Hey All, 
EDIT: Wanted to make sure this warning was up front.... Nutrients do NOT drip through lava-rock well at all! Only use Lavarock in Ebb&Flow setups where they're soaked by flooding. The nutes essentially puddled and then ran down the sides of the bucket, leaving huge areas, empty of roots, in the middle of the buckets. NO real root mass to speak of. Second run using hydroton is almost as heavy as the first harvest with 20+ days to go.
Edit10/10/09) Just found out a month or so ago that using ANY of my tap water is baaaaaad. Slime factor is extremely high. All hydroton and lava rock for the first 2 runs in this cab were rinsed thoroughly with my tap water. Current run in CLEAN hydroton under 1K HPS is showing MASSIVE improvement over same cuts in tapwater washed hydroton. I'm happy and sad about this. Happy to see that I've been right all along and the 'results' have been because of unknown forces and sad because I'll be ending up with barely enough meds to last me till next harvest again. GAH! (The clean hydroton C-99 is REALLY juicy and even she had a 'bit' of tap water run through her hydroton. Just not nearly as much as the others.)
So, the pathetic looking buds at the end of this grow log are due to crappy root growth in bad medium. The lights still kick ass as they were able to still produce what they did, despite the setbacks. Nice.
Finished the first run of my new 220w PL-L cab and it seems a lot of you want to look at how it was set up so here it is. I use only the Lucas method, FloraNova Bloom and RO water to grow with and maintained that throughout this entire grow.
I do not use additives and I do not have deficiencies, as you'll see.
First off, if you're not aware yet, the PL-L lamps are 55w CFL lamps that run from a remote ballast. I use Fulham workhorse ballasts as they're efficient, cool running and totally silent. (They also run just about any Fluoro type lamp out there) More info on those in the links of my sig.
Here's a shot of a Fulham 8 and 2 of the 4 lamps I used.
(3 were 3000K and one was 6500K. No growth differences were detectable but there were too many variables this grow anyway.)
The system is total Mickey Mouse in it's construction (Good thing I have a P.H.D. in that.) so the yield suffered quite a bit. The good news is that the lamps proved they're salt and I'm even more enthusiastic about pimping them everywhere.
First off the cab is quite large for what little lighting I have and I didn't have much in the way of materials to up the reflectivity this first run. Here's a shot loaded with 6 Cinderella-99 clones. This mum came from femmed seed of a C-99 cut that was floating around a few years ago. It was the only survivor and so I've kept her.
You can see the two Home-DeCannabis buckets that I cut down a bit. They're full of lava-rock, as you can see, with drain holes in the bottom.
The buckets are zip-tied to a wooden frame that sits on top of an Ice-Chest for a reservoir.
The pump in the res runs the nutes up the tube and through the homemade PVC manifold I made, which splits the flow to both buckets, and then through the same blue tubing made into a loop in each bucket and crimped off on the end. I then punched holes in the tubing on the bottom side every half inch for water to drip through.
This created a ring/drip style system. (Which totally sucked through lava-rock.... but we'll get to that)
Here's the manifold....
So, between the freshly planted clones picture and day 14 of 12/12 I have no pics. The time sucked and there was a move involved. Short story is that the plants had to be whacked back, leaving a lot more bud-sites than I had anticipated or desired. Still, here they are at day 14 of 12/12
EDIT: Wanted to make sure this warning was up front.... Nutrients do NOT drip through lava-rock well at all! Only use Lavarock in Ebb&Flow setups where they're soaked by flooding. The nutes essentially puddled and then ran down the sides of the bucket, leaving huge areas, empty of roots, in the middle of the buckets. NO real root mass to speak of. Second run using hydroton is almost as heavy as the first harvest with 20+ days to go.
Edit
10/10/09) Just found out a month or so ago that using ANY of my tap water is baaaaaad. Slime factor is extremely high. All hydroton and lava rock for the first 2 runs in this cab were rinsed thoroughly with my tap water. Current run in CLEAN hydroton under 1K HPS is showing MASSIVE improvement over same cuts in tapwater washed hydroton. I'm happy and sad about this. Happy to see that I've been right all along and the 'results' have been because of unknown forces and sad because I'll be ending up with barely enough meds to last me till next harvest again. GAH! (The clean hydroton C-99 is REALLY juicy and even she had a 'bit' of tap water run through her hydroton. Just not nearly as much as the others.)So, the pathetic looking buds at the end of this grow log are due to crappy root growth in bad medium. The lights still kick ass as they were able to still produce what they did, despite the setbacks. Nice.
Finished the first run of my new 220w PL-L cab and it seems a lot of you want to look at how it was set up so here it is. I use only the Lucas method, FloraNova Bloom and RO water to grow with and maintained that throughout this entire grow.
I do not use additives and I do not have deficiencies, as you'll see.
First off, if you're not aware yet, the PL-L lamps are 55w CFL lamps that run from a remote ballast. I use Fulham workhorse ballasts as they're efficient, cool running and totally silent. (They also run just about any Fluoro type lamp out there) More info on those in the links of my sig.
Here's a shot of a Fulham 8 and 2 of the 4 lamps I used.
(3 were 3000K and one was 6500K. No growth differences were detectable but there were too many variables this grow anyway.)
The system is total Mickey Mouse in it's construction (Good thing I have a P.H.D. in that.) so the yield suffered quite a bit. The good news is that the lamps proved they're salt and I'm even more enthusiastic about pimping them everywhere.
First off the cab is quite large for what little lighting I have and I didn't have much in the way of materials to up the reflectivity this first run. Here's a shot loaded with 6 Cinderella-99 clones. This mum came from femmed seed of a C-99 cut that was floating around a few years ago. It was the only survivor and so I've kept her.
You can see the two Home-DeCannabis buckets that I cut down a bit. They're full of lava-rock, as you can see, with drain holes in the bottom.
The buckets are zip-tied to a wooden frame that sits on top of an Ice-Chest for a reservoir.
The pump in the res runs the nutes up the tube and through the homemade PVC manifold I made, which splits the flow to both buckets, and then through the same blue tubing made into a loop in each bucket and crimped off on the end. I then punched holes in the tubing on the bottom side every half inch for water to drip through.
This created a ring/drip style system. (Which totally sucked through lava-rock.... but we'll get to that)
Here's the manifold....
So, between the freshly planted clones picture and day 14 of 12/12 I have no pics. The time sucked and there was a move involved. Short story is that the plants had to be whacked back, leaving a lot more bud-sites than I had anticipated or desired. Still, here they are at day 14 of 12/12
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Other than that I don't know. 
THIS run will last me till the next harvest. (Cross-fingers)
