hempy bucket, but are in the dutch bucket's realm.
They HAVE that problem that if you want to wash constantly,
You have to oxygenate more.
A Hempy bucket is typically considered a Hempy when it's passive primarily - and most certainly with that aeration cycle you MUST allow to beat back the cooties.
If you water one with a pump you still have to honor the AERATION CYCLING that goes on, or you'll get root rot.
And at that point it's also most certainly no longer a Hempy Bucket because of ALL the things a Hempy Bucket uses,
that aeration cycle that definitively beats back the pythium is signature.
If you make the reserve too deep then when you refill it you start having dead water table sitting with roots in it for extended periods of more than about four or five days I guess, I think three days is what the time is considered to be, before pythium can attack a plant in high temps, if there's been some damage to roots from handling or whatever. People fill up Hempy setups and make them last a week and even longer in one-off shots with healthy mature plants; but if you keep rolling the dice something will happen and the water mold will go to town on several of your plants at once.
There's a certain genetic resistance by strain you gotta figure is in there, then there's any kind of physical damage to the roots; there's general health of your plants, there's the temps you're keeping the roots and water at - all of this affects how fast the pythium can multiply. There is also the fact that in some places in the world there's just a LOT of it in the wild.
So people can't predict exactly how long any particular set of plants will skate along too wet before the crud sets up; but it's coming and will not be long, if you violate the parameters of keeping it suppressed
And thanks, Hempy.
