Is this cool?

Buddy Hemphill · Dec 10, 2011

I need somebody to check my head.

I am a hydro noob. This switch is making me feel like a poo butt.

My question is about 'riding the ph'.

I have a top off rez. Should I have it with plain RO or the same solution thats circulating in the system? I would think nutes..

If this is correct?....ph should drop as the plants eat. If it goes up, I need to look for possible root zone issues?..... Generally speaking. Damn I really dont have a clue, do I?,,,lol

So do I adjust the ph in the top off rez to try to compensate for the swing? Bump ph up in the rez enough so that it raises the ph in the system as it drops?

If I am asking the wrong questions, please just explain how a top off rez is supposed to work in relation to ph swing and keeping ppm's correct.

I have never done a hydro build. If you see any problems in the pics please let me know.

If it wasnt for this forum I never would have even tried this. I feel like a kamikaze pilot though. I'm scared I am about crash and burn...but not TOO scared to try!

TIA UCfarmers

growgrow · Dec 10, 2011

I fill mine up w/ the next weeks nutes and PH'd a little bit under normal 5.5. My system was rising about .1 every day or so until i compensated w/ the topoff. Make sure you have a pump in your top off to keep it circulating and i even throw an airstone in there too.

Once you have this system dialed in, you'll be amazed at how fast these fuckers grow. If PH ever gets a lil high or low, dont be afraid to ph dose right into the EPI (of course dilute first) and TAKE NOTES so that you can refer back to later. Good luck man

GROW!

Shady · Dec 10, 2011

Buddy, your setup looks clean and ready to rock once you get the diffuser disk in the epicenter! Generally speaking pH should raise and PPM's should drop as the plants are eating more food than water; pH should drop and PPM's should raise as the plants are drinking more water than food; the sweet spot is when the PPM's stay relatively consistent or lower slightly as the water level lowers and your pH swings slightly upward. Once you are in the sweet spot, your nutrient mix in the top off res should be slightly stronger in PPM's and have a slightly lower pH than what is in the epicenter. I found that a pH between 5.9 to 6.2 in veg and a pH between 5.5 to 5.9 in bloom was golden... :cool

Buddy Hemphill · Dec 18, 2011

f f f f fail....

I had never used a cloner before a month or so ago. I was 2 days from putting some beautiful cuts from the cloner to the UC when I saw some brown on the roots. I freaked out a little and used a kill dosage of Oxidate so as not to transfer rot to the UC. I stunted my cuts and put them in the UC before they recovered, thinking they would perk right up....Next time its DS's rooting tech from the get go.

The first pic is one of the cuts I stuck in a water farm. You can see green (algae?) blooms. I was gonna use it to side by side with the UC for funzies. I put it in some soil after this pic with a nice fresh brewed tea to see if the tea will smoke that shit.

But......In the UC

temp 64
350 ppms Ionic
50ppms greenfuse root
1 ml gal Oxidate

then, chasing my tail...

1 ml gal Sensi cal/mag ( I didn't notice the snot until after the Sensi cal/mg, but I had no cal/mg in the water farm and it was effected also)

No good stuff happening... so I flushed with tap water and then added H2o2 29% at 3ml/gal and raised the water high enough to cover any roots.

2 days later it looks like I am FEEDING this snotty shit.

Buddy Hemphill · Dec 18, 2011

I didnt really ask a question did I?

anybody know what this shit is?

kuz · Dec 18, 2011

thats not cool, all the plants looking that bad?

The h2o2 wiped out all the competition.

could try a big dose of bleach, thats going to add stress to the sick plants. once you kill it, just takes a light dose to keep it gone.

The plants look a little young to be so bad off because of slime on the roots.

Buddy Hemphill · Dec 18, 2011

They have been in the UC a week.

I decided to punt.

They all looked that bad and are in the trash as of about an hour ago.

Buddy Hemphill · Dec 18, 2011

The beauty of this is that I just broke down a soil grow that did 1.85 a bulb.:sad0047:

I was thinking that I got that cat by the tail.......

until I stepped into hydro.

Dammit I feel like BoBo the Clown.:dull

woodsmaneh · Dec 18, 2011

Couple of comments

The box you built around the UC with pond liner is not long enough, if you have a bucket spring a leak there is no way you will be able to replace it. You have no wiggle room. I made the same mistake first time around.

Start using Dutch Master Zone for root issues. Danial from UC told me to use it.

Top Off Res, I just fill my top off with RO water and that is it. Been doing that for a year and works out well for me.

Feeding: I do add backs direct to the epicenter and every week add 1/2 the recommended Zone also to keep things clean. If there is no foam in the epicenter time to add Zone.

Just a note here, I have been using my 2 UC's for about a year now and have had great success in-spite of my screw-ups. (humidity issues) I have also done a few things that they don't recommend like not changing out my res during a grow. This has worked great for the last 3 grows. One of the other growers is doing the same thing , I think DesertSq is one.

Here is a guide line for Ph and PPM that I got from this site.

If your nutes are at 500ppm and two days later there at 350ppm you need to up your ppm! It works like this change res set ppm at say 600ppm ph 5.9 run for 24hrs, now if you ppm rise and ph drops nutes are to strong. If ppm drop and ph rises, nutes are to weak. But if your ppm and ph are basically stable then you have found the right mix for your plants.
Then when topping off your res use pre mixed nutes to keep it at that level, if it starts to rise or fall adjust top off nutes as needed to bring it back to proper level. This is how I set my system up and has worked great for me for years! Don't worry about the numbers just let the plant tell you what it needs and you will be fine.

reggiebaseball · Dec 18, 2011

I suggest you pull the plug right now if you care about weight at all.

Nobody around here pulls 1.85# per light, and the guy giving you advice has grown for 11+ years and yielded .3# (ZERO point three pounds) per light on his first UC grow.

Organic soil tastes better than hydro already. Unless you want a prolonged, low yielding "education" in finicky-ponics, put your UC on craigslist like the other 15 guys in your area.

Of course, don't expect this advice from anyone who is already too far down the same path to turn back.

I will now get flamed for 100 posts about what a douche I am, but let's re-visit this thread in 15 months and see whether you are matching your soil numbers or are just 8k and 1000 hours further down a bad path with the UC.

Buddy Hemphill · Dec 18, 2011

reggiebaseball said:
I suggest you pull the plug right now if you care about weight at all.

Nobody around here pulls 1.85# per light, and the guy giving you advice has grown for 11+ years and yielded .3# (ZERO point three pounds) per light on his first UC grow.

Organic soil tastes better than hydro already. Unless you want a prolonged, low yielding "education" in finicky-ponics, put your UC on craigslist like the other 15 guys in your area.

Of course, don't expect this advice from anyone who is already too far down the same path to turn back.

I will now get flamed for 100 posts about what a douche I am, but let's re-visit this thread in 15 months and see whether you are matching your soil numbers or are just 8k and 1000 hours further down a bad path with the UC.

See...if you wanted to help me you would have read that already have pulled the plug.

Do you have any UC grow advice , given thats the forum I am in, asking about UC....not your opinion on how weed tastes?

Could you post pics of your UC garden so that perhaps I may learn something?

You seem like your trolling.

altimood · Dec 18, 2011

I have friend's that run 5 gallon rdwc buckets with no chiller. DM zone. I'd be using a chiller but dm zone works good for keeping roots healthy. If you don't keep your water cool in those spray cloners, you can get the slime. Good luck bro- your set up looks clean. Wiggle room is nice but you could still replace a bucket with a sawzall, pvc and a soft coupler. There's always a way to fix something. GOOD LUCK!

kuz · Dec 18, 2011

Whats in the greenfuse product?

Are you still going to keep the one plant in dirt?

kuz · Dec 19, 2011

altimood said:
I have friend's that run 5 gallon rdwc buckets with no chiller. DM zone. I'd be using a chiller but dm zone works good for keeping roots healthy. If you don't keep your water cool in those spray cloners, you can get the slime. Good luck bro- your set up looks clean. Wiggle room is nice but you could still replace a bucket with a sawzall, pvc and a soft coupler. There's always a way to fix something. GOOD LUCK!

good point. I see Zone is leading the poll for most effective root health product.

Buddy Hemphill · Dec 19, 2011

kuz said:
Whats in the greenfuse product?

Are you still going to keep the one plant in dirt?

Its an Aussie product...I dunno..."natural extracts"

I put a couple in dirt. The myco's amd benne's seem to be killing the funk. I'm not gonna flip them....I just wanna see what they do.

Buddy Hemphill · Dec 19, 2011

kuz said:
good point. I see Zone is leading the poll for most effective root health product.

Th reason I went with Oxidate and h2o2 is because DS uses h2o2 and dropped zone. (weak...I know)

At this point I am just trying to copycat other farmers until I get the basics down. This is so far from my 'soil knowledge' its ridiculous.

I will be trying zone next round.

DS...why did you drop zone?

tia

kuz · Dec 19, 2011

Buddy Hemphill said:
Th reason I went with Oxidate and h2o2 is because DS uses h2o2 and dropped zone. (weak...I know)

At this point I am just trying to copycat other farmers until I get the basics down. This is so far from my 'soil knowledge' its ridiculous.

I will be trying zone next round.

DS...why did you drop zone?

tia

I hear ya, learn from other grows. Does ds use aero clones, and does he use h2o2 in the cloner? May be that h202 would prevent that stuff but not kill it once established? I dont see many problems with slime in ebb and flo, why i think some root in rockwool and veg ebb and flo, then blow em up in uc.

Zensai · Dec 19, 2011

I use tap water, h2o2, and clonex in my aerocloner and I have never had an issue and always root 100%. I run several UC systems, no use in flaming anyone that doesn't have experience with them. Because clearly everything different is worse then what you know.

Anyways on the UC side of things. I go from the Aerocloner to a UC, and I also go from Aeroclone to a Table. When going to the UC I make sure that my system has basically h2o2, H&G AB, CalMag, Zone, and Silica Blast. 350ppm is usually my target until the plants settle in. The biggest thing with UC is do not over complicate the nutes you add and keep the PPMs low until they start metabolizing, once that happens bump PPMs as needed like you would with any system.

Buddy Hemphill · Dec 19, 2011

Zensai said:
I use tap water, h2o2, and clonex in my aerocloner and I have never had an issue and always root 100%. I run several UC systems, no use in flaming anyone that doesn't have experience with them. Because clearly everything different is worse then what you know.

Anyways on the UC side of things. I go from the Aerocloner to a UC, and I also go from Aeroclone to a Table. When going to the UC I make sure that my system has basically h2o2, H&G AB, CalMag, Zone, and Silica Blast. 350ppm is usually my target until the plants settle in. The biggest thing with UC is do not over complicate the nutes you add and keep the PPMs low until they start metabolizing, once that happens bump PPMs as needed like you would with any system.

thanks Z, would you mind sharing what order you add nutes?

...And to what ppm you bring each to arrive at 350?

Why and how are you using zone and H2o2 together? I am not very knowledgable about sterile envionments...but I am trying to get it.

I wasn't flaming anybody with the weak comment...I meant me.

Sorry for the barage of questions. They say the dumbest question is the one I dont ask.

ttystikk · Dec 20, 2011

I think you're asking good questions, not bad ones. Shows you're paying attention to what's going on...

Personally, I didn't have good luck with H2O2, for several reasons; one, it killed what it came in contact with, but didn't reach deep into a rootmass to kill everything in there. Two, it's an 'ablative' kind of approach, it gets used up in proportion to the microbes it encounters, good or bad. Third, it kills the beneficial stuff too.

I went with DM Zone and I've been pretty happy with the results. First, I only add it at the beginning of a fresh batch of water. Second, I make sure my water temps are 62-64 degrees, this has made all the difference with me.

Lastly, I switched to Jacks Professional Hydroponic nutes due to cost and the ability to be certain about the nutes I was adding. It's ridiculously easy to weigh out the right amounts on a gram scale, mix it up and put it in. No concerns about what I might be missing...

Is this cool?

Is this cool?

Buddy Hemphill

Guest

Attachments

growgrow

Shady

Chillin' in the Shade...

Buddy Hemphill

Guest

Attachments

Buddy Hemphill

Guest

kuz

Buddy Hemphill

Guest

Buddy Hemphill

Guest

woodsmaneh

reggiebaseball

Buddy Hemphill

Guest

altimood

kuz

kuz

Buddy Hemphill

Guest

Buddy Hemphill

Guest

kuz

Zensai

Buddy Hemphill

Guest

ttystikk

Is this cool?

Is this cool?

Buddy Hemphill

Guest

Attachments

growgrow

Shady

Chillin' in the Shade...

Buddy Hemphill

Guest

Attachments

Buddy Hemphill

Guest

kuz

Buddy Hemphill

Guest

Buddy Hemphill

Guest

woodsmaneh

reggiebaseball

Buddy Hemphill

Guest

altimood

kuz

kuz

Buddy Hemphill

Guest

Buddy Hemphill

Guest

kuz

Zensai

Buddy Hemphill

Guest

ttystikk

Privacy & Transparency

Privacy & Transparency