greenthumb2
Member
Anyone have any thoughts?
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Super-Charge Yor Growing with Aeroponics !!
- Thread starter Pirate
- Start date
Has anyone found an alarm or sensor for pump failures?
I was thinking a humidity sensor for low humidity that sets off an alarm. I cannot find such a thing. I'm sure it could be made with a humidity sensor and a raspberry pi (or something similar) but I prefer to just buy one before I search for someone to build me one.
I was thinking a humidity sensor for low humidity that sets off an alarm. I cannot find such a thing. I'm sure it could be made with a humidity sensor and a raspberry pi (or something similar) but I prefer to just buy one before I search for someone to build me one.
O
OG Tree Grower
You could tie in a pressure switch and rig it to a Plc to call your phone after a certian amount of time, pricey gear tho.
Drop That Sound
Well-known member
Remote camera, with picture text would probably be the cheapest insurance. You could at least check in to see that they aren't wilted.
Maybe have a small cup under a sprayer, that slowly drips water like an hour glass. In the cup is one of those soil moisture meters with a light that blinks when its dry. You could time it so that the cup is almost always at least halfway full above the probe, and doesn't drain before the next spray. When the light starts blinking it could trigger a photocell, and send an alert. Also some free webcam security apps have motion detection, which could alert inactivity as well as activity. Just an idea!
Maybe have a small cup under a sprayer, that slowly drips water like an hour glass. In the cup is one of those soil moisture meters with a light that blinks when its dry. You could time it so that the cup is almost always at least halfway full above the probe, and doesn't drain before the next spray. When the light starts blinking it could trigger a photocell, and send an alert. Also some free webcam security apps have motion detection, which could alert inactivity as well as activity. Just an idea!
OdamyaBinSmokin
New member
Can you veg big plants in an aero cloner then transplant into this table? How can you move the roots out of the hole that small without damaging it?
Wow, the thread that doesn't die
I no longer use HPA, but learned a ton of lessons and developed my Mini-Me F & D using some of those lessons (if interested see my Hail Hydro thread).
I start seedlings and clones in 3" net pots in my DIY bubbler. Once the root systems get big enough I transfer the 3" net pot into my flood totes. This minimizes stress to the plant
View attachment 398121 View attachment 398122
I no longer use HPA, but learned a ton of lessons and developed my Mini-Me F & D using some of those lessons (if interested see my Hail Hydro thread).
I start seedlings and clones in 3" net pots in my DIY bubbler. Once the root systems get big enough I transfer the 3" net pot into my flood totes. This minimizes stress to the plant
View attachment 398121 View attachment 398122
Good question. That would depend on how long the plant is vegged
This one is 3rd week of bloom. When I gently pulled it from the bubbler 2 days ago, the root mass was about the size of a soft ball. Gently inserted into same size f & d tote with lid. Zero shock
View attachment 425273 View attachment 425274
U
Ununionized
I used the original Aero type ever invented, the circular vortex-type spinning disks for humidifiers, in several runs. It was hard to handle but that shit worked GREAT.
The reason it's so hard to handle is you MUST feed the air in, from a spot distant from the thing or the humidity kills the motors of em.
I built stacked totes and put glass in the fronts for my girlfriend.
I drew a measuring tape on the back walls of the two totes, and in 30 days, my plants had roots, 30 inches long. The root-sets were about as big around as two, to three-liter bottles and I let them fall 25 inches into 5 inches of water.
The plants themselves were 14 inches high, with stems so stiff you could push the plants over with your hand and they wouldn't break.
That form of aeroponics hyper-oxygenates the water so when the plants' roots hit the water table in the bottom of the thing, there's no refrigeration, no cooling, no nothing: the water is automatically cooled, by the constant air travel created by the humidifier's design.
What I did to limit water loss and stop any leakage was drill holes around the top with a hole saw and cover them with several layers of green scrubber.
The second iteration of that I built, was built into a barrel without glass, and it performed identically. Tremendously vigorous plants. and since it self cools, AND hyper-oxygenates the water, it's a formidable machine.
Just one of them grew 6 plants under a 250, as did the totes.
The reason it's so hard to handle is you MUST feed the air in, from a spot distant from the thing or the humidity kills the motors of em.
I built stacked totes and put glass in the fronts for my girlfriend.
I drew a measuring tape on the back walls of the two totes, and in 30 days, my plants had roots, 30 inches long. The root-sets were about as big around as two, to three-liter bottles and I let them fall 25 inches into 5 inches of water.
The plants themselves were 14 inches high, with stems so stiff you could push the plants over with your hand and they wouldn't break.
That form of aeroponics hyper-oxygenates the water so when the plants' roots hit the water table in the bottom of the thing, there's no refrigeration, no cooling, no nothing: the water is automatically cooled, by the constant air travel created by the humidifier's design.
What I did to limit water loss and stop any leakage was drill holes around the top with a hole saw and cover them with several layers of green scrubber.
The second iteration of that I built, was built into a barrel without glass, and it performed identically. Tremendously vigorous plants. and since it self cools, AND hyper-oxygenates the water, it's a formidable machine.
Just one of them grew 6 plants under a 250, as did the totes.
U
Ununionized
On both those original Ein Gedi based designs, I wound up killing the motors after a couple of grows each. I stopped messing with them at that time because I was stealth/guerrilla growing and moved to Hempy Buckets.
The key to them is feeding them enough air, from far enough away from the unit, that it doesn't corrode and lock up the motors, something I never fixed.
I never found out exactly how the Jews did it in Israel when they invented that type growing.
Any of these aeroponic setups operate vastly better when they're chilled and that's a great thing about the Ein Gedi design: it is the inside of an evaporative cooler. And it brings the temperature of the water down to the wet-bulb temperature - think the temp your tee shirt gets at the lake when it's wet and the wind blows - a temperature COOLER than room temperature and guess what else?
It's also about 65 or so degrees in a LOT of places in the world where there's either high altitude and so, low humidity - or indoors, in an air-conditioned, humidity lowered environment.
The little 4 inch disks have a ring of teeth like teeth from a comb in a circle around this spinning disk that sucks up water from below through a hollow vortex tube they run a little thread up and down - the water walks up this ramp going round and round the inside of that plastic pick-up tube on the electric-motor-spun plastic disk, and then the water spills out onto the flat disk body to be hurled outward at high speed into these squared, plastic, closely-spaced comb teeth built into a ring around that spining disk.
Fan blades on top of the disk suck in air over the motor and into these humidifiers and I took one apart and modified it putting it into tubs and barrels, and - down at the bottom I put a weighted pond pump with a riser on it, and - LoL a funnel stuck into the hollow riser pipe for the waterfall/fountain pump.
The little pick-up tube goes into that and away we go, kids.
There is a saying you should know about water and it's formation of hydrogen peroxide.
In nature one reason rain is such a strong bleach is that - when water is hitting something loud enough to make that loud 'sPLaT' sound drops make on things - there is about enough power for a small portion of that water to be converted - I shit you not, hydrogen peroxide.
When you create that loud hiss from that water coming off onto those pins that's a continuous barrage of that very sound: that's what that hiss is - water slapping the SHIT out of a solid object and it's enough to make some hydrogen peroxide. It's a small amount but that's how highly oxygenated that water is, when you keep flipping about 5 gallons, with a pond pump that's moving about 50 gallons an hour and that mister is turning about, a pint of that an hour, into actual mist, and then - see here's the rest of it - off those pins, falls this MASSIVELY variable-size rain that is ALSO drizzling down the walls of the tote.
All this water, that's being thrown by the spinning disk - only a small amount is becoming mist per se, that's why a gallon reserve on the (fungus prone) spinning disk humidifiers will last hours and hours.
But in a tote with a 25 inch air space the water drizzling down in VERY thin rivulets all over, every square centimeter of that inner surface - this is MORE oxygenation on a MASSIVE - relatively - scale.
So the plants, are just SCREAMING with vigor in the things.
I'm about to move. And when I do I have space for another one of those, and I'm gonna build one with a remote air intake that doesn't kill the motors after just a grow or two.
When mine died I'd gotten a grow and about 3/4ths out of both of em.
I never even disassembled them, I just let the pond pump that was lifting the water, keep flipping it ten times an hour, like a shallow water reserve grow on those.
I specifically wrapped plastic mesh around the riser pipe so that everything falling out of the pump's feed to that funnel up at the top that had the little pick-up tube of the disk in it - that all ran down the filaments of this plastic window screen I wrapped around the riser many times.
This was what it took to make it stay oxygenated when the misting disk died due to motor failure. It also silenced the thing taking away splashing sound.
---------------------------
Since the Ein Gedi types have that humidfier operation in mind when they were designed, there are some little fan blades on top of the disk see, and when the disk turns, it sucks air down into a narrow space they put between the top of the disk, and a hole in the top of the container.
This fans air in and - THIS is what makes the water hit so hard, on the pins: the air picks up and carries the water with it into and through the pins, in order to - raise humidity in a room.
Well - when you do this in a tub obviously, you have to get rid of all that air. The roots though - they aren't dried out by this. They are in a perpetual, windy rain that simply oxygenates the living screaming F*** out of that water that does return to the reservoir below.
It ALL slams into those teeth and gets pulverized into a thick, sodden, rain that then slams against the sides of the container. As it's draining down there is HUGE atmospheric contact, and the oxygenation of the water g.o.e.s. through the r.o.o.f.
The reason they aren't used much is because there are so much simpler methods that don't automatically BLOW DRY all the ROOTS if the WATER supply fails. LoL.
What the Jewish farmers did was put several of them in a container so if one died, all was okay. They're really kinda hard to operate and there's plenty there to fail, but you never saw such heavily oxygenated water, in your life. Well - yes you have. Ever stick your head inside an evaporative cooler? That's what the insides of one of those grows is.
It's evaporatively cooling that water.
I had mine fed by a 16 watt fountain pump, and that water was STILL so cold it was unpleasant to put your hand into it. It was literally being evaporatively refrigerated by a device basically designed to do JUST that. LoL
The key to them is feeding them enough air, from far enough away from the unit, that it doesn't corrode and lock up the motors, something I never fixed.
I never found out exactly how the Jews did it in Israel when they invented that type growing.
Any of these aeroponic setups operate vastly better when they're chilled and that's a great thing about the Ein Gedi design: it is the inside of an evaporative cooler. And it brings the temperature of the water down to the wet-bulb temperature - think the temp your tee shirt gets at the lake when it's wet and the wind blows - a temperature COOLER than room temperature and guess what else?
It's also about 65 or so degrees in a LOT of places in the world where there's either high altitude and so, low humidity - or indoors, in an air-conditioned, humidity lowered environment.
The little 4 inch disks have a ring of teeth like teeth from a comb in a circle around this spinning disk that sucks up water from below through a hollow vortex tube they run a little thread up and down - the water walks up this ramp going round and round the inside of that plastic pick-up tube on the electric-motor-spun plastic disk, and then the water spills out onto the flat disk body to be hurled outward at high speed into these squared, plastic, closely-spaced comb teeth built into a ring around that spining disk.
Fan blades on top of the disk suck in air over the motor and into these humidifiers and I took one apart and modified it putting it into tubs and barrels, and - down at the bottom I put a weighted pond pump with a riser on it, and - LoL a funnel stuck into the hollow riser pipe for the waterfall/fountain pump.
The little pick-up tube goes into that and away we go, kids.
There is a saying you should know about water and it's formation of hydrogen peroxide.
In nature one reason rain is such a strong bleach is that - when water is hitting something loud enough to make that loud 'sPLaT' sound drops make on things - there is about enough power for a small portion of that water to be converted - I shit you not, hydrogen peroxide.
When you create that loud hiss from that water coming off onto those pins that's a continuous barrage of that very sound: that's what that hiss is - water slapping the SHIT out of a solid object and it's enough to make some hydrogen peroxide. It's a small amount but that's how highly oxygenated that water is, when you keep flipping about 5 gallons, with a pond pump that's moving about 50 gallons an hour and that mister is turning about, a pint of that an hour, into actual mist, and then - see here's the rest of it - off those pins, falls this MASSIVELY variable-size rain that is ALSO drizzling down the walls of the tote.
All this water, that's being thrown by the spinning disk - only a small amount is becoming mist per se, that's why a gallon reserve on the (fungus prone) spinning disk humidifiers will last hours and hours.
But in a tote with a 25 inch air space the water drizzling down in VERY thin rivulets all over, every square centimeter of that inner surface - this is MORE oxygenation on a MASSIVE - relatively - scale.
So the plants, are just SCREAMING with vigor in the things.
I'm about to move. And when I do I have space for another one of those, and I'm gonna build one with a remote air intake that doesn't kill the motors after just a grow or two.
When mine died I'd gotten a grow and about 3/4ths out of both of em.
I never even disassembled them, I just let the pond pump that was lifting the water, keep flipping it ten times an hour, like a shallow water reserve grow on those.
I specifically wrapped plastic mesh around the riser pipe so that everything falling out of the pump's feed to that funnel up at the top that had the little pick-up tube of the disk in it - that all ran down the filaments of this plastic window screen I wrapped around the riser many times.
This was what it took to make it stay oxygenated when the misting disk died due to motor failure. It also silenced the thing taking away splashing sound.
---------------------------
Since the Ein Gedi types have that humidfier operation in mind when they were designed, there are some little fan blades on top of the disk see, and when the disk turns, it sucks air down into a narrow space they put between the top of the disk, and a hole in the top of the container.
This fans air in and - THIS is what makes the water hit so hard, on the pins: the air picks up and carries the water with it into and through the pins, in order to - raise humidity in a room.
Well - when you do this in a tub obviously, you have to get rid of all that air. The roots though - they aren't dried out by this. They are in a perpetual, windy rain that simply oxygenates the living screaming F*** out of that water that does return to the reservoir below.
It ALL slams into those teeth and gets pulverized into a thick, sodden, rain that then slams against the sides of the container. As it's draining down there is HUGE atmospheric contact, and the oxygenation of the water g.o.e.s. through the r.o.o.f.
The reason they aren't used much is because there are so much simpler methods that don't automatically BLOW DRY all the ROOTS if the WATER supply fails. LoL.
What the Jewish farmers did was put several of them in a container so if one died, all was okay. They're really kinda hard to operate and there's plenty there to fail, but you never saw such heavily oxygenated water, in your life. Well - yes you have. Ever stick your head inside an evaporative cooler? That's what the insides of one of those grows is.
It's evaporatively cooling that water.
I had mine fed by a 16 watt fountain pump, and that water was STILL so cold it was unpleasant to put your hand into it. It was literally being evaporatively refrigerated by a device basically designed to do JUST that. LoL
U
Ununionized
It's a real shame those Ein Gedi rigs are so dangerous. You're not really supposed to play around with 120 V sucking air past that's laden with highly salted - mineralized, metalized, water. LoL. Woah.
The concept of growing plants' roots inside the evaporative cooler environment is however - I mean is it not? an ODD thing to do, at first glance, right?
They're definitely the most amazing little gizmo and - as far as I know, those farmers at Ein Gedi actually invented Aeroponics, although there's been several reputable claims arguing others did it first.
You hear people say NASA invented it, but for sure, the Jewish farmers at Ein Gedi put it to use, turbo-charging the growth of young fruit trees, I think their growth rate improvement was on the order of three times soil speed for some of their trees.
Have any of you ever seen what's called, a 'cooling tower' where they make a square of boards, that are tilted into these inward-slanted slats, and they drizzle water over these slats at a HIGH rate - into a little pool about 24 inches deep - they do this over and over, and they blow air over it, with a fan: and this super-chills the water down to what you call the wet bulb temperature of the area and this is almost ALWAYS at least SOME cooler than the outside, ambient air,
and they refrigerate meat and stuff or used to by simply immersing, their refrigeration coils, into this super-chilled water so it was always like it was about, 20 degrees cooler than room temperature in a lotta places.
Well - when you're a kid looking into that water it smells like.. ozone or a rain forest - and that water is so cold that if you put your had in as a kid it'll chill it to the bone.
Ok there's something else - When I used to look inside mine right after turning it off, that water would be spritzing little sprites up: popping little bubbles like a gas charged drink.
Obviously with soda that's CO2 but with that water it was nitrogen and oxygen. When water is so cold and so heavily turbulent that when the surface is stilled, it begins to pop with little sprites all over the top - you have got yourself an oxygenated supply of water that surpasses anything else someone can put together in such large amounts.
The only thing that can compete with this is true 0-10 micron atomized water.
==========
It's a sorta niche toy, the way those MMA people use tennis balls on elastic, thrown around the back headband of a ball cap, and they start batting this tennis ball out from em and it's returning with speeds and, a size, and, an at least approximate arc, of an incoming fist: back a little lower than that head band, at their face.
So they cat paw these and punch em and elbow em and knee em - yeah, knee em, as they're coming in at their body and it's just a niche toy.
That's what those Ein Gedi type humifier disk atomizers are, they're a really fun - but potentially VERY dangerous due to electrical hazards, and losing water supply from them the way I built them - and having them fail the crop. Mine never did, a waterfall pump is a VERY reliable thing, and mine always ran till the mister motor corroded due to heavily mineralized water vapor being pushed out of the filter-covered holes in my root boxes, getting pulled right back in past that same motor as input air.
This is dangerous and I don't recommend everybody build one, I actually am an expert in both electricity and electronics, and an expert in handling water and electricity together, although that doesn't make it any safer, at all: it just means I at least knew to slow the f*** down and make sure no water in liquid form was getting out and around that 120 volt motor on top of my reservoir.
If you do decide to figure out how to make one, be aware that - you can kill yourself like that. You very WELL could kill yourself with it.
What I did was just made it so that every time I touched it, I unplugged it and that obviously made it safer but still... dummy is, as dummy does, and I was dummidificatin' with a muchliness when I was messing with mine.
Thinking back on it - maybe not so much. People put 120 volt light hoods on aquariums all the time, but still - if you do decide to mess with one of these - they're not just kinda intrinsically safe, as-is.
They're still a very, very fascinating little thing, ESPECIALLY and really ONLY now that I think about it - if you have an actual, glass faced tub or - two tubs, that's what I did - with a tape measure on the back wall, watching plants' roots growing an inch and a quarter a day.
30 inches in 30 days includes that first week or so where - it wasn't an inch of root a day, it was a quarter inch a day. Right there at the 20, 25 day mark, the roots on my plants were growing - 3 out of 4, about four of six or so - more than an inch per day.
I would then flip those plants and I guess that's what made the roots stop growing so swiftly - also they were in five inches of exceptionally highly oxygenated water maybe they were able to feed the plants all they needed.
Another thing is that when I did mine, I was HEAVILY low stress training them, laying them down, down, down.. down, down, down... over and over and over as the plants were putting out eventually - hundreds of growing nodes along all those branches laid out flat, then the sub branches flattened, on and on - I'm kind an O.C.D. maestro type at times, I can make myself do something just for sake of purity of one element of an experiment so I combined extreme low stress training with - aeroponics, to see what happened.
Oh yes it made a LOTTA freakin weed with the many hours I put into it. Was it worth it? Uh I grow with Hempy Buckets now LoL.
But still.. those doggone things are incredible when they're so vibrant from being fed that way AND having every single node on the plant hormone trained to produce the MAXIMUM growth hormone that can be squeezed out of a plants' genetics.
Low Stress Training is when you keep flattening the plant, and this makes every single growing node at the top two inches of the plant, turn on growth hormone production to the maximum of the plants' genetic capacity. It's formally 'Auxin Training' too.
The concept of growing plants' roots inside the evaporative cooler environment is however - I mean is it not? an ODD thing to do, at first glance, right?
They're definitely the most amazing little gizmo and - as far as I know, those farmers at Ein Gedi actually invented Aeroponics, although there's been several reputable claims arguing others did it first.
You hear people say NASA invented it, but for sure, the Jewish farmers at Ein Gedi put it to use, turbo-charging the growth of young fruit trees, I think their growth rate improvement was on the order of three times soil speed for some of their trees.
Have any of you ever seen what's called, a 'cooling tower' where they make a square of boards, that are tilted into these inward-slanted slats, and they drizzle water over these slats at a HIGH rate - into a little pool about 24 inches deep - they do this over and over, and they blow air over it, with a fan: and this super-chills the water down to what you call the wet bulb temperature of the area and this is almost ALWAYS at least SOME cooler than the outside, ambient air,
and they refrigerate meat and stuff or used to by simply immersing, their refrigeration coils, into this super-chilled water so it was always like it was about, 20 degrees cooler than room temperature in a lotta places.
Well - when you're a kid looking into that water it smells like.. ozone or a rain forest - and that water is so cold that if you put your had in as a kid it'll chill it to the bone.
Ok there's something else - When I used to look inside mine right after turning it off, that water would be spritzing little sprites up: popping little bubbles like a gas charged drink.
Obviously with soda that's CO2 but with that water it was nitrogen and oxygen. When water is so cold and so heavily turbulent that when the surface is stilled, it begins to pop with little sprites all over the top - you have got yourself an oxygenated supply of water that surpasses anything else someone can put together in such large amounts.
The only thing that can compete with this is true 0-10 micron atomized water.
==========
It's a sorta niche toy, the way those MMA people use tennis balls on elastic, thrown around the back headband of a ball cap, and they start batting this tennis ball out from em and it's returning with speeds and, a size, and, an at least approximate arc, of an incoming fist: back a little lower than that head band, at their face.
So they cat paw these and punch em and elbow em and knee em - yeah, knee em, as they're coming in at their body and it's just a niche toy.
That's what those Ein Gedi type humifier disk atomizers are, they're a really fun - but potentially VERY dangerous due to electrical hazards, and losing water supply from them the way I built them - and having them fail the crop. Mine never did, a waterfall pump is a VERY reliable thing, and mine always ran till the mister motor corroded due to heavily mineralized water vapor being pushed out of the filter-covered holes in my root boxes, getting pulled right back in past that same motor as input air.
This is dangerous and I don't recommend everybody build one, I actually am an expert in both electricity and electronics, and an expert in handling water and electricity together, although that doesn't make it any safer, at all: it just means I at least knew to slow the f*** down and make sure no water in liquid form was getting out and around that 120 volt motor on top of my reservoir.
If you do decide to figure out how to make one, be aware that - you can kill yourself like that. You very WELL could kill yourself with it.
What I did was just made it so that every time I touched it, I unplugged it and that obviously made it safer but still... dummy is, as dummy does, and I was dummidificatin' with a muchliness when I was messing with mine.
Thinking back on it - maybe not so much. People put 120 volt light hoods on aquariums all the time, but still - if you do decide to mess with one of these - they're not just kinda intrinsically safe, as-is.
They're still a very, very fascinating little thing, ESPECIALLY and really ONLY now that I think about it - if you have an actual, glass faced tub or - two tubs, that's what I did - with a tape measure on the back wall, watching plants' roots growing an inch and a quarter a day.
30 inches in 30 days includes that first week or so where - it wasn't an inch of root a day, it was a quarter inch a day. Right there at the 20, 25 day mark, the roots on my plants were growing - 3 out of 4, about four of six or so - more than an inch per day.
I would then flip those plants and I guess that's what made the roots stop growing so swiftly - also they were in five inches of exceptionally highly oxygenated water maybe they were able to feed the plants all they needed.
Another thing is that when I did mine, I was HEAVILY low stress training them, laying them down, down, down.. down, down, down... over and over and over as the plants were putting out eventually - hundreds of growing nodes along all those branches laid out flat, then the sub branches flattened, on and on - I'm kind an O.C.D. maestro type at times, I can make myself do something just for sake of purity of one element of an experiment so I combined extreme low stress training with - aeroponics, to see what happened.
Oh yes it made a LOTTA freakin weed with the many hours I put into it. Was it worth it? Uh I grow with Hempy Buckets now LoL.
But still.. those doggone things are incredible when they're so vibrant from being fed that way AND having every single node on the plant hormone trained to produce the MAXIMUM growth hormone that can be squeezed out of a plants' genetics.
Low Stress Training is when you keep flattening the plant, and this makes every single growing node at the top two inches of the plant, turn on growth hormone production to the maximum of the plants' genetic capacity. It's formally 'Auxin Training' too.
