Anyone a bubbleponics pro?

I just started my first grow after many months of research, shopping, and construction. Although I have done a lot of research I still feel I don't have enough detailed info. I have read much of Roseman's guide, all of Nebula Haze's material on growweedeasy.com over and over, and have decided to do main lining as described by Nugbuckets. I just want to know if I'm doing this all correctly or if I should change something before I hit a brick wall.

To let you know where I am, I have build a grow room 6'hx4'wx3'd with panda film and pvc, grow lamp with cfls and reflector (2700k and 6500), a 5gal bubble bucket with a water pump and air pump, and a net pot bucket lid with Rockwool and hydroton.

I placed the seeds straight into the RW ran water over them for 6 hours then watered the RW to keep it damp over 5 days. Today was day 6 and I have 1" sprouts. So I changed my res, ph'ed my filtered well water, and added 1/4 the recommended nutes (1.5mls in 3.75gal of ph'ed water) for General Hydroponics orange, green, and purple nutes. Within 6 hours my spirits are standing tall and much greener.

What do you think? I'm trying to grow on a budget so please keep that in mind. I just bought a Ph meter and a ppm meter today which will be here in a week. I'll see if I can post some pictures of my progress so far (they uploaded out of order but you get the idea). Thanks much.

Don't let your seedling get damp off from the base of its stem being wet.

I put three seeds in that RW. I did that because I don't know which will be female. I'm not really clear on how long it takes from seedling to sexing. Did I make a mistake by putting 3 seeds? Should I uproot 2? Should I just wait for sexing then separate?

Well CaptnTrips i'll give you my take on your situation. It looks like you have put a lot of effort into this, but to be perfectly honest starting out as a cherry fresh newbie with a full on active hydro setup is usually a recipe for disaster. I started out this way as well and wish I would have discovered growing Hempy style or coco first before I moved to active hydro. I ended up with every newbie problem known to mankind. So I started with active hydro (exciting!) and all these years later i'm using passive hydro (Boring!) in fabric pots using Canna coco as a medium. After my complete switch to DTW coco I found that I spend about 1/10th the time maintaining my grow with the exact same results. Go figure!

Anyways I am fully experienced with BP/DWC so I can offer some advice on your grow.

Temperatures! - High res temps are the real killer in BP. The pump in the res and heat from the light are going to be your biggest enemy. Once the res temps get past 71 shit gets pretty gnarly. Water will become cloudy and start to smell like a fish pond. I tried to keep mine at 65 or below and still sometimes had slime problems. Do anything you can to keep the res temps low.

Multiple mixed sex plants in one bucket. - I still have no idea why people encourage this. Once the plants get big enough to flower the roots have completely filled the bucket. If one or two out of three happen to be males then you have to try and remove their roots from the res or else they will rot. This usually ends up with you in the bathtub trying desperately to separate the male roots from the female and ends up with you getting about 75% of them. The other 25% slowly rots in your res making a delicious environment for pythium. The only time there should be multiple plants in a single res is if the res is big enough for easy root separation. I grew single 3-4 foot tall plants in 5 gallon DWC. I would have to add at least a gallon every DAY when they were in full flower. If there were multiples in there I imagine the draw would be difficult to sustain.

Drip line placement - I see in the photo that you have the drip line damn near on top of the RW cube. This really isn't ideal and can lead to the problems snaps mentioned. You need to take your drip line and butt it up to the side of the cube about halfway down. You also just want a slight trickle. Looking at the size of your seedlings I imagine the tap roots have either exited or are about to exit the cube from the bottom anyways.

Feeding - Your new sprouts in no way need any nutrients right now. In fact if it were me I would dump out the res and refill it with plain pH water. I read all those guides on growing in DWC and BP and all those dudes recommend feeding 1/4 strength as soon as the first tiny ass leaves appear. It's just not needed. The cotyledons (seed leaf) on the seedlings have enough food storage to provide the plant with for at least 2 weeks. I'll start feeding with they begin to shrivel and would generally stay on 1/4 strength nutrients until the plants big enough to take more.

Sorry for the long winded post, but I just wanted to share my thoughts on all of this stuff. Feel free to ask any questions. Good luck!

^^^ what he said.

I'm typing on a phone so I just don't have the patience to spill that much knowledge on you. I'm glad Bucees covered the bases for you.

Just read, read, read. It's all been done before so learn from others mistakes.

Carrying forward with Bucees' sound 411...

Replace the water pump with a high volume outboard air pump (~35 lpm)+ quality air stones, or...

Get a 5G bucket + large bucket size net pot (fits over top perfectly, < $5) and buy something like a 6" Hydro Halo Drip Ring

Small water pump < 200 gph should not warm ~ 3-4g of water too much

Replace hydroton with polished ornamental rock (Dollar Store)

RW is problematic, especially for young seedlings. When I used them, I had the small cubes and even cut them in half

The wide HH Rings will draw the roots laterally toward them- a good thing

To avoid root rot, I would put this on a timer

Look close to see HH Drip Ring is inside large net pot bucket lid

Pump is 160 gph. Buy womens' nylon sockets from Wally World to cover inlet

Thanks for the input snaps and bucees. I know that it is heavy undertaking to go hydro, but due to a recent lack of employment I have all the time in the world. So I do still want to continue on with the dwc but I am an open book on how to proceed.

Last night I decided to make two more buckets and section the RW into one plant per bucket. I decided that I have the room in the tent for plenty more. What do you think?

I checked the plants this morning and the one that didn't pop up right away is super green and standing tall. The other 2 have grown noticeably. I'm going to start putting a frozen bottle of water in the res every 6 hours through the day and once before bed to keep the res cool. I'm going to put a fan in to the tent as well.

The parts I'm very unclear on is timing. How long does it take from seed to harvest? I know it depends on strain but like an average. How long for veg, when does sexing happen, what is the overall invested time, life cyclic time, and yield for a single main-lined plant?I really appreciate the help.

I know I'm new but please be patient with me.

Last night I decided to make two more buckets and section the RW into one plant per bucket. I decided that I have the room in the tent for plenty more. What do you think?

Click to expand...

I think that having separate buckets will save you a lot of trouble.

The parts I'm very unclear on is timing. How long does it take from seed to harvest? I know it depends on strain but like an average. How long for veg, when does sexing happen, what is the overall invested time, life cyclic time, and yield for a single main-lined plant?I really appreciate the help.

Click to expand...

Well you are right it is strain dependent, but i'll give you my basic routine times when I ran DWC. I would generally pop a single feminized seed and veg her to maturity and then take clones. This usually took about a month and a half give or take a week. After my clones were rooted I would put them in 5 gallon DWC and veg them for at least a month or until I reached my 24 inch cut off zone. Which ever came first. Usually in the summer I could veg out a bit faster due to normal temperatures. In the winter it's about 10 degrees cooler in my basement so things grew a bit slower.

After I reach the desired size I would flip to 12/12 and begin flowering. Always mark this day on a calendar! My current strain is always finished by day 62, so that's another 2 months or baby sitting and chasing potential problems.

Before I started keeping mothers and cloning I usually had a 4 month from germination to finish time. I would usually veg them out a bit bigger though. Sometimes vegging for up to 8 weeks.

Yield is completely strain dependent. Of course the bigger the plant the bigger the yield is going to be, but genetics plays a major factor. I have had heavy indica genetics yield twice the amount of product in half the time of a Sativa. It's just the way it works. You will never know what the yield will be before you actually grow the strain out. Even if you buy seeds you may end up with a oddball phenotype that doesn't yield worth a shit. Every time you germinate a seed it's a roll of the dice. This is why I do the mother/clone system. If I happen across a super nice strain thats potent and a nice yielder I try to keep it's genetics alive for as long as I can.

I know I'm new but please be patient with me.

Click to expand...

We all were at one time. I learned a lot from the site over the years and now I try to give a little back. Like the other suggested though, read read read and read some more. There isn't a problem you can have that someone else hasn't already had and posted about! Cheers.

On my way to the store to get 2 more buckets. I will post pictures when all is completo. Thanks for the tips.

So I figured I'd drop a quick update on my accomplishments for the day. My little soldiers are growing like weeds! they are now about 2" tall and we now have leaves. Nice and green standing tall and straight for now.

I separated the RW into three sections and one of the pants had a 2" tap root hanging out the bottom. I started my new bucket system. Transferred the plants and restarted all res to plain filtered ph'ed water, no nutes. 3 buckets, one water pump will pump water to all three pots and two air pumps will supply the air. I'm linking the buckets together with a grommet and pvc. Also turned that fan on for some early circulation until I can buy a small one to install. Got tired though. Please let me know what you think. Thanks!


Here's to going green!

Those buckets are not light proof which will fuck you up. You can wrap them in 3 layers of reflectix from home depot and that will fix it and also insulate your buckets so hopefully only one ice bottle per day. Home Depot also sells black bucket lids that are light proof. I used to use 1L bottles.... anything smaller sucks. You need the right bulk heads and containers or the undercurrent plumbing will leak all over the fuckin place and you risk a connection failing and a 50 gallon flood. Most people use square buckets like tidy cat kitty litter buckets or something and unseals or spintight bulkheads or some other aquarium bulkhead. Personally I skipped that shit and bought a 4x4 100 gallon res and run up to 12 plants in 2" neoprene collars... basically like a giant tote. All the benefits of undercurrent without any of the drawbacks like flooding, water flow through the system, roots clogging pipes, and busting your ass installing those god awful uniseals.

You need to run bennies also to prevent slime I like aquashield and pondzyme. So.... light proof buckets and bennies are my 2 cents. For what it's worth I'm an amateur and started with dwc.... now we have misc house plants in coco hempys, head stash moms in ebb n flo, and a little dwc cloner/seedling propegator made from a coleman cooler.... all DIY. I have never done a soil grow and I don't have a green thumb.

The biggest things are to stay on top of ph (critical) and root condition (bennies, temps, dissolved O, lightproof). Also feed lightly.

And I like starting beans in rapid routers because I think they hold oxygen better and in my opinion the rooting gel in the rapid rooter works well.

Isn't aquashield for cloning? Also I did plan on putting film on the bucket lids. Thanks fir the tip

So I was thinking about putting a small speaker in my groom and playing some classical music. Thoughts?

I heard plants liked heavy metal...

Spanky84 said:

I heard plants liked heavy metal...

Click to expand...

I heard that too.

CaptnTrips said:

So I was thinking about putting a small speaker in my groom and playing some classical music. Thoughts?

Click to expand...

I have been playing classic rock in the shop so it covers up the sound of all my fans running. I think the plants like it too. Rock on.....

Help please!? I'm having an issue. I changed my set up considerably since my last post. I sectioned my plants into 3 pieces of rockwool. Placed each plant into a net pot and placed those net pots into a big tote tub lid 2 in the top corners and one in bottom middle. Set the tub up just like a bubble bucket filled with 20gal of water and light tighted the lid. Looks great perfect size for my light (four 13w 6500k cfls, one 60some watt 6500k cfl, and 4 23w 2700k cfls distibuted evenly). Ok so, when I ph my water, the next day, the water is cloudy and gross looking. Im sure its not good. Ill explain exactly how I ph the tub. I put my nutes in (1/5 the directions) then dip out a gallon of water put in a third of the ph down stir and add half back to the res and stir, wait 15 minutes add the rest stir and repeat until ph is correct. Close up shop for the night go to bed and in the morning it's cloudy and ph has gone back up. My little sprouts are still green as ever and should be getting a new set of sprout leaves soon. What do you think?

I think you ignored my bennies warning but that's cool. And no aquashield is not for cloning it is pathogen control.

Hydroburn said:

I think you ignored my bennies warning but that's cool. And no aquashield is not for cloning it is pathogen control.

Click to expand...

I didnt. I apologize. Had some issues and have been focusing on basics. Water got cloudy because of water, pump wasn't strong enough, res was far too large for what I'm doing so, I rebooted my buckets. Got rid of the water pump, I'm using R/O water now, got my ph meter and ppm meter today, and I'm ordering aquashield as per your instruction. How much do I use, and how often. Do I use h202 3 percent as well in conjunction with aquashield? If so how much?