Its a Bio-bucket takeover!

Hey ICers,
Yes its another bio-bucket system, well why the hell not they kick ass!
I'm running a 6 bucket system with 3 white heaven clones (2 standard & 1 feminisied) & 3 Celticstone. They are currently under just the 1 x 600W HPS tho i'll be adding a second one real soon as well as changing the HPS globes over to MH conversion globes as soon as i get my hands on a couple.
The pump i'm using is an internal 3900LPH. I've timed my buckets & they fill in just 2 1/2 minutes, so that works out at turning over at a rate of about 24 times an hour.
At the moment i only have a very small waterfall effect, about 3" but i'm also running a couple of flexy airstone tubes in there as well to help make up for the loss in waterfall height. The reason for this is that my veg room has a VERY low roof & my flower room is currently in use.
I'm using a 19mm inlet & a 32mm outlet that then feeds into a 80mm main drain. I also added a screw up connector on the 19mm inlet so that i can easily remove a bucket without shutting down the system at all.
i'm also using the black lava rocks rather than the recomended red ones because i couldn't find a source of the red ones anywhere in my area & believe me i looked! Come monday i plan to buy some silver backed tape to light seal all my drain hoses.

OK, now to some pics.
heres 1 of the Celticstone at day 1

White heaven day 1

CS day4


WH day4

CS day5

WH left, CS right day5

Nice RT! I like how you set the plants on top of the LR. I will do the same.

Looks nice.

Thanks cracker, just following BT's directions. The rockwool cubes are about a centimeter above the water level
they are looking a bit daggy at the moment Rule35, givem a week to really get their feet into the water & we should see some serious growth.

……….good luck my friend, and a bio-bucket take over sounds good to me….lol

RT, How are the babes doing? Ya think there is a fine line on how high to place the clones? I mean to low and the cubes are soaked (like mine were) and too high it takes a bit for the roots to reach the water. What tds levels are you at now? Rule mentioned going to 1800 ppm's at week 3 with no problems. The one thing I liked my last round is by week 2 or so the ph balenced out fine and didn't swing at all. I think cool water temps and the constant fresh water supply is a key factor. I had poor root growth. I think insufficient DO and high temps ( mid 70's) were my problem.

Hi Cracker,
I had a small catrosphy here, 1 of the white heaven, the feminisied clone croaked. I think i had the nutes too high at 1000tds as well as the light was a little too close. The roots were only just reaching the water level & the cube dried out too much. Within 24hrs i had a dried up stick. Boo bloody Hoo!
DM recomends starting at 800- 1000. I've droped the TDS down to just 700 & once they are more established i'll bump it back up some.
I've got a friend sending me a replacement clone later this week so it should catch up pretty quick. I've just ordered a couple of MH conversion globes, the ones that will work in a HPS ballast.

I had the same thing happen to me so I dropped the RW, now I have 100% success

Those are the lights I use myself. Try to keep your res temp at 68f, you won't run into any problems then.

res temp is currently running at about 23c still, i think thats about 68f in non Aus speak. lol. I've got a bad habbit of puting clones in RW into a hydro system too soon. I think i need to wait till i've got a good set of roots vsable on the bottom of the RW cube rather than a few wisps.

RT, About your low water drop. A turnover rate of 25 times an hour is a lot!. Your pump is submerged in the reservoir right? Consider putting a tee with a ball valve just above the pumps output. You could adjust/open this valve so water dumps back into the reservoir. this will help add DO to the system. A part of all that flow thru the buckets might be better used this way. Sorry I don't have a pict for You.

Thats not a bad idea cracker, i could just put in a 'T' with a tap on it with the outlet squirting back into the res. That sure would add more air to the water. My Metal Halide conversion globes arrived today so tonight i'll swap it over with the HPS globe in use now.
The replacement Black Death clones arrived today too. I've put them into the bigger RW cubes & given them some weak nutes & they'll spend the next couple of days just under some fluro lighting till roots appear then they're gonna have to do some catch up!

Black Death? Sounds interesting, do tell (and show)!

Hey all, we're well overdue for an update, lots has been happening here.
I got a couple Black Death clones to replace the dead white heaven & the other sick WH too. So now i've got 3 Celticstone, 1 white heaven standard & 2 Black death. I've been pruning the 4 bigger plants back so that the BD can catch up, unfortunately they have been slow to get going & are way behind. They have only just started to grow over the last couple of days. 1 of them has just showed her first root out the side of the net pot.

I bought a couple of metal halide conversion globes, 600w that can be run from a HPS ballast. Unfortunately 1 failed just 3 days after pluging it in. Got a replacement 1 comming next week as soon as i can get into town. for now i'm runng 1 mh & 1 HPS globe over the 6 of them.

Because of my low waterfall effect i wasn't getting enough air in the water & they were showing a bit of wilt so i've added air stones to each of the buckets. They picked up straight away. I'll sure be glad when i can move them into the flower room & get the full waterfall effect going. All being well they'll be on the move this weekend.

I took your advice cracker & added a side tap in the inlet that runs back into the res reducing the bucket cycling rate back to around 15 times an hour.

Now to some pics;
A group shot, day 19

White heaven day 19

Black death taken at the same time but only day 10 for them.

Celticstone day 19

Just a bit of leg, CS.

Now for some sexy stuff, gotta love the root porn, this is a CS girl who graciously lifted here skirts for her day 20.



A close up of the CS girl, u can see the heavy pruning.

rattrap verry nice i love your grows man im still trying to get over that light storm bro im doing a little something of my own but back to you dude just love your efforts ...
wardone....

Nice grow man! Plants lookin' good and healthy. Gonna be a yummy harvest.

Hey wardone, thanks for droping by, great to hear from u. Yeah i love growing out the lightstorm, i've put a couple outdoors to see how they go this season. A friend of mine grew out some cuttings i gave him in a full hydro setup but they didn't seem to come up quite as well. Defenately not because of the grower, he really knows his stuff. I think the LS prefers growing organically in soil.

RT!, Good to hear from Ya! It's interesting how the babes perked rite up with the airstones. "Another" example of how important good gas exchange is. I get a kick out You calling a ball valve a tap. Round these parts a tap is what ya put on a keg!

I've run into a bit of a problem. My flower room will be available in a few days & the 4 large plants are more than ready to head in there & start filling out a scrog screen for probably a week or 2 before i switch them. But the 2 replacement Black death clones are a good 2-3 weeks behind, they are only prob 6-8" high. I've designed my system so that i can remove any buckets & have the system still keep on going without them. So i'm plannning on moving the 4 big plants into the flower room but leave the 2 smaller ones in the veg room for another week at least. I won't have any res or water pump for the BD's just an air stone in the bottom of each & hand top up the water levels. The main reason i'm planing on doing this is that if i also move them out to the flower room the light will be a good 2 feet above them because of the height of the bigger plants.

Now my question is will i run the risk of killing off the good bacteria in the smaller plant buckets with just an air stone in each bucket??

Hey all,
Well i finally got to move my buckets into my flower room. I was waiting for a light mover to arrive before i moved them in. I also had to dig a deeper & wider hole for my larger res as well as patch up the panda plastic where the duct tape had let go.. I've got 2 x600W HPS lights on the light mover with the mover moving 75cm, the width of an adjusta shade. The res is capable of holding 170L but i've got it at around 3/4 full.








Now its time to move the girls in & get their plumbing setup. I drained out about 2/3 of each bucket into some spare buckets i have to make them lighter to lift but still have enough weight in them so they don't fall over. 1 thing i noticed when moving them is how unstable they are when they get big like this. I think if i was going to let them grow out normally rather than scrog them that they would be needing some sort of support.

So the first job was to move them to their new room & setup their plumbing. The screw up inlet pipe made moving them really easy. I cut the down pipe so that it ended just after it entered the lid of the res tub & set the float valve so that there was a 15" fall from the elbow to the water surface. As u can prob see i'm getting some nice waterfall action with the water getting churned up really well under the drain pipe. I then cut a slot in the lid to make room for the drain pipe then cut a piece of old carpet to sit over the lid as insulation. Today i'll be building a wooden hatch cover to go over the res that is strong enough to stand on.









now to the heart breaking part.
These girls have gotten WAY too big!
Now i could either bend down all the branches & spread them out under the scrog screen or i could give them a major trim, cutting off over 6" on many branches. I chose to cut them back. The reason for this was that if i had bent them all down under the screen, the screen would have been full already & ready to be switched to flower within a few days to a week tops. If all the plants were at the same stage of development thats just what i would have done but the Black Death needs at least 2 weeks longer in veg to catch up. 1 is doing really well & growing an inch or 2 every day, the other is a little behind, i nearly lost this one too! but its got roots out of the net pot now & should start to take off as well. I also trimmed off all the lower bud sites as well as any branches i didn't think would make it to the screen.
So now they are all set, the light mover has the lights suspended about 2" above the screen, the res has been toped up & the TDS is set to 1000, ph 6.1. Now all thats left is to start tucking them nodes back under as they pop up till the screen is around 3/4 full.