Oh No - It's A Green Hole! - Reverse Thrusters! - Dammit - Too Late!

[Weaselcracker]

Why thank you Tead. I just whipped it together, and will continue to re-whip it as needed. The white pipe is actually some of the framework of some sort of plastic kid toy that was laying around the yard, which may give you a sense of the care and attention level I put into this contraption
My biggest challenge is getting them to survive the first stage without drowning them. After that as I mentioned before there will be other issues, like lack of extra lighting for the solo cup section of the grow, and different feeding requirements of plants all on the same system. Neither issue is likely to have a solution so they'll just have to suffer through it. If I get anything good I hope to reveg it.

 

[Mello136]

Hey Wease!! Pot Ingenuity at its best huh. Good work on it. I like it when I get crafty like this,

 

[Weaselcracker]

He he. Yes it does look like they may be plotting something. It's been pointed out that the one in front is whispering to it's neighbor.
Mello! Long time no see.

 

[Tead]

The white pipe is actually some of the framework of some sort of plastic kid toy that was laying around the yard, which may give you a sense of the care and attention level I put into this contraption

Awesome "jackleg" engineering baby!

I was wondering how you were going to juggle the different feeding requirements. You have to feed everyone same-same all the time.
On the other hand, it sure seems like a nice setup for some Osmo+ girls. Hmmm.... yea.... I'm liking that idea a lot. 2L hempys all fed with osmo+ and a pump system like yours. One could vary the feeding levels all day long with the same watering system. Might have to steal your watering system idea anyway.

 

[Mello136]

Yeah I went on a lurker binge for about a month. lol

 

[Tead]

What'r ya doin for drainage in that crazy setup?

 

[Weaselcracker]

For lack of a better place to stick this info at the moment, I'm going to post this little diy here. Maybe I'll start a little thread for it because I can't be the only one suffering with this super annoying problem, can I?
I've had years of problems with my digital timers. Maybe it's just the brand of the ONLY ones that are available locally, which are made by 'Woods'. Curse you, Woods! I've been through several of their timers and they all have had the same issue. I don't know if other brands have this same quirk.

I've been reducing the 'on' hours of the two lights in the flowering room for the sake of the sativas, by 15 minutes at a time, and may go as low as 10/14 before they're finished. However, it seems like whenever I reprogram a setting on one of these stupid things, their state of the art circuitry cannot handle the change. What typically happens is either they do not come on at the designated 'on' time, and stay off, or much more commonly, come on and stay on -till I figure it out. Figuring it out isn't as easy as you might think!

In order to get in to my flowering room I have to go through the veg room. This generally means I can only go in there when the flowering room lights are meant to be on, or I'll be screwing up the light cycle. Sometimes because of scheduling I have to go in anyway, and in that case I'll shut all the veg lights off and use a green led headlamp to work.
Usually it takes me a few days to figure out, to my horror, that the timers are messed up and the lights aren't working right. I have had no way of knowing what's going on in the flowering room without going in there. A couple times I've been in the veg room and heard the heat vent fan going when lights were supposed to be off, and got suspicious. Other times I've clued in because the pots were drying up faster than usual.

I've gotten to the point of realizing that every time I reprogram a timer, I have to unplug it, remove the little battery in the back to reset it completely, and reprogram everything from scratch. This is the only sure way to know that the thing isn't going to get 'confused'. This also has its hazards if I make a mistake when reprogramming all the info.

Tonight I rigged up extension cords that run off of those flowering light timers, one for each light- A and B. They run through the walls into the veg room and have indicator night lights plugged into the end of each one. These lights will go on and off with the timers and should tell me what's happening with the lights. I should have done this years ago.
I hate you Woods.

 

[Weaselcracker]

What'r ya doin for drainage in that crazy setup?

When I built the grow room I made a drain in the floor. So at the moment everything, what little watering they've needed anyway, just runs on to the floor, but it would be super simple to replace the plywood with something that catches the water and drains wherever I wish, including back into the bucket. The minimum setting I can do on the timer is one minute and that's overkill for watering right now but hopefully will work out later on. In theory there are flow rate controls on the manifold but they are hell to adjust equally. Another option is to control the flow rate by attaching some of the many cheap-ass sprinkler/dripper thingies that came with the cheap-ass manifold. But they also seem finicky.
As for the feeding schedule- I have another manifold that takes four hoses and another pump. I could make separate systems and reservoirs for the sativas and the sativa/indica strains. But that sounds like waaay too much work so I'm just going to feed them by the sativa's needs. If the others are too badly underfed I may have to rethink things. I hope not

 

[Tead]

Ya know... I've tried several digi timers over the years. They've all failed me. The old school mechanical ones work much better for me, and if I need a crazy timing schedule, I daisy chain 2 of them together to achieve any lighting schedule my little heart desires.

A few points on the drainage and feeding words...
Love the water spider system.
I've used simple "C" clamps on water tubes to restrict flow before. Worked like a charm. Extremely adjustable.
So, are you at all familiar with some of the fancy hydraulic things the Romans did with their distribution systems and sometimes toys?
They really did some creative things. Heck, I saw one story about a Holy Water dispenser that output "X" amount of water when you put a coin in a slot. While I have no specific advice, you might do some fun reading and come up with some interesting ideas.
I wouldn't recycle the nute mix. You'll be putting whatever might by growing in the medium into every other pot almost instantly. Drain to waste baby.... dtw.
Worried about the plywood in your drainage. In my world, water + wood = termites.... every time.
OH! A fun story!
Our termites swarm every spring. The temps/rh/air pressure triggers their hatch. We turn off all our inside lights for a few nights to avoid them coming into the house. Streetlights look like balls of bugs for a few nights. Anyway, somehow I triggered these conditions in my grow tent a while back. I had some of those little bastards swarming in my grow shed!

 

[AKgramma]

WC: What works really well for a drainage pan is a pan they sell to put under washing machines. It not only provided a waterproof catch for waste water, but it also has an outlet to which you can attach a garden hose to empty it. They are sold at Lowes in two sizes. I use the smaller one to protect the carpet in the grow room under the shelving I use as support for my homemade "tent'.

 

[Dontscrewup]

~FLOWERING~

Here are a couple no-frills pics of the flowering Blueberry and Pineapple Chunk from Friday. The older PC, strung up in the dangly mobile contraption, failed to get her picture taken before the camera battery died.

Pineapple Chunk

Very Nice! This is the same strain I'm growing. It's cool to see what I have to look forward to.

 

[Weaselcracker]

Thanks for the tip AK. I figured there would be such a thing out there somewhere. I hadn't thought of a washing machine pan. I did spot a used shower stall base laying around last year, and considered grabbing that for my veg room, which doesn't a drain. It wasn't quite the right size though. Around here there aren't really stores to speak of so recycling and diy is the name of the game.

 

[Mello136]

G'morning Wease! That plant looks similar to mine expect Baby Greens has very little space between the canopy and the pot. Her branches are about 14-16 in in length. I wonder what we'll yield if the squirrels don't get us first?

 

[Kriaze]

Hey Weaselcracker just dropping in to say that it's good to see that everything is in it's usual orderly fashion Nice little watering system you built there and those extensions with night lights on are a great idea! Good luck with the solo cup competition and I'll have to sub to that and see how they all go.

Everything is back on track here after having a nightmare time of it taking down my grow room, putting it back together then having to do it all again when the new central heating system sprung a leak. All is back in order again and hopefully even a little better after some rearrangements of my own, I may even have managed to save the remaining plants that I have as they didn't die and are now back in veg The smoke after a cure has turned out to be quite a nice smoke so I'm warping a batch over through the green hole for you to partake of. It's not the best but it's certainly better than what I had to buy to see me through to the end of the last grow

 

[Weaselcracker]

Thanks for the teleported pot Kriaze! Glad to know you're still hanging in there. Amazing what we can do when we want to. If growing wasn't fun I would consider it impossible to find the time and energy. No one could pay me enough to even consider it. The power of positive attitude I suppose. I look forward to your next journal. I'm glad I ended mine on a good note. Plants have been struggling this time around. I just figured out that my ph tester has been off by .5 and everything was in an acid bath for the last few weeks.

 

[Weaselcracker]

Thanks for dropping in again, Mello. That picture, which Dontscrewup pasted in, is from the first part of my journal and the plant been harvested long since. It's in a ten gallon pot. Branches the same length as yours. I did a fly-by of your journal and it looks like yours is a bag seed, grown in a solo cup? Amazing

 

[Weaselcracker]

Tead. No termites here. Maybe it's too wet for them. Sounds mildly horrifying. The plywood will rot eventually. In summer I plan to check over the place and do some upgrading and a fresh coat of paint. It would be easy enough for me to make everything drain properly with hoses if I get spare time to clear out the plants for a while and do some work in there.
Thanks for the tips on watering control. I hadn't thought of little hose clamps. I wonder if they come small enough for 1/4 line? The flow rate adjusters I have now are bad. Adjusting one throws an opposing one out of adjustment, and I can go around and around for hours trying to get the silly things all working the same. Then over time they seem to change, so in my tests, after a day they were all trickling at very different rates, with some not trickling at all.
I'm realizing that I've really set myself up for some issues here. One of the solo cup plants is a clone, which presumably will start flowering right away and should get flowering nutes. The rest will continue to veg for weeks. Strains vary from pure sativa to pure (almost?) indica. What to feed them all?
I'm using digital timers because of frequent power outages. In the past with the mechanical timers I would never know what time the lights were even going to be on after the timers got scrambled in a week of power problems. These particular ones seem good for handling the draw, and haven't gone up in smoke yet. Sometimes I wish they would.

 

[AKgramma]

WC: I was told by an electrical expert that you cannot overload the timers, or they don't work correctly. I had to divide my lights between two timers, (mechanical) and they worked just fine after that.

 

[Weaselcracker]

Yes the digital ones do burn out more easily from what I see, and read. I have one per 600 watt light and they seem fine. The main problems I have with them are basic quirks of their design, unrelated to the power load I believe.

 

[AKgramma]

Yes the digital ones do burn out more easily from what I see, and read. I have one per 600 watt light and they seem fine. The main problems I have with them are basic quirks of their design, unrelated to the power load I believe.

I could not get the digital timers to program... waaaay too complicated, so I went back to manual. Once I split the load, they worked just fine.