primeform said:

Im not a hydro guy but from what i gather here are your solutions:
1> set chiller to 62 degrees as the root rot cant live below 67.
2> DM zone if you want to run sterile(meaning no benes or root excel)
3> hygrozyme to eat up the dead roots

Click to expand...

What moron recommended dm zone

primeform said:

What moron recommended dm zone

Click to expand...

why not recommend zone?

Before certain irresponsible posters cause more confusion, desertsquirrel, Zone is fine. No one ever said they had a problem with Zone. That's exactly what most would recommend after you've killed the problem and your bennies with something else. The post referred to something else.

Someone (the kind of person for whom the phrase "insufferable know it all" was phrased) thinks they're saying "I told you so," but only because they still don't get the point. Read back a few pages and I think you'll follow.

On a related note, I've been motivated to find the "ignore user" function and use it for the first time ever. Will it also block any further unwanted pm's?

Damn those roots like nice Getto. I think I am going to follow suit and use Zone my next run as well. I have been using aquashield and I have no problems right now, BUT, I did have a problem with some algae thanks to hygrozyme in the first few weeks of my grow. (Why this is still being recommended by "growers" in RDWC is mind boggling to me to say the least) Well anyway I flushed my system refilled it with fresh water and zone for a couple days with very low PPM like 250. The new root growth was explosive and white. I then drained it and added my base nutes and aquashield. Everything is looking OK but not as great as when I treated briefly with the Zone. In the back of my mind I was thinking that Zone was the way to go but after reading a few more threads I think I am going to try it next time. I didn't want to change in the middle of my current grow because I want to see the difference next time, kind of have a base to judge it on. Everything is looking good bro. I love to see successful RDWC grows my friend, it is a very elite club. I read something the other day that was the best analogy of RDWC that I have heard. RDWC is like a drag car, when it is running right it is balls to the wall, but the smallest mistake can have your car in the pits. Next time for me Ionic Grow, Zone in veg. Ionic Bloom, Big Bud, Overdive, Zone in flower. KISS FTW!

Peace- GC

was that zone you used some of the funky blue batch...?

lol at all of you seriously.

day 14 12/12

Im sticking with zone for now 1.5ml/gallon

fuck yea dude way to come back swingin'

Zone is a great cure but if it was me I would switch back to your zyme or aquashield to keep things in check and just bust out the zone in the event of more brownies. You could check with BudGoggles on the matter as he has alot of experience with both. Best of luck mang..

gettogro, congratulations, and thank you for the excellent thread.

i'm very sorry about all the drama.

quick question . . . what was your pH doing at the beginning of this?

I Just did the sums on the h2o2 for 50% grade you need 100:1 so the 29%grade is about 60:1, in your massive res you need 1.85 gallons of 29%peroxide every 4 days for pathogen control.

Well you can listen to me or not but it IS word!
First, you have white pails. Make them lightproof. You're BEGGING for root trouble.
Do NOT use Hygroslime. In fact, don't ever use ANYTHING organic in your HYDROPONIC RDWC systems. OR...use beneficials but to me...organic hydroponic is an oxymoron and a dead (strerile) res is the way to go ...for me.
YMMV but this has been working for me in the SAME systems for over 18 months now.. I have to swap bulbs WAY more often than swap anything in my RDWC systems. I use that black 1/8" dripline as my 24/7 topfeed and I have to replace that stuff a couple times a year....and I have an airstone in each tub that I replace every harvey but...
Sterile has been stable and trouble free for me for a LONG time now.

We all want dwc performance with non-rdwc reliability.
At least I do.

Some systems want to take a shit. Others do not.
Like planes in their designs.
The more maneuverable ones, because of the geometry they must necessarily display, are inherently unstable in flight. If you take your hands off the stick, they will veer out of control and crash.
Then we have the stable ones. If you take your hands off the stick, they will right themselves. They will porpoise their way slowly out of a dive, a turn, etc. Give them long enough with no control inputs, and they will end up flying straight and level.
But they trade performance for reliability.

So RDWC wants to take a shit. And Krusty. Why? Recirculation.
DTW is not known to be inherently failure-prone. Look at everybody's dtw coco runs. Look at hempy buckets. Standalone dwc tolerates higher res temps, and presumably lower DO levels, than rdwc. Why? Something to do with pathogens related to root exudates, I suspect.
Like a doorknob at a public place. All those germs. It will get get you sick. Foreign germs and all.
Unlike your doorknob at your place. Which does not get you sick.You have built up resistance to that funk.
Plants get sick, catch colds. From doorknobs.
Recirculating solutions recirculate exudate from roots.
Shit. Recirculating shit.
Pathogens working with exudate from plant A can victimize plant B because, well, plant B is being fed plant A's shit.

Swimming in shit. No wonder they get sick. No wonder the systems require all the bullshit they do. Chillers, Zone, h2o2, bleach, don't use this, can't use that.

No organics? Fuckever. Organics rock, they do so much cool shit.

So the solution is, as I mentioned previously, to dtw.

So you get yourself an EZ-Roots aeration frame. Or spend hours like a bitch drilling holes, then sanding or blowtorching them to smooth them out. Or some shit.
Fill your aeration frame with 76% hydroton, 24% coco.(joke)
Topdrip into it. Like all the peeps with slanted tables and smartpots. Get your 20% runoff every time you irrigate. Roots will want to grow out the bottom. They will eventually air-prune.

But wait. That 20% runoff. Where does it go again?
Down the drain.
But then I thought
If you cut a hole in the lid of a 27 gal tote, and put a drain as low as you could, you would have like 1-1.5" of water at the bottom of the tote(swc)
Then the roots could kick it in the shallow water layer too.

The water would not be that deep. So it would not necessarily have to be actively oxygenated. And the solution contained there would be turned over fairly rapidly, once every day or two.
Hempy buckets work, don't they?

So then I reflected back to this one system I built, with miniature netpots suspended in a lid over a 1" layer of water. But a recirc system.
They exploded, and were really happy with me, when I introduced airstones to the layer of water.

But airstones are vectors for airborne pathogens.
Unless one actually used a hepa filter for their snorkel. Seems simple in retrospect.
So then we can get air with little to no pathogen risk to the roots dangling in the water.
And those roots would follow DWC laws.
And not take a shit.

Let's say the DWC roots took a shit. Then what?
Who cares. Tear them off and keep topdripping into the chow bucket.
You don't need a bigass root mass to do trees. One can get 2+ from a couple stacked 5 gal buckets if done right.
So the dwc roots are extra, another avenue for feeding.
Because dwc performance, once seen, cannot be forgotten.

Then
After we topdripped into chow and fed those roots
And that drained into the shallow(or you could make it deeper) water layer, ran airstones, and fed those roots

Then the 20% runoff can go away.

So we never recirculate shit. I added a layer of earthworm castings on the chow, and a layer of coco on top of that. Home for bennies.
Bennies will in fact discourage pathogens if used correctly.
But like I said, those dwc roots are extra roots anyways, and nonessential.

And if your topdrip has rotted somehow, well...
Fuck who knows. I don't have that problem. Don't even know how to get it, topdripping periodically into chow. Just don't recirc.

Now, though dwc tolerates high temps with aplomb compared to rdwc, we would like to keep the solution at 68 or so I am guessing. For insurance. For shits and giggles.
So I will be constructing a box, in a very halfass fashion, out of reflectix. That contains the totes. A reflectix tile across the top of the totes, across the whole canopy. And encase the sides too.
Then take a duct booster, and pull some AC'ed air through some duct, and pump it into the aforementioned reflectix box. Lightly pressurized. Set that shit to a remote thermostat if you want that reads the temp somewhere in this box.
That way you have a higher margin of safety, with lower dwc/swc mini-res temps.
One could take advantage of concrete floors too.

So this way we will get dwc growth rates
And topdrip reliability
With less water consumption than
UC
MPB
Ebb & flow
Ebb & grow(that shit is so funny)
etc.

I figured I should do this first, and test it fully before making claims.
But maybe there is someone who could benefit from this.
I can run organics now
I can veg fast enough to make trees practical
I could yank and transplant into more coco if needed
I can do anything I want.
I can REPOSITION PLANTS.

I said
I CAN REPOSITION PLANTS.
Platforms, casters, flexible tubing for feed and drain.
What.

I feel like a dopegrowing superhero sometimes.
And you can too.

I love the aircraft analogy. Perfect!
I didnt read ALL of it because I kinda got lost at the part that says RDWC plants are sharing each others' poop and pathogens.
A RDWC system that contains clones is exactly the same as a standalone DWC. It's all one system and all the plants are one...genetically the same. They are succeptible and immune to the same things.
External pathogens arent introduced any more redily in a RDWC than a DWC.

For example, I have a res that is hooked to 3 plantsites. The plants and the solution they get are all identicle. The whole system, and even the plants are actually ONE thing. No one takes solution or waste from one RDWC system containing strain X and dumps it into strain Y's system.

I'll take moving water over stagnant ANY day and so will MY plants....ALL day!

DWC provides all the instability of RDWC but less of the performance. Kinda like an agile jet fighter with no thrust.
Disclaimer:
As far as I'm concerned and the way physics or horticulture work for my plants. YMMV I guess.

DTW.
Recirculating solution, coupled with the classic RDWC design, are the root of the problem.
Thus my proposal hinges on the DTW application.

I break down a kickass chow dtw formula based on cns-17 veg(3-1-2) with the necessary improvements over in the nute thread.
Salts ftw.

May be the wrong thread but how u like the 3-1-2 veg formula I've been using the hydro grow 3-2-4 instead of the 3-1-2. I had to add some calmag cuz I was having Ca deficiencies on a strain. I figured with such low K my heavy feeders wouldn't like it as much as the grow but I've been curious

Did not try the 3-2-4 for hydro.
Hydro implies recirculation.
Recirc requires, if I remember correctly, more P and Ca to balance against each other for pH management purposes.
Problem is the limits on P with bennies.
Capulator says he was told that 50 ppms P is the limit for toxicity for bennies.
JK said like 60 ppms I think.

So that is why I never went with 3-2-4.
My cns-17 duplicate formula works out to 83 ppms P2O5 I think.
So 36.188 ppms of P.
So a border of safety.
If I fed 3-2-4, then my bennies would die off at the ppms I feed at right now in veg.
And Cap would be sad.
So would my plants.
It would slow veg time.
I get paid to flower, not to veg.

What EC u rocking? My ppms of P stay around 40-50 with 3-2-4. I veg super fast with this, A1 and ACT with caps bennies

Don't know EC for sure. If my broke-ass $30 HM digital ppm meter is 500 scale, then I think I am like 3.4 lately. 1700 ppms or something right now. Whew. They wanted over 2000 ppms initally. Glad they chilled out.