AN hate thread! Come hate away on AN! It's a party!

[dankworth]

Hate!

 

[OGONLY]

You can hate all you want but you have to admit some of their products work very well. Overpriced maybe, but I still use Big Bud and Overdrive. I get a free gallon of Overdrive every 6 months because it flakes up in the bottle. I say I think its mold and they let me trade in my half gallon for a new full gallon. It does kind of look like mold, and it might actually be. All I know is my results are such that I'm not changing a thing.

 

[southstreets]

Don't care 4 most of there stuff but big bud and carboload work wonders..

 

[dankworth]

Yeah! I hate it too how they reformulate everything every few months! And they took away Barricade and gave us Rhino skin which is 1/20th the amount of K silicate!
And how they took away the aminos from Big Bud!
And the Joe Camel Ed Hardy cartoons! Like I am a kid being sold cigarettes!

I totally agree with you guys. AN pissed me off too and made me follow a fertilizer salt tutorial.

Hate! Hate! Hate!

 

[SweetTooth]

Powdered big bud make your res smell like cat piss

 

[ProdigyGrower]

Powdered big bud make your res smell like cat piss

AN is awesome I have had nothing but epic results with connie and their additives so hate away brutha but the facts are an grows super frosty fatty buds .

 

[SweetTooth]

Sure, Connie works great. But it is expensive and I'm not lying when I say powdered bigbud makes your res smell like piss

 

[ProdigyGrower]

o

Sure, Connie works great. But it is expensive and I'm not lying when I say powdered bigbud makes your res smell like piss

h i belive you never used powered because honestly its the same price per ap as the liquid or more now that was a year ago so it cold be cheaper now all i know is it works and AN is cheap compared to aptus but with the results jacks having they could be more than worth the money you pay for what u get in this life imop.

 

[Blaze]

My biggest issues with AN is that they take existing ag products, dilute them, then jack up the price a few thousand percent. Nothing they make is unique or special - all you are paying for when you buy AN is the fancy label. That's it. Their products do work, but they work no better than other similar if not identical products that sell for a faction of the price. I have tried their products in the past and was not all that impressed - and the cost was certainly not justifiable.

To me using AN is sort of like converting your car to run on alcohol and then using nothing but Hennessy to power it. Would it work? Yes. Is it cost effective or logical? Hell no. I mean just look at Big Bud: it's just potassium phosphate and potassium sulphate. Yet one liter of Big Bud costs over $40 and makes about 50 gallon. For that same price you can buy 5 lbs of monopoassium phosphate - enough to make 500 gallons. Same with their Voodoo Juice - why pay $200 a gallon for bacterial cultures when you could buy a 5 gallon ACT brewer and enough materials to make 50+ gallons of ACT that will work far better anyway for the same price? AN is a rip off - always has been and always will be.

 

[Dynamite]

I like AN when its ON ! think Ima grab a couple bottles of connie today !!

 

[dankworth]

I used connoisseur for a while myself, across several different systems.
What's the NPK on the guaranteed analysis on that you guys? For even amounts of A and B?
How many times have they reformulated it? And what were those ratios, and why?
What are the exact ppms again? Of all 6 major nutrients?
And what of the iron? I have become a huge fan of 4-5 ppms iron in my micro ratio.
Should it be used in a drain-to-waste application, or recirculating?
Should it be used for rockwool or coco? Certainly not both, they have different requirements.
How about the N:K ratio? That is so important for my coco performance for flowering.
And the alcohols that were supposed to be in there to elongate the bearing surface of the colas by promoting cell division, are those still in there?
I remember when they first came out with it.
AN was flagged all to shit in OR.
That means they were caught lying about the guaranteed analysis on like half their shit.
NLG in the tron had to open that store in the Couve just to slang AN.
Too bad the first connie jugs had all that mold and precipitate lol. And that gay-ass perfume in there. WTF.
What are the exact salts that go into making Connie again?
What do you guys think of urea?

Prodigygrower, I grew frosty shit with connie too.
I grow better shit now with my food.
Because my food is tailored to my medium.
Then to my cultivar.
Then to my environment.
Like a nute ratio is supposed to be.

Foods should be for mediums. Soil, coco, rockwool, rdwc, they all should have differing ratios from one another. One size does not fit all. Not if we are talking about optimizing performance.
Recirculating solutions, if I remember correctly, need more P and Ca for ph management purposes than is optimal for the plant.
So I dtw.
Being able to tune your food to optimize ratios is better than buying off-the-shelf nutes as far as plant health goes.
I only knew as much as you guys a while back.
Now I know way more. I studied until I understood it so I could optimize plant health.

Dynamite! 16 from 24 7-10 gal containers of rockwool watered once every 2 days by hand under 8k in vertizontals on 4' centers, with constant ventilation!
Hittin' 2/light with no co2!.
Dude they are going to rename 82nd after a civil rights leader any day now. Like 39th and Union.
I have wondered ever since I read your thread what nute ratio would be truly optimal for dtw rockwool. Not a lot of cats buying rockwool these days.
I learned a shitload from your journals.
Thanks for sharing.
Dude you got to seal that thing up with co2 and AC before the big four-oh.

I hope everybody has a sense of humor about this thread, because I sure do.

Hate!

 

[drknockbootz]

hey dank you got any pics of your grow using your own salts?

 

[dankworth]

Nope. Switched to my own salts just in time for a 1/2 week power outage, so things did not work out quite like I had hoped.
Was sick a bit lately, autoimmune frogduckpigflu got me down.
Smoking it anyways. But it is not pretty, sadly.
I believe I should have something cool to show off in a few months.

 

[dankworth]

Don't forget to hate, you guys.
Even some feverish dislike will do in a pinch.

 

[ESER.ONE]

Lol make your own nutrients then... what you guys need is a different hydro store... lol advance is a bit pricey but my hydro spot hooks me up with 20 to 30 percent off with no mark up.. comes out pretty cheap if you ask me considering the results...

Advanced nutrients work great. But so does everything else if used right.

Hate to break to you dank but pulling 2ps for 1 k while having 7k more of surrounding light isnt much to brag about. Ive pulled 1.5 from a 600 watter using different nutes not just advanced. Its not the nutes you have to learn but your plant. Even when you taylor your nutes to your choice you still have to learn the strain.

We can hate all we want but in reality all nute companys are the same there in it to rob you and why do they do that..? Cus they can cus you sir are not using these nutes for growin tomatoes and i think they know that.

 

[outwest]

I've never used AN, but I have 2 bottles that were given to me. They simply don't fit with my organic growing style. They take up space, and I don't want them. They can't be thrown away or recycled.

I simply keep them so I can HATE them.

outwest

 

[true grit]

I've used nutes all across teh board. And I still come back to sensi AB for veg. As for bloom it just depends to me whether i wanna be organic or not, but eser nailed it on the head- all nutes work right if you use em well and know your plants. Sensi and Connie worked great for me, but after 4-5 runs with same plants I switched to organic....had a slight learning curve and am now outproducing what i was with chems and with better quality- simply because I learned the plants better over time. Could it be the nutes? I doubt it, i just spend more time figuring the plants needs at different points of bloom.

 

[dankworth]

Nope it's sure not. My gig is not anywhere close to dialed in my opinion.
Jalisco Kid was getting 1.25 g/watt+ with 2.2-2.8# specimens he was saying.
Tobor got 1.6 gpw with a single scrogged specimen of the white.
Heath Robinson makes us all look bad.
I have been on a learning curve for a while.
I have been fighting Crohn's for my adult life without knowing what was wrong with me until recently.
Where my lips were blue and I came within a week of not making it. My intestines would not absorb nutrients for a while, lost 20 pounds and went through such misery and pain that I developed PTSD from it.
During my absence from the boards recently and all.
I have spent a while knowing the changes that needed to take place, but was physically unable to make the changes, and was the onliest person there was to do the work.
Jalisco Kid's posts are what led me to the diy nutes. And then there are Fatman's insights.
You cannot fine-tune your nutrient ratios as easily buying AN.
Most cannot tell what the ppms for n-p-k-ca-mg-s are for their food.
So when determining cause and effect relationships, the ones with less knowledge are at a disadvantage.

I used AN for years. But they reformulated so often, I would get results that I was happy with only to have the formula changed.
If AN had left things alone, like other nute companies, I may have not gone with salts.

The thing I can brag about is that at this point, my cost for nutes and additives is under $100 per 1k per year. I see how 2.5/light is possible in my room with my cultivar.
Unfortunately I cannot take the glass out of my reflectors, so that kept me at 2/light and not more.
That 2/light was with 3 digital ballasts, and 5 magnetic.
4 tired hps, and 4 MHs that cost 18.00 apiece off the internet.
VPD that was good but not optimal.
Handwatering 12 bigass specimens every 2 days.
Getting victimized by root aphids because I was scared to use imidacloprid and spectracide, because my immune system had very little left to give.
So there is lots of room for optimization and improvement.

Illness has kept me from achieving the results that I believe that I can.
I am a big fan of dialing in 1 cultivar until happy.
I am hopeful that this is the year where everything will come together with my health, and allow me to garden like I would like to.
There will be multiple reinvestment cycles until the room makes me happy.

The best quality I have experienced was grown with AN 3-part and Botanicare's Cal-mag for base nutes, and hammerhead(old hammerhead)/MOAB, with some other additives, mostly under a hortilux blue mh.
So I have been chasing that quality ever since.
I can give my plants the exact same ppms, in fact improved ones, with my salts.
For like no money. And infinite tuneability. And no one will change my formulation without my consent.
AN also gets flagged in OR lots, because they deliberately lie about the guaranteed analysis. So what you thought you were buying for NPK is not always what they are selling you.

All of this gets in the way of me dialing in my strain.

The last ferts I was buying was Botanicare's CNS-17. 5 gallon jugs, after my discount, were $90. I was burning through them every 18 days. Plus driving 200 miles round trip. Part of why I was so interested in purchasing the raw salts.
Now I can reverse engineer anybody's nutes, and will effectively never pay for fertilizer again.

There is no reason for me to purchase any ferts from a grow store anymore.
No more drip clean either.
No more RE.
No more Banana Manna.
Because I studied until I figured out how to pay regular ag prices for inputs.
This is what I am advocating.
I even give my veg and flowering formulas in posts, and explain why they are the way they are, and the medium they are intended for.
So others can save money too.
And then put the money towards environmental controls.
Can't hit 2.5/light without a fairly perfect environment.

The important thing is that I am not trying to take advantage of anybody's brand loyalty to sell them a product with worse value than the product I sold them last year.
And AN is.
For some, it will continue to be worth it to buy AN.
But like JK and others before me, I feel it is my duty to offer this info to a couple people who feel the same way.

Don't forget to hate!

 

[ESER.ONE]

Exactly true grit... i love organic grow herb. The taste is amazing the smell is just better then salt nutes my yields i wont say are better but i still have some more to learn with organics. Nothing like brewing your own teas thats for sure.. rev from skunk sure can brew some good ones.

 

[ESER.ONE]

That post was a good one dankworth..