r0m30’s first grow, HP Aero cabinet

This will be my first grow. My cabinet is documented here. I have 6 White Russian clones that I purchased in my HP Aero cloner acclimating.
Two clones are inserted into the netpots with all of the rockwool in place, I removed most of the rockwool from two of them and two are sitting in a shallow dish as backups as I wait for these girls to tell me what I’ve done wrong.

The plan**.

Here’s how I plan on approaching this grow.
Acclimation:
I have the clones in my cloner running on a cycle of 5 seconds on/ 3 minutes off. The cloner is filled with 2 quarts of RO water and 1 ml of SuperThrive.
Early Veg:
Once the root mass develops I will switch to 3 seconds on/ 3 minutes off and start introducing nutrients. I plan on starting at about 1/8 strength and working up from there. I’m still debating if I should start running DTW at this point or only run DTW in the buckets.
Flower:
I will take the two healthiest clones and transfer them to the flower chamber when they reach about 10”. I will be growing using the Scrog method. I plan on Femming the plants at 10 inches and then letting them fill about 25% of the screen before switching to 12/12 to induce flowering. I hope this will keep most of the stretch under the screen so these ladies don’t outgrow the cabinet. I will start the mist cycle at 1/10 second on / 3 minutes off and adjust from there according to the root dampness and development. I will be increasing the nutrient level about twice a week until I start to see some burn then I’ll dial it back and stay at that level until harvest with a flush of low PH water for the last two days.

Nutrients:
I’ve chosen Jack’s Hydroponic from J. R. Peters to feed the ladies. I’m using about 75% of the recommended maximum as “full strength” for my system. I’ll need to dial that in as I go along. I will be mixing the Jacks Hydro and the Calcium Nitrate into separate concentrated liquids to give me a ratio of 1 oz of concentrate per gallon of RO water. This will allow me to mix the nutrients for the reservoir using a graduated syringe instead of trying to measure out hundredths of a gram of dry nutrients. I hope this will make mixing the nutrients little easier.

Here is the elemental breakdown of my “full strength” blend.

I have no space for a mother plant so I’m still researching and trying to come up with a workable routine. At this point I may end up cloning off of the other clones once they reach a point where they can no longer stay in the cloner.


** No plan survives first contact with the enemy - Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

Congrats on getting your cab running. I'm jealous. My little WW clone is coming along, but it will still be awhile. I plan to have 2 pretty good sized bushes coming out of my rig. I'm interested in seeing your low profile cab in action. It reminds me of a scaled up PC rig, lol. I like your idea about waiting to see nute burn, and dialing back. Pretty much my plan too. Looking forward to your progress.

Whatever happened to hammer21 & his crazy build? Just goes to show that these things tend to drag out farther than expected. Not in your case though.

Woo Mike Lemme see your girls.!.

Mike Young said:

Congrats on getting your cab running. I'm jealous.

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Thanks, it was a long journey and now I start another.

Mike Young said:

My little WW clone is coming along, but it will still be awhile. I plan to have 2 pretty good sized bushes coming out of my rig. I'm interested in seeing your low profile cab in action. It reminds me of a scaled up PC rig, lol. I like your idea about waiting to see nute burn, and dialing back. Pretty much my plan too. Looking forward to your progress.

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It seems like the startup is hurry up and wait with a lot of waiting. I'm sure with your hi-tech humidity dome your girl will be all grown up before you know it.
A scaled up PC rig
Looking forward to seeing your progress as well.

Mike Young said:

Whatever happened to hammer21 & his crazy build? Just goes to show that these things tend to drag out farther than expected. Not in your case though.

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I don't know, wasn't he trying to sell some of his stuff a while ago?

I was looking back on this and I placed my first parts order on May 31 so it's been about two and a half months, a lot of that was dealing with freshwatersystems but I won't rant about them again.

Rawbudski, what's up man? Long time. Where the hell you been hiding? Lurking in the shadows, I assume.

r0m,l yeah, I think he was trying to sell a timer or some sort of enviroment controller. Didn't seem like he was trolling. Who knows. Only 2.5 months, huh? Doesn't seem like it's been that long. Not in comparison to my wait.

Yes, Lurking about Pouncing on the wanna-be trolls. I have been good, looking after my babies! Check them out in my sig.

Mike Young said:

Rawbudski, what's up man? Long time. Where the hell you been hiding? Lurking in the shadows, I assume.

r0m,l yeah, I think he was trying to sell a timer or some sort of enviroment controller. Didn't seem like he was trolling. Who knows. Only 2.5 months, huh? Doesn't seem like it's been that long. Not in comparison to my wait.

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Not to keep talking about hammer in your journal, but he is alive and well- just waiting for parts and not much to write about. He has sent me a couple pm's and he hasn't "dropped out" hehe... Sheesh, I've had a pretty bad set of obstacles myself- but I think I have everything I need now, and the home depot deck box is on sale here too, so I better jump on it.
Really love that you are finally to this point r0m- wishing the best of luck and will be watching intently.

Trichy Bastard said:

Not to keep talking about hammer in your journal, but he is alive and well- just waiting for parts and not much to write about. He has sent me a couple pm's and he hasn't "dropped out" hehe...

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Glad to here he's still with us. The wait for parts can be a killer.

Trichy Bastard said:

I've had a pretty bad set of obstacles myself- but I think I have everything I need now, and the home depot deck box is on sale here too, so I better jump on it.

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Onward! Must-Make-Mist

It's been a week and I haven't killed them yet


I'm running them at 3 seconds on/ 3 minutes off right now and the roots don't seem to wet, probably wetter than needed for HP Aero but with the small root masses I'm going for more is better. I have started to feed them at about 320 PPM.

As I said before I removed most of the rockwool from two of the clones and left it on two of them. So far it looks like leaving the rockwool was the better option. I'm just concerned that later it will cause issues with stem and/or root rot.
Here are some root pictures.

Most of the rockwool removed:


Rockwool left on.

Thanks, right now, I'm keeping a close eye on all of them

I have thought about the needed root mass to transfer from the cloner to the pods, but don't really know what is "enough". One difference from your setup is that my cloner is HPA and not a bubbler so they should be a little better acclimated. The misters are positioned differently. In the cloner I have the misters mounted on the side spraying towards the center and in the pods the misters are top mounted spraying down. I did this because when the plants are smaller their root mass is concentrated near the top of the bucket so a downward spray would probably go right past the smaller root mass.

Well I tried a little harder to kill them this week

Sometime between 7AM and 4PM the water level fell below the feed tube and they were without mist. I'm guessing 3-4 hours.

Here they are:


The tips on several leaves are brown and appear dead. I've replenished the nutrients and upped the misting time to 4sec/3Min. The ones in the rockwool fared better with the moisture retained by the rockwool keeping them at least a little moister. Hope they look better soon.

Here is a root picture



Starting to get some fish bones, hope that's a good sign.

I also started up the flower chamber with a bleach solution to sterilize the system in anticipation of moving these ladies in there soon but we will see how bad this setback turns out.....

On the subject of the flower chamber, I followed cavadges original design pretty faithfully, there is a grower on GC called Mechanibus who is also doing HP Aero in 5 gallon buckets and he has his misters mounted on the side of the bucket like I have in my cloner. In watching the flower buckets fire I see the mist being driven right into the bottom of the bucket and I thinking side mounting may give me better mist dispersal.

Any thoughts?

Fingers are crossed for them to pull through, they don't look so bad... I like the idea of side mounting, and plan to do it on my chamber as well. I think decision of nozzle placement sort of depends on the nozzle disperal angle, although you have quite a few in a small bucket, so it shouldn't make much difference to your setup in that respect. I would also assume, like you, that they will get better coverage, especially in the earlier stages that way. The rockwool should help smooth things out for your initial plant moisture, and I doubt will cause issues later in terms of damping off or whatever. You can hand water in the beginning if need be, and once you stop doing that I'd expect the rockwool to stay relatively dry. It's fun to watch your setup r0m...

Thanks TB, I got my fingers and toes crossed as well.

Ironically I went to Lowes today to get new lids to refit the buckets to spray from the side and they were out! Some days it just doesn't pay to get outta bed.

PetFlora said:

The one thing you don't want is soaked roots. That's the purpose/benefit of HPA. I am using 2 heads in a 14G pod.
<snip>
Sadly, I did lose one of 3 plants (see post #10).

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That's why I built my .05 second timer, trying to get the best results out of what I have.

Sorry to hear about you girl

The clones I left in the rockwool are still doing much better, after last weeks no mist incident the clones that had the rockwool removed are not doing well at all. To avoid another loss of mist I am now putting 3 quarts of nutrients in the cloner at each nutrient change change.

I hate it when I have to relearn something, this week it's the inverse square law. I know this both from back in the stone age when I went to school and from photography yet I still needed to learn it again. I finally replaced the battery in my light meter, it has a lux meter function that allows you to measure the luminance in LUX or FC. I fired it up and OMFG the clone light measures 20K LUX at the source but at the plants I was only getting 1900 LUX. Physics is a bitch. I filled all of the shelve adjustment holes when I painted the cabinet because they were drilled all the way through. Right now I have the cloner stacked on some boxes to get the colnes closer to the light. Now they are a few inches from the light and getting about 11500 LUX at the tops but still only 3600 LUX at the bottom. The roots seem to have responded, in the day since the move they have fuzzed up quite a bit.

Here are this weeks pictures:

I made some more changes to the flower pods, I can now remove the sprayers without opening the buckets (thanks Mech!) so with the pods as ready as they are going to be. I moved the two strongest clones to the flower chamber. I'm still running the lights 24/7 as these girls have a way to go before the are ready to flower. I've started the mist cycle at .25sec/2 min and will monitor the rest of the day to see how moist the roots stay.

Anyone know of a filter to get truer colors out of a picture under a grow light?
I'll have to see if I can find my gray card to set up a profile for the lights, or maybe seting up the custom white balance?
Here are the girls just before the move:

Well since I've moved the strongest clones to the flower chamber I'm going to do a test run on my cloner. I've made a few changes, I changed out the cloner light to use one of those brooder reflectors and 2 23W CFLs and hung that on a light yo-yo. I also re-plumbed the output from the pump so the priming bypass is more accessable and made a hole in the cloner lid so it looks like it belongs there.
I went and did a quick review of Rump's mini cloning guide at the end of his DIY cloner thread and went to work.
Here are the results:

Now we wait......

They look a little droopy now hope that's temporary.

I'm going to start with the cycles that Cavadge used on his cloner and adjust from there.

those roots look great man...good work

BD