PhatNuggz
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I decided to make this thread since I see a lot of people over think hydro. A lot of times "adding more" or "going bigger" is a solution to hopes of achieving those big tree dreams. In reality , could everything they are doing be setting them further back?
Halfway thru my last run I was doing some cleaning and/or general maintenance around my air pumps (still same size that came with my UC Double barrel 16) when I accidentally knocked off the hose that connected to the air stones. Now , I've felt this air before and knew it was hot. That was why Last year I replaced my metal air Manifolds that came from current culture with white plastic ones from the grow store. The plastic didn't heat up like the metal ones. I also replaced all the airline with blue aquatic airline to keep heat away.
This time I really thought about this super hot air. What good could air that is hot enough to be uncomfortable on my skin be for my roots . Skin is a protective layer that has been weathered by dirt, oxygen, sunlight, etc. If this air could do that to my thick skin l, what would it do to gentle sensitive sterile roots that have lived in water their entire lives which are more like our veins or organs rather than our skin.
I unplugged the air pump and left it off the rest of the entire run. Plants still thrived and produced the most fire flowers I've ever been able to accomplish. I feel the quality increase is mostly due to my switching to 600s from 1000s however not having any air stones roaring didn't hinder my success.
After every harvest I always toss my baskets, grow rocks, and airstones and replace them with new ones. Since I switched to 600s and lost yield I decided to cut costs and reuse my baskets and grow rocks and simply wash them. As for the air stones, i tossed them and decided to not replace them. I went ahead and removed all the airlines, air manifolds, and put the pump away into storage.
I made an educated hypothesis that the hot air blowing into my root mass was not only physically damaging from the force of the bubbles but also from the temperature. I also guessed that the hot air that comes up thru the water on its way to the surface is also exchanging heat with the water its directly in contact with this heating the system and being counter productive to a water chiller.
We know air bubbles don't oxygenate water unlike what most of us believed when we first got into hydro . Water takes in air from its surface area. The bubbles simply break up the waters surface exposing more of it to the air allowing more oxygen to be absorbed. So a standing calm glass of water will still take in oxygen just fine, and if you stir the water up it'll increase the surface area and take in more. You don't need roaring bubbles.
I figured with the AL15 still going in the Epi center and the waterfall effect in the epicenter from recirculating, id have plenty of DO.
So I took a batch of clones from my ez cloner and threw them into the system with no airstones.
View attachment 657059
I did water thru the top for first 3 days which also had me thinking that I plan to turn the rerun pvc into a feed and recirculate each bucket individually the way the epi center does. I'll just put the pump into the epi center and suck from the epi center and push thru the small pvc feed line and create a waterfall effect in each site.
Here they are 5 days into veg
View attachment 657060
Lights went out and here's a size comparison for you. 15 inches tall after only 5 days in the UC with no air stones.
View attachment 657061
And here are the roots after 5 days. Healthy and white. Lots of those little finger side growth where the bubbles would normally damage or rip those off. However, as you'll be able to notice there is a film starting to form at the top of the water from lack of agitation .
View attachment 657062
I only use RO and A+B so the water doesn't smell and it's not hurting my roots. I plan to change the system out every week until I can modify it for next run to waterfall in every bucket.
Hopefully this can help people cut costs and grow bigger , healthier plants.
I'd be interested to see how it goes if you send me a message. I think you'll definitely want some kind of agitation in the water around the roots.
I would imagine they're probably stainless steel and so, as you mention, will gradually pickle. This also happens with platinum (if you put platinum in saline at a pH of about 1 and add an oxidisers, such as persulphate or peroxide, it'll start dissolving into solution - they use that trick to recycle catalytic converters without autoclaves or aqua regia). Whether or not it's a problem is another thing I guess. I suspect you may be able to saturate the water with oxygen using relatively short bursts. Could always use magnesium for the electodes
I've tried growing, temporarily, using H2O2 in solution, solely (no air pump). Peroxide has a relatively long persistence in water apparently, even at low concentrations; check this >link< where they measure the degradation. My hope was it'd help kill off any germs and also provide oxygen to the roots; it definitely does break down into free O2 when it contacts the roots as you can actually see it fizzing if you use higher concentrations. I didn't run this for long enough to know whether or not it'd work over a full grow. It did seem to keep the nutrient reasonably clean; I was running it in a clear container (exposed to light) but didn't have any algae growth in it initially.
Something I did notice, using Advanced Nutrients hard water veg, was that after adding just a few mL of peroxide every few days to 4-8L of water at ~1000ppm nutrient, I could see what appeared to be something flocking out of solution (opaque white fluff). At first I wondered if that might be the hard water additive chelating (ligand binding) minerals out of the water. But I already had some mixed up that had been sat in a bottle for weeks / months that was still perfectly transparent.
I strongly suspect what was happening was that the peroxide was actually oxidising something within the nutrient itself. Peroxide is a none specific oxidiser, so it'll oxidise anything around that can be oxidised; including organic material in the nutrient. The nutrient solution itself didn't appear to change at all in terms of ppm reading, but that could easily be because the things it's oxidising in solution aren't conductive to begin with (the ppm reading is essentially a conductivity reading right). The peroxide oxidises whatever it encounters first that it can most readily react with. One solution to that may be to add something to the tank to preferentially cause it's decomposition.
I've read many blog posts (re-posts of re-posts?) claiming H2O2 is really simple to use but I suspect I've observed something others haven't due to it being used in a transparent container to begin with (so I could actually see what was happening in the nutrient tank - the flock forming). I would be curious to know if something similar happens using the electrolysis idea, as oxygen radicals will temporarily form near the electrodes, which may then also react with the nutrient itself.
I would hope water still has plenty of oxygen in it without air stones! Lol
Thats why its H2(O)<---- other wise it would just be H2 and we would be basically living on the sun!
This is why methods of Hydroponics like the KRATKY method work.
Good job on proving the advertisement companies wrong!
I am going to point out an issue with the first post.
Air bubbles do in fact aerate the water, each air bubble at the part touching the water is exchanging some of their air with the water.
The primary air exchange happens at the surface, but the smaller the bubbles the more they give off on their way to the surface. Nano bubbles are the best way to oxygenate salt water tanks because of this. Nano bubbles can significantly raise the ORP of water and that's a product of more dissolved oxygen in the water, and it's entirely because of bubbles, not the the surface being broken.
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