Big John's Trees

[Big John]

How y'all doin? I've been around various forums for years, but never posted a grow until now. They say there's no time like the present, so let's start logging!


Empty room?


That's better


The plants are in some fairly large turface filled ppks.


The top containers are half whiskey barrel liners, probably ~8-10 gallon capacity to the brim?


The reservoir, a 950GPH mag drive hooked up via a 3/4"FIP to 3/4"MH(garden hose thread) adapter to a gilmour full flow garden hose manifold. I used some FH(GHT) to MIP fittings then screwed in FIP-insert fittings to attach the 3/4" vinyl hose.

More coming soon.

 

[icdog]

Nice setup. It looks like 4 plants, what does your manifold split off to with the y fitting?
How big is your res?
Why 4 tailpieces?

 

[cyat]

looks cool

nice plants and build

 

[Big John]

Good question icdog

There's 6 light locations in the room, and 3.6K of ballast. It's 5 1ks in a diamond flip, and a 600 at the end (X are plants, Os are bulbs)

O X O x
X O X o
O X O x

The 4 1ks in the corners are on a flip after 6 hours, it looks something like this:

X O x
X O X o
O X x
flipped to
O X x
X O X o
X O x

The plan is to run perpetual. Only the 4 main plant locations are filled right now.

There's 4 tailpieces because the tubs look like this:

And I just kinda rolled with it and went symmetrical. 3 tailpieces might actually help them flood faster, they do drain quite quickly. The pump overcomes it, but I don't know how well it'll do once the other 2 sites are turned on.

 

[Big John]

Well damn, the extra spaces got deleted in those diagrams and I can't edit. It's supposed to be

_ X O x
X O X o
O X _ x
to
O X _ x
X O X o
_ X O x

The little xs are the unfilled plant sites.

Right now I have 4 blue dreams from clone in the room. I'm 7 days past the flip to flowering, and they're blowing up.



The BD stretches like crazy till week 4 or longer, I might have even vegged them too long, we'll see. These two are the amazons of the bunch.

#4, the monster:


#2, the perfect child

 

[Big John]

Then there's the other two.

#1, the runt


This one was a bit stunted when I got the clones. She is growing well now, but never quite caught up. I'm getting a bit of downward curl on the leaf edges on all the plants, but this one most of all. I'm thinking perhaps it's related to heat or VPD, but advice is welcome.



and #6

The middle plant, I think she'll do just fine.

Temps are ranging between 70 and peaking at 90 about an hour after lights on. RH from 60 lights off to 40% at the lowest point with lights on. The room is actively exhausted with a 10" can max and a 10x39 phat filter. None of the plants are reaching for the 1000 in the middle as much as I'd like, I think perhaps the heat is too much.

 

[DamnUglyDogE]

Front row with a big ass smile... DAMN !!! NICE....

Edit-

Inspirational to say the very least...

The amount of detail you put into the design is worthy of a award.
Dig the screen on the roof... Ready and forward looking...

Just every thing down to even the room its self and the vaulted roof.. GOLDEN man...

I want a barn. Horses can stay in the rain...

Blue dream is going to be an amazing strain in those pots...
This will be one of the top shows this year, I can feel it in my bones... lol

Talk about the next level....

You hid this HOW LONG... Not right man... Damn... Not right ...

Thanks for sharing this and taking the time to lay it out in such a great format...

EPIC....

 

[Big John]

looks cool

nice plants and build

Thanks man!

Front row with a big ass smile... DAMN !!! NICE....

Hell yeah dude!

 

[DamnUglyDogE]

half whiskey barrel liners.. Golden...


Whiskey River - Willie Nelson, LIVE (1974)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiVunqkZ1RM

 

[Mister_D]

Cool setup, i'll grab a seat next to AD

Get those temps under control asap though. You should be aiming to keep temps within 10 degs night and day (i.e 75-85 deg F)

 

[Kit Kat]

Yesss, another tree PPK. The more y'all post these the more tempted I am.

 

[Big John]

Cool setup, i'll grab a seat next to AD

Get those temps under control asap though. You should be aiming to keep temps within 10 degs night and day (i.e 75-85 deg F)

You're right man, your right. It's my #1 priority.

I think my first step will be to increase the passive intake. I'm gonna tackle that project tonight. See where that puts me.

If it comes down to it I can also put in a bigger fan, possibly a 12" or 14" can max. I could also dial down the lights somewhat, put the middle 1k and/or the 600 on a 6 hour timer so they only come on middle of the day(lights on at night).

I still probably won't achieve an ideal environment, it's a passive intake/active exhaust, and it can get pretty hot in the summer here.

 

[Bmac1]

Very nice setup. Looking forward to how these trees turn out.

 

[icdog]

I'm wondering if the manifold makes this setup work. At the moment I have 8 rectangular plant containers which are about the same volume as yours hooked to a 1200 gph mag drive feeding a 3/4 line with 4 crosses at 2 sites to feed them. I can barely get it to flood all the containers even after I added valves on each outlet which aren't in the pic.
I don't get it. Might be my res size but the containers seem to drain real quick, 3 tailpieces.

Any suggestions?

 

[Big John]

I'm wondering if the manifold makes this setup work. At the moment I have 8 rectangular plant containers which are about the same volume as yours hooked to a 1200 gph mag drive feeding a 3/4 line with 4 crosses at 2 sites to feed them. I can barely get it to flood all the containers even after I added valves on each outlet which aren't in the pic.
I don't get it. Might be my res size but the containers seem to drain real quick, 3 tailpieces.

View Image

Any suggestions?

Well I'm no master of fluid dynamics but as far as I can tell there's a few main factors. The GPH of your pump, how well your plumbing flows(return lines, feed lines, manifold etc), and how fast your containers drain.

D9 recommends 250GPH per site and he's using 5 gallons of turface with 3 tailpieces. He says it takes about 30 seconds to flood.

Mines at about 212.5 GPH, 6-7 gallons of screened turface(32% air porosity) and 4 tailpieces per site. It takes about a minute to flood all 4 containers.

I have about 15 gallons of water in the reservoir, it's bigger than that but not full. After 90 seconds of running the pump begins to suck air, then it will only pump as fast as the drains return water to the pump chamber. The 3/4" drains are daisy chained and do flow slightly faster than the water will drain out of the turface filled containers, so it still will continue to raise the level in the medium containers, just very slowly.

When I get the other two sites going I'll see if that 90 second window is enough for all 6. If not I'm considering three options, none of them mutually exclusive. A bigger reservoir, an additional overflow reservoir plumbed with 2" PVC and uniseals, and/or a bigger pump, probably a 1500gph or 1800gph just to get the flood time down. The Cap art-dne recycle timer I'm using takes a dive in sensitivity after a minute on time and becomes very hard to adjust, just a small twitch can take it from 1 minute to over 2, with this timer it would be ideal to be under 1 minute for the flood for adjustability as roots grow and fill more of medium.

In any case I will upgrade the reservoir and pump when I build out veg ppks, and switch the setup I got going now to the veg chamber.

I don't know if some sort of manifold would help you out or not. It really depends on whether or not your current feed line setup is bottlenecking your pump. How long does it take to flood right now? It also depends on what you mean by barely able to flood it, you only really want the water level barely rising above the top of the medium anyhow. I like to adjust the flood so that a mound of turface in the center around the stem always stays dry. If the stem stays too wet it can rot, stem rot will kill a massive plant in no time, ask the outdoor guys.

The garden hose manifold is working well so far, you could easily expand it up to 10 sites by using the two way splitters. I was thinking of adding another splitter into the mix so I could screw on a garden hose and easily drain the system for maintenance. But the key part will be how well it holds up over time.

 

[Tonygreen]

Hi Big John, can you share more info on your room? How did you build it all? How many square feet ya got in there mate?

Just wow glad to be tagged up for the show!

 

[Big John]

Hi Big John, can you share more info on your room? How did you build it all? How many square feet ya got in there mate?

Just wow glad to be tagged up for the show!

What's up Tony? Good to have ya!

The flower room is around 9x13, give or take. 45 mil EPMD pond liner on the floors to catch any leaks or flooding. It's just panda plastic on the walls, maybe next time I can swap it out for some of that fancy orca stuff, but it's still pretty dang bright in there! Let's see, what else, 14" flexible ducting for exhaust, 2x12" hard ducted passive intakes. Got a staging area right outside the panda film/velcro door, that's where the 44gal brute bulk res and the pump reservoir sit, as well as a ghetto work table (mdf on stacked buckets, what can't you do with those damn things?)

How'd I build it? A little know how, a few tools, and 5 gallon bucket full of curse words

 

[Big John]

Front row with a big ass smile... DAMN !!! NICE....

Edit-

Inspirational to say the very least...

The amount of detail you put into the design is worthy of a award.
Dig the screen on the roof... Ready and forward looking...

Just every thing down to even the room its self and the vaulted roof.. GOLDEN man...

I want a barn. Horses can stay in the rain...

Blue dream is going to be an amazing strain in those pots...
This will be one of the top shows this year, I can feel it in my bones... lol

Talk about the next level....

You hid this HOW LONG... Not right man... Damn... Not right ...

Thanks for sharing this and taking the time to lay it out in such a great format...

EPIC....

Haha, thanks man. Don't get your hopes up too high now, I ain't no master grower. It's taken some time to get here, third go at trees, 2nd in ppks, but I tore it all out rethought everything this time around. I used to run vert donuts with stacked 600s in pods, nowhere near as badass as your kiddie pools though. Every run I find things to improve upon, and if there ever comes a day where I don't, well, we can just go ahead and cross that bridge when we get to it.

Love me some good ol' willie
http://youtu.be/aFkcAH-m9W0

And the shallow depth half whiskey barrel liners are great! Sturdy as hell. Only thing is you have to find a spacer since the bottoms aren't flat. You can see where I used rigid styrofoam insulation, but I don't know how it'll hold up long term. I got something better up my sleeve, I'll slip that out when I get the veg room ppks up and running.

It was DHF who told me about the chicken wire on the ceilings Krusty had. The BD definitely needs support, or she'll be snapping branches like fireworks on the fourth of July. As far as the barn goes, if any plant could fill one it'll be the dream! Big John's Barn, has a nice ring to it

Speaking of improvements, I should probably figure out some kind of cage setup for the next round of plants, seems to be all the rage with the fellas busting out axes and shoutin "TIMBER!" when they go to harvest.

 

[lazy gardener]

dont know what the hell is up with them funky ass grow pots but shit do you have it going on! your sq foot makes a mafucker drool. tagged up. how long and big are you planning on vegging? a month? I use welded 6x6 concrete wire for my cages around the lights. can usually swipe pcs here and there from new construction job sites

 

[Big John]

dont know what the hell is up with them funky ass grow pots but shit do you have it going on! your sq foot makes a mafucker drool. tagged up. how long and big are you planning on vegging? a month? I use welded 6x6 concrete wire for my cages around the lights. can usually swipe pcs here and there from new construction job sites

Flipped the switch a week before taking those photos. These blue dreams should stretch 2-3 times easy. They were vegged 6 weeks from clone, didn't really take off until I put them in the flood and drain ppks.