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I am more prepared for super fuckin dense plants this time around, I upgraded to an 8" exhaust fan, and am using the old 4" as an intake. That should help with airflow and keeping the humidity down while in flower, its in an air conditioned living room that is usually between 40-45% RH.
Im not sure how I got root rot last time as I have a water chiller and air stones, but im prepared to run h2o2 at the first sight of problems. The only thing I can think is maybe some shit from the tap, because im using tap water not RO. That's the last major upgrade id like to make to this system but I haven't been impressed with any of the under-the-sink RO systems i've been researching.
Also I learned that in a closed RDWC system, running different genetics at the same time isnt a great idea as the plants will have slightly different nutrient needs, so this time all 4 are the same strain.
Insulated my buckets and piping to help conserve a little energy on the chiller, and also keep the buckets from sweating/condensating as much.
I also have a setup going to/from my kitchen sink with a long hose so doing water flushes will be a lot easier. I had to use 5 gallon buckets last grow which was a huge pain in the ass and I only flushed the water every 2 weeks, so this time ill be flushing every week and maybe that will keep the water cleaner overall and prevent the root rot issue I had before.
Also the 4 plants last time were autoflowers that got a lot bigger than I expected, so this time im growing photos and these genetics supposedly produce tight, small plants. And I can flip them earlier if I want. This will keep the plant size down, and hopefully further combat overly dense plants creating humidity buildup that I can't properly control and prevent mold. With the airflow upgrades I made I don't know if this is totally necessary but I would like to get one good clean grow with absolutely no problems in before I start trying to dial things up
had brown algae in my water chiller from sitting out and not cleaning properly. Sterilized with a LOT of physan20 while the plants were out of the system. A couple of flushes flushed the last of that gunk out of there, and I kept flushing and shop vaccing the chiller inlet and outlet to make sure.
Got the plants in there, gave each of the plants a short soak in a bowl of ph'd dechlorinated water with a lot of southern ag gff, and also nutes and voodoo juice
They went through a growth spurt over 2-3 days but now they started looking droopy
The water level is like a quarter inch below the net pots bottom, and they don't have roots poking out the bottom yet (they're coming out the sides) so I think theyre underwatered.
Watered with a cup of water from the resevoir to see if theyll perk up.
BROWN ALGAE
Holy crap what a pain in the ass this shit was. So I moved apartments before this grow, and had my water chiller sitting for a year or so and I never drained it so I guess the water sitting in there just bred a super gross ecosystem of doom. So when I assembled the system I ran a very light bleach concentration through it for a week or so but I didn't know about the brown algae I was just doing that as part of my normal process. So Im guessing that bleach concentration was way too low for the colony I had (check the pics). So I noticed a giant fuzzy doughnut growing on the inlet and outlet of my res that goes to the water chiller. Suspicious. That cant be good. So after a lot of stunted growth and very limited root growth I figured yeah this probably isnt good. I drained and cleaned it and it was disgusting. You can't really clean the inside lines of the water chiller so you just have to run some kind of cleaner in the water you pump through it. I filled the system up with 20 gallons of water and poured an entire gallon jug of 35% H2O2 in that bitch and ran it for a few days and just top watered the plants with a cup. Then I drained and refilled it up to the netpots and let it go for a few days and the fucking fuzzy donut came back. And also when I went to drain it I noticed a giant fuckin amber colored booger growing on the water outlet into one of the plant's buckets. what the fuck. So fuck it ill try physan20. Ran a super super super diluted amount in the system and it absolutely fuckin fried whatever little roots were there. shitttt. and on top of the the donut was growing unabated. fuckkkkkkkkkkk. So time to go nuclear. I took the plants out of the system, took everything apart, scrubbed the fuck out of it with like 50%bleach 50% water. Then I filled just the res up with like 5 gallons of water, poured an entire gallon of bleach into it, and ran that through the water chiller for a few hours. Then i drained it, stuck my shop vac up to the inlet of the water chiller, and it sucked a LOT of shit out of the chiller. The shopvac bucket was SWIMMING with chunks of random gooey fluffy fuzzy random colored shit. Absolutely disgusting. I filled the res up with 5 gallons of water, ran it through the water chiller for like an hour, and then drained and shopvacced the inlet and outlet again. I repeated that like 6 or 7 times till absolutely nothing but clear water was coming out of the chiller. Then I filled it with 5 gallons of water, another whole gallon of bleach, and ran it for a full day.
Then I drained it (again everything coming out clear) and filled again, and this time dumped a bucket of vinegar in and ran that through the water chiller for a day (figuring it would remove any leftover bleach residue inside the chiller, and also some mineral deposits maybe??? good preventative maintenance anyway lol. Drained it, filled it with plain water, ran it for a bit, drained and refilled with plain water, ran it, then I started filling the whole system with water, letting it run for a couple hours, then draining (just trying to get any leftover bleach or vinegar residue OUT so the plants can go back in).
I put the plants in and monitored nervously for weeks. (oh yeah this all started around week 2-3 and lasted until week 8) and they slowly but surely started to recover. At first I didn't see any real growth and I was top watering with a cup of resevoir water once a day. but after like 2 weeks they started sprouting roots out the side and I was like phew hopefully this nightmare is over. One thing im worried about is any brown algae that might've started growing on the leca rocks/pebbles that I wasnt able to wash in bleach water. Hopefully when I ran the Physan20(and it killed the roots of the plant) it also either killed all the brown algae or knocked it down enough that the Southern Agriculture Garden Friendly Fungicide (which is Hydroguard but like literally 10000 times more concentrated) would outcompete and kill the rest.
i am updating the rest of the diary but its now week 14 so its been like a month and a half since the nuclear sterilization and i havent seen any kind of weird growth anywhere, and just extremely healthy plants. So I think this system is clean.
lawdy dont store your water chiller with water in it.
Sorry I put you guys in dirty water contaminated with brown algae. Thanks for recovering
One of them is kind of stunted and smaller than the rest, but it has prolific enough roots finally that im going to flip them to flower this weekend.
joshehutch
