Bubbleponics - Sour Apple Auto

Hey folks, I'm finally back at it again. It took me a while for a couple of reasons: 1) I usually only grow in the winter. 2) I completely revamped my grow room after the issues I ran into with the last setup. 3) It took me a while to brainstorm exactly what I wanted to do. I bought these seeds from D.C. Seeds and was very pleased with the experience. I'm very happy to give business to a fellow American and Veteran. I've only ever purchased seeds from the UK in the past and that experience has been "dodgy" to say the least (not the vendors fault, but the transit). I've only ever grown photo's, but chose to go with all auto's moving forward. After calculating the intensity of my current light, with it being on a 20/4 rotation I'm very close to hitting 40 moles per day, at least directly under the light. It doesn't quite cover my 2' x 5' trellis. I'll eventually upgrade my light, but auto's should get me the best bang for my buck with this light. Also, I spent a pretty penny building this new grow room. The other obvious reason for growing auto's is their shorter seed to harvest time. I've got a small grow area, and never plan on expanding. Theoretically, auto's will allow me to produce the most out of my room. A few things about my grow room: 1) I lined the whole closet with 1/2" plywood and put that piece of ply the air intake/outtake/power as the divider between each side of the closet 2) The grow room itself has ply on all wall surfaces so I could mount stuff to it and paint it 3) The other side of the closet is my storage/prep/power distribution/etc. area. Maybe I'll take a pic one of these days 4) My last grow my carbon filter/fan was venting into the other side of the closet. This created a headache for a number of reasons. I tapped a 4" hole through the floor and am now venting into my crawl space below the house. 5) I moved to bubbleponics to speed up my grows even more. I will be removing the drip system once the roots hit the water in the res. 6) The larger res. will hopefully make my life much easier. Late in the last grow I could only fit 3 gallons of water in the bucket and that sucker was pounding down at least a gallon a day. That required too much micro-managing for me (both ph and refills). 7) I no longer have a fixed trellis with chicken wire. The trellis is held in place by dowels that I can pull out by hand. The short sides of the trellis have hinges on the bottom, so I can fold it and pull it out easy-mode. Lastly, I'll be using string for the trellis so come harvest all I have to do is cut the string instead of dealing with trying not to destroy buds pulling them through chicken wire (it takes forever). 8) I built a light diffuser on the other side of the air intake 9) My res. is on a motorcycle lift I'm using a drill to move up and down I have now started using Jack's as my primary nutes. They tell you the full break-down of each macro and micro nute, giving me more control and understanding. I think House & Garden is a good product, but when stuff goes bad it's more difficult to troubleshoot when you have no idea what each piece of their full lineup contains. I'm assuming it's kind of a proprietary type thing, which I understand, but knowledge is power. I am still using their Drip Clean (while the bubbler is going) and Roots Excelurator Silver, both excellent products. I'm still using Hydroguard, and will FOREVER. I'm a true believer now of why Hydroguard is necessary for any hydro application, IMO. I also purchased water soluble fulvic acid, but have decided not to use it for this grow....or at least while the bubbler is going (I'll elaborate below). Ok...now that all that is out of the way.... I really wanted to use my well water instead of R/O to make my life easier. Soooo....I filled up my res., and put two seeds in the system immediately. Nothing happened after 1 1/2 weeks. I finally opened up the cubes and saw that the beans had popped, but it looked like maybe I drowned them, or they ddin't grow straight up or something. For round two, I didn't change the water out, and decided to soak the beans for 24 hours in R/O water first. I had the exact same problem. I'm still not really sure what happend, but I suspect it was the well water. My PPMs were sitting at ~500 with the well water, which was probably too spicy for the beans just starting. Also, my well water is questionable (even though it's at 165ppm), but I won't elaborate further....it's a long ass story and I've spent an absurd amount of money on it. Lastly, I did put the Fulvic acid in, and it was very messy. I really want to avoid having to clean my res. Once the roots get big it will be a real pain in the ass to clean. I'm leaning towards not using the Fulvic acid this grow just to see how things go. I had 10 beans total of the Sour Apple and have already ruined 4. So here's hoping third times the charm. So, I went back to my tried and true method: 0) R/O water for everything. Ditching the well water idea. 1) Soak beans in R/O water for 24 hours 2) Paper towel method between plates on a heating mat 3) Once the roots pop, I place them pointed down in the hole of the rockwool cube 4) Hand water once a day by dipping the cube in the pre-mix of 1/4 strength Jack's and everything else I've listed above. This put my PPMs at 300...a way more reasonable value for starts. It's been exactly 7 days since I followed the above. It's probably hard to see but the cotyledons came up, and multiple roots have come out the bottom of the cubes....way faster than I've ever seen since I started growing. That means even though I'm doing my old process this already shaved at least a week off of when I'd normally put it in my bucket in the past.