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.
(reposted from the RDWC brown root problems???? thread)
