Deep Water Culture tomato plant

I was bored one day and decided to make a Deep water culture rig out of stuff I have cluttering the garage.
I used: a plastic bucket, a 1.5L water bottle, 3 small rockwool cubes, 3 plastic clothes pegs, a plastic cup, a small fish pump with an air stone and some tape.

First I cut the bucket down to something like a quarter of it's height. I actually did that a while ago to use as a low laying drip tray- but I cut around it again to make it more straight to sit level on the ground. That left me with a big curled band of plastic which i wrapped around the 3 rockwool cubes to make an improvised bottomless pot. I tapped around that to hold it's cylinder shape. Then I got a plastic cup and cut it in half-ish so it would have no bottom too. I got the improvised rockwool pot and wedged it in the cup using another piece of bent scrap plastic and 3 clothes pegs. Real shoddy but should hold enough weight for me to have an experimental grow. The bottom half of the rig I cut a 1.5L bottle at the neck so before it tapers in to get maximum width for the opening. Because the bottle is likely to be top heavy and tip over I got the sawed-off bucket and cut a circle out of it so the bottle could slide in then taped that up. To finish it all off I made a mylar wrap around it and a bit of a collar around the top to block light getting in to the water since that will degrade nutrients and help algae.

After making the rig I was super keen to put it to use so I searched for a plant to put straight in it skipping the growing through the rockwool part and having roots ready to dangle in the aerated water. Out in the yard I had a struggling tomato seedling which I actually planted in to the dead stump of a palm tree in the shade- it's amazing it lived there for months but of course it never grew up and is looking very sick. None the less it was easy to crumble away the dead stump and pull the tomato out with a few good long strings of roots all ready to go. I pushed a hole all the way through the middle of the rockwool cubes and coaxed (and blew with my lungs) the roots through the hole and free to dangle down.

I'm really excited to see how it goes. Being a sick plant it should mean I see results within a week because sicker means dead and healthier means green.

It's going under a 600w HPS with my plants which i've just switched to 12 - 12. Not an ideal lighting regime to start out a youngster but i really just want to see if it lives or dies at this point.

I'm using Flair Form Green Dream 2 part veg nutrients at the seedling recommended dosage and also a bit of Pythoff too- I asked the hydro guy for H202 and he gave me that instead so its like a root health anti nasty's thing.

Please comment!!

PS. I've never tried DWC before only read about it and had a lot of interest.

Here are some pictures

Well it's made it past 24 hours now since I put the seedling in my rig and it hasn't died or shown any signs of deterioration. I'm not sure but the stem might even be less purple already.

First test is over. If the rig was all wrong i'm sure the plant would of died or sagged right down by now.
I wish someone would comment

Tomato stems/leaf bottoms will turn purple. Mine did as well, and I was told it's simply a genetic trait I believe. Its nothing to worry over. That being said....your going to need a MUCH bigger container to grow in. I was all but root bound in a 5 gallon tote with my tomato plant. It would suck it dry in 2 days no problem.

Yeah I know it's too small- i'm not actually trying to grow anything. Really I'll just get bored of it soon and chuck the tomato out and do something else. The thing is ever since I started learning how to grow plants I been really interested in just seeing a plant grow with it's roots fully submerged in water. I guess I just grew up thinking something like that was impossible. I was bored so I scrounged up stuff to make it happen.

I actually have something new to say about it the tomato already- it's growing! That wouldn't really be very amazing except for the fact that this seedling only spent a very short time in a good medium then spent months and months living on a dead palm tree stump in a shaded spot. It seriously didn't get any taller in up to maybe 4 months living in that spot- which was another experiment in how hardy the plant could be. Now after a time that could be measured in hours it has lost a lot of the purple stem and the tiny bump I had to look really close to see on transplant day is now a easily visible shoot. I know purple on really young tomato is common- but you have to understand this wasn't supposed to be a 'seedling' anymore, it was meant to be a full grow bush.
In a way it's like my experiment is already over because I know now how easy it is to make a DWC unit- although the scale I made it in isn't appropriate for many crops. I'll leave it going longer because obviously there are other ways it can fail but it's cool to see how immediately healthy a plant can be in DWC.

I could go to the effort of getting a picture today, but i'll just take one tomorrow when there is more to see anyway.