Custom Medium-less, Ebb & Flow grow posts

[Mystre.Pharmer]

Greetings fellow Pharmers!

I've been getting some interest in my custom grow posts. these posts are a meadiumless ebb and flow. They give to roots PLENTY of room to grow while still being able to move the posts around. best of all no hydroton to clean, which is my favorite part and why I came up with this design for em.

1) get a pile of pvc fence posts from your local hardware store.

2) First mark the halfway mark at 2 locations on the post at 2.5" so that all your next dots are on center. Then lay the tape measure along those dots and mark
where you want to drill for your plants.

3) I drilled 2" holes on center every 6" inches. I put 9 2" plant sites and one 4" hole for my hand to fit in and get at the ebb and flow connections.

4) oops, sometimes this happens!! don't worry its fixable.. when building these tho, I would put the end cap on and draw a line on the post. then when deciding where to put your holes for the ebb and flow connections you know how far from the edge to be... make sure to include the screw cap thats a little bigger the hole itself.

5) The ebb and flow connector wont fit! so the cap wont be snug and it'll leak!! just in-case you didn't measure FIRST (normally i remember to leave room for the end cap AFTER i started drilling the first hole for the connections lol). the end caps slide on quite far so be sure to keep it in mind to avoid these extra steps.

6) so put the cap on and trace the ebb and flow connectors screw thing and determine the room it needs to not touch each other and allow the cap to fit snugly on the end.

...part 2 soon to follow

 

[Mystre.Pharmer]

7) You can use the end that you cut off of the post (they come in about 98" long from the store i think) I happened to have a smaller piece of scrap from another project. Im saving the ends I cut off of these posts to make smaller grow posts to keep mums in.

8) Move the drill around until from over head it looks to completely cover the sharpy lines you drew from earlier.

9) Start drilling, be careful because the lid is just sitting on the end and not attached. so go slow until you make contact with the cap, then continue drilling through the cap.

10) like so:

11) There is no need to drill the hole all the way through, you can see it took me two times, the first time it moved a little and no longer was going to drill out the entire sharpy marks so i did it again.

12) Here is the modified end cap on the post, you might notice that I reuse my caps, they last a long time generally as long as you are careful prying them off at harvest.

13) I screw in the 1/2" ebb and flow connectors. one thing to note is that I also use a 1/2" exit as you can see. that's because It isn't a return line, it drains to waste (a bucket) I flood only long enough to reach the root crowns then that's it. I use a 600GPH per 4 grow posts, on a 4 min flood.

14) None of these pictures came out well lol sorry, i guess i was shaky. But some times I put some silicone glue in the corners of the cap (the bottom corners that is) and then a heavy, steady, single bead all the way around the edge of the post. Than the cap is slid on and held firmly in place for 30 seconds so there is no push back and its snugly glued on.

...part 3's next ;)

 

[Mystre.Pharmer]

15) Ever since i started adding silicone glue to the outside I've never had leak problems. just some at the bottom, and sides, no need for the top because water doesn't fill that high.

16) The corners get some silicone glue squeezed inside too.

17) the other end completed.

18) there you have it, my custom medium-less ebb and flow system.

Oh yea, oh yea, BTW no matter what hydro system you choose to grow with, these connectors are awesome! no leaks and very stroung. they are designed for bio-diesel applications i think. They are (1/2" but come in many sizes) Poly Quick Disconnect Couplings. they come in very handy and I have them on all my 1/2" feeding hoses.

This is a picture of when i used to flood for 15 minutes on and it recirculated in the rez and it used 3/4" exit lines. I would recommend bigger exit ebb and flow fittings on the exit lines if they will have water actually flowing through, otherwise you could flood depending how stroung your pump is and how long your on cycle is. my 4 minutes isn't long enough to over flow these posts.

 

[Mystre.Pharmer]

Here is a picture of some grow posts with only 4 plant sites each.

some pictures of an older grow of mine with GH nutes:

sometimes the plants will need to be reminded to stay out of the feed lines.

they look brown but GH nutrients I've noticed tend to stain roots this color. they are actually pretty healthy and they grow together in one large mass. So when its time to clean em, all the roots slide out in one piece. than I just tie a sponge to a pvc pipe and scrub the inside of the tube (i take only one end off btw) with bleach water or a H202 solution and rinse very well and let dry, then just re glue the lid (make sure to clean the ebb and flow parts too)... sanitation is very important.

 

[Mystre.Pharmer]

That's it. thanks for stopping by all! the two links in my signature are to my past and current grow. This current grow I'm taking alot of root pictures. My plants seem to like their posts very much, and I welcome anyone to stop by my journal and take a look at these posts in action.

Happy Pharming everyone!

-Mystre.Pharmer

 

[Mystre.Pharmer]

here is one particular posts root progression from their initial transplant from my areo cloners, to the grow posts.

this picture is from Day1 in the posts:

this picture is of day 15 still a long way to grow ;):

these are some different plants roots dunno what day these roots are but these are different than the ones from above:

and just a few shots of the plants living happily in the posts:

 

[Mystre.Pharmer]

oh one last thought, I cut the posts to be 61.5" long and that 4" hole on the hand for my hand is also 6" from center from the last 2" hole, and the and cap covers the 4" hole just a little. I cover those 4" holes with a 5" neoprene insert from you local hydro store or i make a custom duct tape flap to cover it. that is taped to the post and can easily be lifted up to look inside because i recently ran out of 5" neo inserts to cover it with.

hope all this made sense to everyone :) feel free to ask questions here or in my current grow thread.

Happy Pharming!
-Mystre

P.S. I also gorilla tape the net cups to the posts because of all the air movement in my room they could blow over in the beginning. I also gorilla tape bamboo stakes to the outside of the posts and tie plants to them for support. been working out great so far.

 

[FileError404]

Great DIY post! Move to Grow FAQ ASAP! :clapping

 

[Jalisco Kid]

You can special order those posts from home depot in 20' lengths. I offset my holes so the plants are not right next to each other. I used external pvc/uniseals for my misters and bicycle innertube to seal my caps. That way I could pop the end caps off and use a 2" pvc pipe with a t on the end and then push the old roots right out. I used those for a year or so and then went to 8" pvc pipe. Numbers were getting scary so I switched over to growing trees.
Good to see you make your own. I have to laugh to myself when I see people buy that system in stores. Suerte JK

 

[blueleaf]

looking great bro!

 

[SkyHi]

So its just like aero but capped and sealed at both ends and flooded periodically. Nice and simple i like it.

 

[ugmjfarmer]

and... question, since we have no media, what is the dry out time like? Say for instance if a pump failed, how quickly would the operation be dead?

 

[Mystre.Pharmer]

Great DIY post! Move to Grow FAQ ASAP! :clapping

Hey there FileError404 thanks :) these posts are pretty easy to make but I wanted to make sure that I included the modified end cap. I forget to draw the endcap line on the posts sometimes and have to deal with it from time to time.

You can special order those posts from home depot in 20' lengths. I offset my holes so the plants are not right next to each other. I used external pvc/uniseals for my misters and bicycle innertube to seal my caps. That way I could pop the end caps off and use a 2" pvc pipe with a t on the end and then push the old roots right out. I used those for a year or so and then went to 8" pvc pipe. Numbers were getting scary so I switched over to growing trees.
Good to see you make your own. I have to laugh to myself when I see people buy that system in stores. Suerte JK

wow 20' thats good to know. in my first journal here at the farm, I had 2k in a sealed room on a mover and had 10 posts that had 5 plants in each. I drilled the holes staggered and liked it since they were bigger than i normally grow. if you plan on growing 2-4 oz plants with these posts, staggering the holes is a good tip, every little bit counts ;) but with plants at every 6" i dont think it'll make a difference.

any chance you could elaborate on the bicycle inter-tube sealing process? I cant really picture what you mean. also these posts hold a bit of water when filling (alot more than areo) would it be stroung enough to support ebb and flow? I would like to get away from buy those small household silicone tubes ;)

I agree, everything that is sold in stores for growing hydroponically is really easy to make. if you get stuck, alot of the systems details are in the online pdf files so they almost give you a blueprint to make it yourself. you can save alot of money making these yourself. :)

looking great bro!

Thanks Blueleaf

So its just like aero but capped and sealed at both ends and flooded periodically. Nice and simple i like it.

indeed. I started growing in big trays with hydroton inside and the plants roots grew together and they loved all the room and yielded great. then I get to individual pots of hydroton, yield wasn't as good, but I liked being able to move plants around. I didn't want to make the switch to areo (if i do it'll be high pressure but that's a whole different story lol) but i say the areo posts. I thought it was awesome because I hate cleaning hydroton (especially the amount you use to fill whole trays) so i came up with some REAL SIMPLE modifications to the areo idea. kept it medium less (thought about baskets with hydroton but obviously didn't lol) these posts with the quick release couplings make it easy to move them about the room, its nice to beable to move posts if i need to and beable to harvest a few at a time aswell.

and... question, since we have no media, what is the dry out time like? Say for instance if a pump failed, how quickly would the operation be dead?

great question! one of the reasons i didnt just do areo is because they last longer in these posts with a pump failure. there is a lip on the ebb and flow connectors as we all know, and so they dont drain 100% (prolly 99.95% drains) so if a pump fails they do have that little bit to live on, but its not much.

first ill say that I feed about 1 hour after lights on, 5 hours from that, and again 1 hour before lights off. I accidentally switched a pump to manual instead of auto. they got fed ONCE an hour after the lights on. and that was it! they sat in a room at 84F and ~45% humidity about 8" from the 1kwatt light. (my lights almost make no heat it seems lol, the hood or directly under the light, its not even remotely warm). So i go in my room the next day at light on and almost shit myself! they looked droopy and sad, it was VERY depressing. once i figured out what happened (the posts were bone dry inside so the problem was obvious) I flooded em and fixed the timer. and they recovered.

this happened to my "original 16" in my current grow, im trying perpetual right now, that's why i refer to them as the original 16. just the first 16 plants put in the room.

so they lasted 24 hours with 10 of them in extreme-ish conditions and bounced back once flooded again the next day.

pumps do fail, but my pumps turn on like 4 times a day for 4 minutes. in areo pumps fail more often because they turn on like every 4 minutes, that constant on/off can destroy pumps.

 

[Mystre.Pharmer]

:hi hi! me again.

thought I would add this calculation for anyone interested, works for all things square (rectangles, boxes) not circular tubes (that's a different, more complex formula)

My posts are 62.5" long (earlier i think i said 61.5" that's wroung)... 5" wide and with two ebb and flow extensions it floods to about 3.5" high (more actually like 3.25" but rounding up is better IMHO)

so to find out how much water will be pumped into these tubes we do this:

62.5x5x3.5=1093.75 cubic inches

and we know that there are 231 cubic inches in a gallon.

1093.75/231= 4.73485 gallons when filled to 3.5"

I have a 30 gallons of water for my rez, and it has 2 pumps in it, each floods 4 posts. which is 18.9394 gallons for the 4 posts. I run my pumps at different times (different digital timers) for example: one timer is on at 1:00 and off at 1:04 than the next timer for the pump in the same rez turns on at 1:07 and off at 1:11. so the initial flood can start letting gravity put the water back so that the second pump never runs dry.



Happy Pharming!
-Mystre.Pharmer

 

[SealedRoom]

Thank you so much for posting the DIY! I love making things myself aswell. those quick release couplings look very convenient, I think ill be getting some for my hoses. good tips on the math btw. finding the square inches of even a circular object isn't too difficult, I never thought to look up how many cubic inches are in a gallon, cool to know. great diy with tons of pics. 5 stars ;)

 

[sedate]

I don't really have anything constructive here to add except -

^^^ is a beatiful picture of whatever week 2 that this.

That photo looks awesome.

 

[aSilvrHaze]

Mystre.Pharmer, is there any way you could post a similar how-to for the cloners? I just got finished reading through both of your journals and this DIY for the posts, and am Very interested in your cloners because some of those clones have looked incredibly nice!

 

[Mystre.Pharmer]

Mystre.Pharmer, is there any way you could post a similar how-to for the cloners? I just got finished reading through both of your journals and this DIY for the posts, and am Very interested in your cloners because some of those clones have looked incredibly nice!

Greetings aSilvrHaze! thanks for the kind words :) i hope i journals can always be a learning experience for anyone interested :)

about the cloners, sure thing! i actually just sold my house and am moving so am inbetween some stuff as you may imagine ;) but the good news there is that i've taken apart my 3 cloners ;) so when i put them back together i can take some pictures of em for ya, state what i use for a pump, rez size, nozzles i use etc. it might be like a month from now tho. :)

you could also probably find a very similar cloner that someone else has DIYed for. after you build a few it becomes easier to look at stuff or browse at a store and see what will work or what could work if you really wanted to lol. I like to walk around stores and picture everything being used for growing purposes hahaha.




but ya it seems im rambling now. but yeah of course i could do ya a DIY for my cloners :) 2 are 69 units and one is a 70 unit in rubbermaid roughneck containers so they are pretty cheap to make too.


thanks for stopping by

Happy Pharming!

-Mystre.Pharmer

 

[Snafu]

nice to see someone else doing this, the stink bud idea is good but i like the ebb and flow much better then the aeroponics

 

[Crysmatic]

i'd never thought of the buick 3800 as a 1 gallon engine before :)

great write up. do you use any medium in those net pots? why wouldn't you just insert the neo plug directly into the post?