BigTokes ~ "How-To" Of The Bio-Buckets 101

You would mix your nutrient solution to the total amount of volume in the system, that means: reservoir plus buckets!! If your using GH (DO NOT) add the total amount of what the label says per gallon, it’s to high!! I start out adding small amounts until the total ppm’s are at 400, then I let that circulate for two weeks before I put my clones in.

Well done Big Toke.. Hurtback would be mighty proud of your informative thread about his style of growing.. If I could K+ to you.
-Kaus

-=- For the disbelievers back before Hurt left OG I was part of the new BioBucket system and it works fantastic
Beneficial Bacteria From a Old GRow


RootBall


My Old Setup

Sorry for the Hyjack.. Back To your Normally scheduled growing

Kaus – I remember you from way back in the day bro, good to see an old veteran at this system………yes it is true that I have used a lot of HurtBacks original design, (no need in trying to reinvent the wheel) I used every thing that I could from his design and then made a few modifications of my own, therefore I feel like that I’ve been beneficial in improving the system for folks like me who desire to go big-time, but for folks who like to keep it small then that type of design works great……..anyways it’s good to see ya Kaus and btw are you still growing in the Bio-Buckets? I know that you had some trouble at first so I was wounding if you’ve got everything worked out?

I did and no i dont.. Ive considered redoing it as a Farmer John setup close to what you have except PVC pipeing in the middle for the return to a large res.

Sounds very interesting, I wound like to see that maybe some day when you’ve finished it you can show me.

thanks for all this info Bigtoke, your version of the Bio Buckets is much more refined than hurtback's, i used both threads to build mine. You said to use a 1 5/16ths hole saw for the coupler and hurtback says 1 3/8ths and i couldn't find either one any where? well i revised and went with a 1 1/4 in. and used my dremel to widen the hole which worked well, but became somewhat loose do you think it will leak with the glue gun and silicone?

Thanks for your time big toke great thread, and I will have pics of my room soon with the bio buckets setup for a 4 bucket system with a 1000 watt cool sun system.

Sounds like your working on a great little system and as for the hot-glue, all you need to do is make sure that you have hot-glued the inside and out of the bucket to at lest ½ beyond your hole, and then used some silicone to wipe around it after the hot-glue has dried and you should be just fine………in order to establish a good Bacterium filed in the system your going to have to let the system run 24/7, it really depends on the type of water that your using in your system as to how long you need to let it set, as a rule of thumb if your using RO-Water one week would be enough, but if your using Tap-Water I would recommend two weeks under most conditions, and there has been some cases that I have only went one week and did just fin, but you now what they say “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!!” so just check the water to see if it has the slick-film to it and you’ll be just fine.

kudos bigtoke thanks for taking this to the next level

being that heat increases biological activity do you think it would be possible to run the system at a higher temps (before plants are inserted) to 80-85 to get the system colonized faster?

I've just built a mini biobucket 2 gallons with a 1 gallon res that I am going to try using for germinating seeds, the seeds will sit in mesh cups in the res side so I can germ multiple strains and I put an aquarium heater in the bucket side to bring the water temps up, was also thinking of harvesting some rainwater for the little system since it is in abundance right now

I also have a 30 gallon garbage can with a 5 gallon bucket drilled and filled with lava rock as my net pot that I've made specifically for a mother, I have a 1250 little giant pump lying around that I'll use, I've ran it constant in a res before and it warmed the water up a bit but not past 70, hoping to get a 'little shop of horrors' type effect

also just had another idea and I'm not even stoned yet, how about a biobucket res system for soil growers, for instance take a 55 gal drum or 2 and pop in a 5 gal 'net pot' and a smaller tub to catch the waterfall and recirculate, anyways what I was envisioning was to have a biological res and one would add ferts and mix their ppm up in the system and let it be for a day to brew and then use about half of the liquid to feed the plants, and then immediately top up the water level back up, I might try it on some outdoor plants

1) If a soil grower is doing everything they should, beneficial bacteria is already present in the soil. The whole point of bio-buckets is to replace the soil ecosystem that is missing in hydro. I think using a biofield in a mixing reservoir for a soil grow is just unnecessary work.

2) As for heat, I believe Bigtoke has said repeatedly not to allow your reservoir temps to get above 80 degrees F. 85 F runs the risk off frying all of your beneficial bacteria, not to mention I believe warmer temps will decrease the amount of dissolved oxygen.

3) Gathering rainwater can be an ecologically sound method of getting water but keep a few things in mind. If the rainwater collected is runoff from your roof, are you sure that there are no chemicals in your roofing that could be leaching into the water? How is the water stored after collection? It should be in a light proof, airtight container to prevent insect and algae growth. If you ask me, rainwater collection should be reserved only for use in outdoor gardens and livestock, water is too cheap to run the risk of contamination in human consumption.

Hopes this helps, keep brainstorming and coming up with new ideas, it's how we all learn and progress.

BigToke, got a question for you. I noticed the first few amber hairs on my NL5xHaze today. My last grow was just bagseed and I didn't flush with straight water for the last week prior to harvest like some people say. Since this is such better genetics, I want to do everything right. Do you recommend running straight water for the last week, or just leave everything alone until harvest. Also, do you recommend 24 hours of darkness prior to cutting, cutting at the end of lights on, at the end of lights off, or does any of this really matter? Thanks for your help.

lucifer – thanks for the kudos……..I will try to answer these questions as brief as possible lol!!!!!!

would be possible to run the system at a higher temps (before plants are inserted) to 80-85 to get the system colonized faster?

Click to expand...

Answer is: No!! in nature or our echo-environment the number of good-bacteria out number the bad-bacteria by the millions!! So way is there any bad-bacteria at all? The answer to this is; nature rarely supplies the perfect conditions for the good-bacteria to take over….go figure? In our Bio-Buckets we are attempting to supply that perfect hydro-environment for the air-born bacteria that causes bacterium {bio-film}, the population of various microorganisms, trapped in a layer of slime and excretion products, attached to a surface. thus giving way to the terminology of {Beneficial Bacterium} increasing your temps in your Bio-Buckets will do one to two things, 1) if temps are around 80 degrees the {BB} will begin to decrees not increase. 2) if temps get to 82 degrees and above lab results have shown that the {BB} cannot survive, in other words; you have just made your Bio-System more appetizing for the bad-bacteria than the good-bacteria, that’s not what you want!!!

I will not even get in to what this will do to your BOD’s {Biochemical Oxygen Demands,} in brief: this is the amount of oxygen (measured in mg/l) that is required for the decomposition of organic matter by single-cell organisms, brother you do know that going higher in temps lowers your 02 right? Lets not go there!!

Also this is going to cause lock-out of the COD’s {Chemical Oxygen Demands,} this is the amount of oxygen this is consumed in the exidation of organic and oxidasable inorganic matter as well, in other words; not even your nutrient solution was designed to operate in such high temps and low {BOD’s} & {COD’s}

So how do we fix this problem wanting to get an early start on things, it’s really very simple I do believe and it goes something like this:

There is this term that we use in labs that’s called {BOD5,} this is the amount of dissolved oxygen consumed in five days by Beneficial Bacterium that perform biological degradation of organic matter.

Here’s how this works: have you ever hard of {Breakpoint Chlorination} this is the addition of chlorine to water until there is enough chlorine present for disinfection of water. The thing about this is chlorine is only able to hold it’s bond with H20/water only for a certain amount of time without adding any more to it……….and that breakthrough point is around 24-hours, after this the chlorine have lost it’s hold on the H20 enough for the {BB} to begin to work on that bio-film.

I understand that most folks would like to use Bio-Catalyses to quick start there system and that’s just fine; just remember if using tap-water give 24-hours for the chlorine to reach it’s breakthrough point and after that go to it, I would recommend something like GH-Subculture or something to it’s equivalent.

Also you need to consider what is known as CFU’s {Colony Forming Units} this is a measure that indicates the number of microorganisms in water, I will not get into all of that right now, but if your not using lava rocks go get some and use them in your net-pots as your medium, also go back over the material that I have supplied it will tell you every thing in short what you need to do, btw there was a hell of a lot of time and consideration that went into the design of BigTokes Bio-Bucket System, thus I found that some of the science that went into the making of it, that some folk didn’t want to here, so I’m just giving folks what they need to know for now in the building of the system…….but every now and then I will explain in more details about this great-system.

once again in short, every hydroponics system that is manufacture by a company used hydro-engineers to design there hydro-systems, and every hydro-engineer knows that there is one single thing he must design/build his hydro-system around, and that is the most reacting substance in the world, OXYGEN!!! Bottom line, every hydro-system is built around how well they can utilize this most precious gas, in short: every plant-cell needs it in order to stay alive, your nutrients need it in the forum of {Biotransformation} the conversion of a substance into other compounds by organisms; including bioegradation. And last but not lest your Beneficial Bacterium need it to live!! Nothing will react or live in your system without it, it is the most single important element of your system.

If I did not answer your question in the way that you wanted it, it should be noted that ntstephenson is right on the money.

ntstephenson – I do not starve my plants in there last days, but I do however hold back from feeding them in the last week or so of there cycle. I do not flush at all………and yes I do turn the lights out and let the system run for two days before I harvest.

Thanks for the tip, and for the confirmation. I felt like I was in grade school again and just got a gold star.

so are you saying it's not the heat that kills the bacteria it's the access to O2, I know at the soilfoodweb ( http://www.soilfoodweb.com ) where they are world leaders in agricultural microbe testing they recommend running aerated compost tea brewers at 80-85 degrees for maximum bacterial multiplication and fungal growth but with lots of aeration, ideally I want to run my little germination bucket at 80+ degrees since this is a temp needed for germination of tropical sativas but I guess I need to hook up some bubblers in both sides to keep the O2 levels up, I already have a netpot with lava rock in it, I think my little pump is circulating the water about 30 or 40 times per hour

Before I cram my foot completely down my mouth, please let me qualify everything I am about to say with: This is my relatively uninformed opinion. (mixed in with a small amount of experience)

The search engine at soilfoodweb was not working for me, so I could not reference what you were referring to.

Just in case, I would like to make sure that we are talking about the same thing. When I was talking about not letting temps go above 80F, I was talking about reservoir temps. I have not nor do I plan to let my reservoir approach that high, so I can not testify from experience what will happen at reservoir temperatures that high. My reservoir stays between 67-71 degrees F. I have grown from seed and rooted clones in my Bio-buckets in Oasis cubes with no humidity dome, no special aeration of nutrient solution, and basically no care whatsoever. I even rooted clones under a 1000w MH at 650ppm @.5 once. I honestly don't beleive raising your reservoir temps to 85F is necessary, but of course I may be wrong, since I have never done it.

Have you ever been fishing in the middle of a hot summer day? Did you notice how all of the fish are in deeper waters while water temperatures are hot? This is because water loses its ability to hold onto dissolved oxygen at higher temperatures, and the fish literally suffocate if they cannot move to cooler waters. The same thing holds true for plants. Please remember that in hydro, we are essentially doing something unnatural with the plants, in that we are drowning them in water. Because of this it is that much more important that we allow for plenty of oxygen in the root zone. If beneficial bacteria thrive better at 85F, it's too bad, your plants won't. Unless you pressurize your nutrient solution, you can't force in any more oxygen then it will naturally take at a given temperature.

Germination of seeds may be a slightly different story, since AT THE POINT OF GERMINATION, they are not receiving any nutrients from their environment. But once the nutrient reservoirs inside the seed are used up, the young plants will require nutrients from their growing medium. If that medium is soil, and it is at 85F, the plant will still have access to enough oxygen to allow for the conversion of sugars and starches to energy. But if the plant is in 85F water, there will not be enough dissolved oxygen.

Once again, please take everything I have said with a grain of salt, I haven't ever tried this nor have I heard of anyone trying this. If you do, please do us all a service at IC and report your results, I would be quite interested.

As a side note, if your pump is truly replacing your bucket 30 to 40 times an hour, you might want to consider installing a tee and pull off half of that flow directly back to your reservoir. Once roots develop, that much water flow may be harmful to them. I had a 350 gph pump on two 5 gallon buckets (35 changes an hour) and this was way too much flow, the roots were getting tangled and ripped. I installed a T fitting that basically cut my flow in half to the buckets and all was well afterwards.

all I want to use the mini heated bio bucket for is to germinate seeds, until the tails are long enough, then I will transfer them to another medium, but my idea is to create a good environment for the initial sprouting

I have a big bucket I've built for a mom that I'll be running at 70 degrees

Big Toke,
This thread just blows me away,unbelievable amount of legwork done by you,All i have to do is read it,and it is saved to my drive,and every single question i could have is there. :friends: I am sooooo sold on the whole bio-bucket deal,as soon as my stuff gets here i will be starting a twenty two bucket setup JUST like you explained and i will be following your instructions to the T,obviously no need for me to do any thinking or tweaking as i see you have done it allready,THANK YOU!

germ bucket is looking very promising so far, running it at about 75, I'm using some 20+ year old mexican bagseed that I was skeptical about but I see seeds swelling and nice white innards, one seed has a definite sprout, old seeds grow very slowly when germinating so the bio bucket seems ideal..the self cleaning feature is very important as old seeds are full of rancid oils
also I added a few drops of a kelp extract called growth plus in canada and nitrozyme in the usa, a nice concentration of hormones vitamins and minerals useful for germination

Hey BT. I was wondering about foam in the res. I scrolled through and could not find anything about it. Does your res get foam on the surface too?

Lucifer? – if all your doing is germinating seeds in your mini-bio-system I am almost sure that would be fine.

red145, – glad you liked my handy work, when you get ready come and see me I’d like to see what you do.

rule35sub1 – usually it’s a sing of soft-water, hand you every done a water analysis before?

never did a water analysis b4. i do use water from my RO i get about 25 ppm after it runs through the filter.