1 year experience growing HPA

I started about a year go trying HPA (first time growing any plant) and made a lot of mistakes but luckily there are so many helpful people on the forum. @dstroy @Atomizer and stinkbud passed on incredible experience and knowledge onto me. If it were not for them, I would still be scratching my head. I also want to give back to this community like they have. I used an accumulator + bladder tank + tefen misters on a timer, I also return the waste water back to reservoir.

I really didn't know what to expect at the beginning, it's my first time growing and and this looked fun. You can see that I let these veg for way too long and I didn't do much pruning/defoliating. This is 3-4 weeks into flower.


End of flower


When I went to clean out the roots from the tote. I can see that they actually grew towards the misters and blocked them. At this point, it's not even HPA, it's just dripping water onto the roots. Dstroy told me that's because I let them veg for too long and I do agree with him. But fundamentally the problem is that they grow nice at the beginning when roots are small, but as the roots become bigger and thicker, only the very surface can get the misting and rest will be too dry and thirsty, hence the brown color.


Same setup but in a 5 gallon bucket. I let it veg for too long and this is the result.



Somethings that I learned from mistakes.
1. They grow fast, give .6 EC of nutes on day 5 of seed, or else they will have leaf issues.
2. Roots do not have insulator like soil/coco and needs to be kept cool, I wouldn't let the root temps go beyond 74F
3. Light leaks will cause algae growth, I use reflectix to keep out the light + the radiant heat to help with #2
4. keep the ph between 5.7-6.1, aim for 5.8
5. follow VPD chart.

I learned from my mistakes in the first grow and applied the fixes to the 2nd grow. I will post that soon.

The last buds picture, the branch on the top right, it’s internodal nugs are as big as my top top colas. Looks really good.

What have you got for ventilation? That room must get moist.

In the old room, I vent the hot air via carbon scrubber out through the drywall which helps to keep the heat/moisture down.

I also run a dehumidifier which will increase the heat but reduce moisture to 60%

I also have a central air, but if I were to do it again, minisplit AC will be the way to go.

On the 2nd grow, I transitioned completely to 5 gallon buckets. Vegging them for 1 month then flip to 12/12.


This is a clone that I put under the new design of misters pointing down (got the idea from Dstroy). As you can see, the top roots are white because it's getting enough water while the center are turning brown due to insufficient water.





These root pics are from mature plants (day 30 after flower). It still grows enough that it will engulf the misters



The root pics above are these Blue Dreams (day 30 from flower)


Now looking back, when the roots start to get in the way of the misters, the little droplets of water will concentrate in the area and trickle down, It ceases to be HPA and becomes something of a drip system without the coco medium and NFT at the bottom of the 5 gallon buckets. It can still grow but there are percentage of the roots that are dying of thirst. With this thought in mind, I decided to go with LPA in the 3rd grow that uses aquarium pumps (much more cost effective than the accumulator tanks + diaphram pump)

next up: harvest of the 2nd grow

Blue Dream before flipping


Harvest




Root pics (roots engulfing the misters, my worst nightmare)





I put 4 of these Blue dreams under 4 strips of samsung led that's 100w each (400w total) with a ppfd of around 500-600 and yielded a little more than 500g. 2'x4' area. They do yield a little more than the OGs that I had in the same run but they were definitely more fun and satisfying to trim.

up next: Tahoe OG harvest