Thoughts on using florakleen and a pressure cooker to reuse hydroton/perlite

You don't need to use a pressure cooker to sterilize your medium.

To clean/sterilize my hydroton. I boil 3-4 gallons of RO water on top of the stove. I place my hydroton (about 2 gallons total volume) into a 5 gallon bucket, which I pore the boiling water into and place a lid on the bucket and let sit for many hours, some times 24 hours. The boiling water will sterilize the hydroton and help to redissolve any salt build up on the hydroton. No chemicals needed, NO bleach needed.

WHIPEDMEAT said:

phosphoric-acid, overnight usually, i don t remember exact dosage 85% the highest you can buy, and the ghe powder form ph down is also very good
bleach for disinfect, and the acid bath for adjust its Ph,without this Ph fluctaute a lot and wider spectrum disinfection if using both.. maybe too much, but better twice than none

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Maybe I don't get something.

Disinfection and pH level are OK, but what about roots? I mean, this is the main issue when you want to re-use clay pebbles. Or at least this happen to me. I can't take old roots away and I can't re-use the medium with pieces of old roots, being a clean hydro setup.

So I would use a bath in a pure acid to decompose roots.

Being almost pure acid, a previous or subsequent disinfection should be useless. Pretty nothing can survive an acid bath.

The point is...when you talk about using acid how many liters of it for how many pebbles?
But...are we maybe talking about two different things?

Ganoderma said:

You don't need to use a pressure cooker to sterilize your medium.

To clean/sterilize my hydroton. I boil 3-4 gallons of RO water on top of the stove. I place my hydroton (about 2 gallons total volume) into a 5 gallon bucket, which I pore the boiling water into and place a lid on the bucket and let sit for many hours, some times 24 hours. The boiling water will sterilize the hydroton and help to redissolve any salt build up on the hydroton. No chemicals needed, NO bleach needed.

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Sterilize and disinfection, technically are two different things. You can't sterilize anything with boiling water (at atm pressure) but you're doing a good disinfection.
For example...few bacteria populations will die with boiling water. A big biofilm would not, need more time at high temp. or higher temp.





And for the crazy side of this thread...what about frying the hydroton in some kind of oil, carbonizing organic stuff (roots), sterilizing it with high Tº at the same time, and then wash it with soap?

i try to write it step by step..

- pots with roots --> take them out shake it until you have only the stem in hand onto a foil, you have the LECA and some root mass, let it dry and with supressed air you can blow remaining roots out from it.

- now put all the hydrotons into a bucket or barrel anything, or just bathtube if nothing else you have to do the rinse and soak procedure

- there are other chemicals beside bleach like h2o2, isopropylalcohol depends on you what you like to use. after this, rinse it and let evaporate few hrs or overnight

- than the acid bath is set around Ph3-4 to soak it. i didn t measure it only the Ph value of the bath. it must be kept under 4 Ph, and you can let it soak for a while the longer the better, plus use an airstone to aerate it.

- build back your system fill it up with it, and run a few days before you plant anything into it with Ph 5.5 water on 0.4 Ec nutes

I use a rotating drum made of fine steel mesh. Dry the hydroton, throw it into the drum and rotate. The cascading, tumbing action cleans every ball and crushes any root debris into dust which falls through the mesh. Only take a couple of minutes. It works like a ballmill, except the milling media is the hydroton and the stuff being ground is the root debris. For smaller scale, you can use a steel fine mesh wastepaper basket for the drum.

noreason said:

Sterilize and disinfection, technically are two different things. You can't sterilize anything with boiling water (at atm pressure) but you're doing a good disinfection.
For example...few bacteria populations will die with boiling water. A big biofilm would not, need more time at high temp. or higher temp.

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Have you ever heard of a man by the name of Louis Pasteur?

He is the person who the process of Pasteurization was named after/for. He is best known to the general public for his invention of the technique of treating milk and wine to stop bacterial contamination, a process now called pasteurization.

The medium doesn't need to be 100% sterilized when growing plants, it's not like you are trying to cultivate mushrooms cultures or even bacterial cultures, where contamination of the medium/culture results in the contaminate over running the medium/culture.

There are other ways to sterilize then using pressure sterilization. One typical bulk sterilization process of mediums, uses stream to sterilize _____. The temp is brought up above 120 degrees (140-160), and held there for X amount of hours (total minutes) depending on the total volume (and density of material) that is being sterilized.

Ganoderma said:

Have you ever heard of a man by the name of Louis Pasteur?

He is the person who the process of Pasteurization was named after/for. He is best known to the general public for his invention of the technique of treating milk and wine to stop bacterial contamination, a process now called pasteurization.

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Dude, please read again:

Sterilize and disinfection, technically are two different things. You can't sterilize anything with boiling water (at atm pressure) but you're doing a good disinfection.

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You know milk have an expiration date right? You maybe also know you can buy milk pasteurizated 5 times? Know why, don't you?

Ganoderma said:

The medium doesn't need to be 100% sterilized when growing plants, it's not like you are trying to cultivate mushrooms cultures or even bacterial cultures, where contamination of the medium/culture results in the contaminate over running the medium/culture.

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Cannabis grow in pure manure too. However sterilyze and disinfect still are technically two different things.

No need to be aggressive btw, sorry if I bothered you

Sorry been offline a few days thanks for all the ideas everybody. I'm gonna review this thread again when I actually have some dirty hydroton/perlite mix to clean later this year and try out the various methods described here. I should be able to find this thread even if it gets buried by going into my control panel and finding the threads I started.

The best way may very well be a combo of all the ideas listed here I'll try them all out and see what works best. I got plenty of ph down so can try that and soak it in 5.5ph solution afterwards im running hempy buckets so dont have a system i can use to flush it with. Used to run drip systems but cleaning it and keeping it from clogging was a pita and I found that hempys work better anyways. I can try everything for cleaning the medium which I stress won't be pure hydroton but a 50/50 mix with perlite. If all else fails and I feel stuff really needs to be sterilized then I always have my pressure cooker to fall back on. People that use that method say it forces the tiny roots out of the pores too and it ends up caked on top where it can be easily scooped up.

Won't be online much the next 4-5 months I just ran out of smoke and am gonna be totally dry for a long time. Being online seeing pics of people's fat buds makes me cry when I'm out. Damn broad mites I would've had at least 2-3oz and been working on another flowering cycle but the lil bastards destroyed me. Thanks again for all the help there's a lot of useful info here. Ive got to go take a good long walk in the dry desert of sobriety now but ill be back in the fall. I might be speaking in tongues, have a Gandalf beard and waving snakes around but I will be back lol. Take it easy everybody and good luck to all your grows.

There is IME no reason to do all that work, to clean hydroton or perlite. I have reused both media's on both small and large scale, only reason I see to sterilize your media.
Would be running a sterile res.

For hydroton I float it in a large tub, flushing/washing any leftover nutes out with tab water. Remove what I can of root mas, there will be small floaters left. Then I would reuse it, after a pH adjustment, unless I have had issues with fungi in prev grow. In that case, I would soak it in a h2o2 solution before reuse.

For perlite right after harvet, I would tip my perlite buckets out on a large tarp. Remove the rootball and shake it a little, but I would trash the main rootball. Then rake the perlite with a plastic leaf rake, to get the majority of loose roots. Flush with tab water, pH adjust and reuse.

I wouldn't worry about minor amounts of left over roots, natural occurring microbes will take care of that. And not bother your plants at all, you can also induce beneficial bacteria to your res. To speed things up, look at Koi/aquarium shops. They are often cheaper then the growshops, and I have seen several growshops in europe store BB cultures wrong.

Palindrome said:

There is IME no reason to do all that work, to clean hydroton or perlite. I have reused both media's on both small and large scale, only reason I see to sterilize your media.
Would be running a sterile res.

For hydroton I float it in a large tub, flushing/washing any leftover nutes out with tab water. Remove what I can of root mas, there will be small floaters left. Then I would reuse it, after a pH adjustment, unless I have had issues with fungi in prev grow. In that case, I would soak it in a h2o2 solution before reuse.

For perlite right after harvet, I would tip my perlite buckets out on a large tarp. Remove the rootball and shake it a little, but I would trash the main rootball. Then rake the perlite with a plastic leaf rake, to get the majority of loose roots. Flush with tab water, pH adjust and reuse.

I wouldn't worry about minor amounts of left over roots, natural occurring microbes will take care of that. And not bother your plants at all, you can also induce beneficial bacteria to your res. To speed things up, look at Koi/aquarium shops. They are often cheaper then the growshops, and I have seen several growshops in europe store BB cultures wrong.

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Great info brother I imagine most cleanings would only need to be like that and I'd only have to sterilize after it's gone through at least a few runs or if I had a infection. With hempy buckets there is no external res to maintain so don't got to worry about that. I figure cannazyme would eat up any small leftover roots most the time so will stick with it or a equivalent product. Thanks for the advice now back to my lonely desert

Palindrome said:

There is IME no reason to do all that work, to clean hydroton or perlite. I have reused both media's on both small and large scale, only reason I see to sterilize your media.
Would be running a sterile res.

For hydroton I float it in a large tub, flushing/washing any leftover nutes out with tab water. Remove what I can of root mas, there will be small floaters left. Then I would reuse it, after a pH adjustment, unless I have had issues with fungi in prev grow. In that case, I would soak it in a h2o2 solution before reuse.

For perlite right after harvet, I would tip my perlite buckets out on a large tarp. Remove the rootball and shake it a little, but I would trash the main rootball. Then rake the perlite with a plastic leaf rake, to get the majority of loose roots. Flush with tab water, pH adjust and reuse.

I wouldn't worry about minor amounts of left over roots, natural occurring microbes will take care of that. And not bother your plants at all, you can also induce beneficial bacteria to your res. To speed things up, look at Koi/aquarium shops. They are often cheaper then the growshops, and I have seen several growshops in europe store BB cultures wrong.

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Wise words and not to much work.

Bird of Hermes said:

Great info brother I imagine most cleanings would only need to be like that and I'd only have to sterilize after it's gone through at least a few runs or if I had a infection. With hempy buckets there is no external res to maintain so don't got to worry about that. I figure cannazyme would eat up any small leftover roots most the time so will stick with it or a equivalent product. Thanks for the advice now back to my lonely desert

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Your welcome
Try look up Healthy Koi enzymes, they have some good products. They might not be made for growing cannabis, but the enzymes don't care. If it's one or the other kind of dead organic matter, they will convert dead matter into watersoulable nutrients.

As I recall, it lasts alot longer then cannazyme.

Palindrome said:

Your welcome
Try look up Healthy Koi enzymes, they have some good products. They might not be made for growing cannabis, but the enzymes don't care. If it's one or the other kind of dead organic matter, they will convert dead matter into watersoulable nutrients.

As I recall, it lasts alot longer then cannazyme.

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Sounds good I'll definitely check that stuff out especially if it's cheaper. Been looking for something I can soak old stems and branches in that would soften them up so they can be disposed of more easily. Maybe the enzymes might help there too. Thanks again man