Mini rDWC

[Zer0Ry0k0]

This is a lil something I threw together with spare parts and a couple purchased items. I had intended on taking some before, during and after pics, but I forgot.

The project is unfinished right this moment, but I am planning on stopping by the hardware store when I'm in town tomorrow. I was trying to find a 1/2" 4-way barb, but they don't seem to make them?
The original plan was to arrange them in a X, having the middle plant site extended, looking like a cross, and hanging a fluorescent light in the middle of the plant triangle. Being forced to use two T barbs attached makes the design a tad sloppy, but it shouldn't matter.

It took about 2 hours to do this for me with a simple sketch and loose plan on how to get it done. I'm sure if I had practice and was being timed, I could do it in about 30 minutes.

4x plastic jars (mine are 7" tall and slightly more than 2" diameter)
4x 1/2" ebb & flow fittings
1' of 1/2" tube
1x 1/2" 4-way barb (or 2x 1/2" T barbs)
1x small/micro water pump with 1/4" outlet
1x 4-port air pump (I want a quiet one, any suggestions?)
3-5' of 1/4" tube (I will get a better measurement tomorrow)
4x air stones (I used the cylindrical shaped ones, anything under 4" length should be fine)
2x 1/4" T barbs
6x 1/4" elbows
3x 2" net pots
drill
some bit
another bit
1 1/4" hole saw? again, all of this info will be updated tomorrow night.
razor blade for cleanup of holes

Once I get some decent roots on a couple of my clones I will put three in this and see what happens. I may end up using this to grow some greens for me to eat if there is a root clogging problem.
I also could use 3/4" for the return plumbing, but I was short 1 e&f fitting.

I haven't decided if I am going to put the elbows on the ends of the feed lines to shoot the water down or let it spray into the net pot... the plan is to use the barb.

I'm interested to see how much water this can hold staying 1-2" below the net pots. I would like to get a separate res to keep it filled, but I don't know how to make a float valve that small. Any links to mini-float valve DIY threads would be muchly appreciated.
edit: I need to get some float switches and I think I found a float valve that is 2-3"length

 

[Zer0Ry0k0]

I finished the system mostly, filled it up, found it holds about 2200 ml 1" below netpot and has a leak on the two white e&f fittings. I should have used pipe threading on them the first time but I hoped it wouldn't leak.

I need to get a small flat air stone for the controller, the cylinder is not fully submerged.

Why is there no X barb? wouldn't other people want a 4-way barb once in a while also?

Criticism welcome.

The bubbles on low pop and tiny droplets touch the whole bottom of the netpot.
When the bubbles are on high it gets slightly frothy.

 

[mudvaynefan]

Hey whats up buddy. Everything is looking cool. I was staring at my gold fish the other day, he is in a small tank, that has one airstone in it.

The contatier is so small, the bubbles look frothy like you said, and I was thinking, hmmm, how would roots do in a small contaner, but with TONS of oxy. You are gonna answer that question with your rig.

I like the setup. As I was looking over the pics, a question popped up. With out res, a mag pump to circulate the water, what does connecting the buckets together do?

I would like to know, does the water pressure hold the water in the buckets, or is the water actually moving around bewtween the 4 buckets you have. Ill be watching.

Good Job.

 

[ArcticBlast]

cool idea, i'll tag along

ArcticBlast

 

[KosmoKramer]

One problem I see is going to be controlling pH. Such a small res is going to have your pH swinging all over the place. No volume in your res means hardly any buffers from your nute solution, which is what helps keeping the pH steady.

Cool little micro system. Good luck with it.

 

[slowandeasy]

Kramer hit the the nail on the head! Your pH will not stay stable in that small of a set up....period! Roots would take up the whole container in a few weeks anyhow. Nice work, but it is too small! The only way you could make that possibly work would be to have a much larger Rez, but even then it would only work for a few weeks and the roots would get too large. The smaller the container, the faster things will go wrong. pH spotting will happen, in a matter of hours. Good luck, you need bigger containers to be sucessful.

 

[Classyathome]

A+++

Swap in one large rez - 10 gallon - and hook it into the circle. Your ph/nutes prob goes away...

Nice - great thought and effort...

 

[Zer0Ry0k0]

I am trying to figure out a decent way to connect a res, either with a float valve (gravity feed), micro switch and pump (turn the box it's sitting on into a res) or simply having a wide container next to it connected through the return lines.

I do recognize there will be root growth problems. I am planning on either
1) running moms in it, cutting back both top and bottom growth often.
2) using it as a veg station before going into the large rDWC system.
3) growing random leafy greens for me to eat.

Whatever happens I will be using it for something. The buckets are being fed from the black one, there is a mini pump inside it. it feeds through the top 1/4" feed lines and flows back to the controller through the 1/2" bottom return lines. There isn't much pressure of any kind... I was just annoyed that it was leaking.

You mentioned your aquarium, you should check out aquaponics. I want to do stuff like that later for food production.

Thank you for mentioning the pH swings that I will be dealing with. So far the pH is stable but there are no roots in the water, just droplets from the netpot/hydroton/rockwool going into the water. I wanted this to be a test run and houseplant system at the same time. The system is living in my bathroom right now so I don't have do hear the air pump all day. The plants are looking great so far, I was worried the rockwool being wet the whole time was going to be a problem, but we shall see.

I was not planning on flowering anything in this, but I will give it a shot and see how bad it gets.

 

[slowandeasy]

No pH problems YET, is the key word. Trust me, once they start eating it will swing. Lockout happens quick like, so keep on top of things. Good work, just too small IMO

 

[Bill Murray]

Good luck with working out the kinks on this!
I'm very interested, I'll definitely be watching closely.

 

[waltwalt]

Nice small system, you should see if your local hydro-shop would be interested in purchasing one off you. My local store displays mini-systems like this all the time to show the lay-person how the big systems work.

-ww

 

[Balazar]

Very interesting. I am looking into doing a mini rDWC to use as an intermediate stage between the cloner and the larger veg rDWC. I was thinking about 1 gallon black plastic paint cans for the containers. Your res should hold 3 quarts for every 1 square foot of canopy space. So if you plan on having 2 square feet of canopy space you will need a res that holds 1.5 gallons. This is a rule of thumb that BigToke has contributed here.

 

[DevilWeed]

That's a really cool little system! Definitely worth a shot and fun to play with. With the volume being so small, you could even dump the solution every day or two just to keep things fresh...might help if pH gets wacky.

Good work man, looking forward to progress pics.

 

[Marijuanasaur]

if you added a master Res container then you could add any degree of nutrient stability you wanted. This project is really cool, and like MudVaynefan, I too am curious what would happen in a small container with lots of oxygen touching the roots.

 

[Thaniel]

thats sooo cute!

 

[NEARTHEBEACHBOY]

Thats one of the coolest little setups ive seen in a while.props man,hope it works out for ya.

 

[IamNug]

lookin good, I've run a similar system in the past using folgers coffee containers.. down sides were they drank the water way too fast. And once they got heavy basically the nets both popped through the container. Also once they would drink all the water and there was no weight left, then they really love to tip over from being super top heavy.

I switched to 3.5 gal buckets and have a 32 gallon system volume, three big plants are drinking 5 gallons of fresh water every three days. Id recommend trying to combine a control bucket with float valve, connected to a very large reservoir into your micro system. You will find later it's almost mandatory.

Keep up the great work! this system will make a perfect veg to transfer station like you mentioned! Thanks for sharing!

 

[Balazar]

IamNug makes some good points about dealing with the physics of a small scale system.

Dealing with the plants becoming top heavy and falling through the bucket or completely over and breaking themselves is also an issue even in large scale systems. I think a scrog is one of the easiest ways to fix this. I have seen bucket steaks but the most interesting method I've seen is individual bucket supports made out of wire mesh with 4" squares. The mesh was cut into rectangles that were 3ft x diameter of the inside of the bucket lids lip. They tied the ends together to make a cylinder that fit perfectly in the lip of the bucket lid and it seem to work pretty good.

 

[slowandeasy]

Obviously this system did not work, just like I said. The thread starter has not posted in a long time. Nice idea, but too small...things go wrong much faster in smaller set ups