B
Bob Smith
I do always prune/deleaf so thats not a problem at all. I'm just saying that it seems like alot of surface area of the plant not getting much light leaving alot more to plan on discarding. Did you look at the 9 site pic in my first post? I was thinking of just spreading apart the sites a little more and running the lights vertical.
Anyway, I would consider myself an intermediate grower and feel like I have a pretty good handle on things. I've had success with soil and rockool. I also feel like the uc styled grow has a few advantages over DWC as well RDWC with the negative pressure/high flow. I also agree with your point of the 90f air blowing air. My plan is to use two different air pumps, one for the sites, and one for the epi and have both air pumps OUTSIDE of the room along with the epi. The room that will be supplying the air stays at a cool 65f year round. I plan on also running two water pumps (also sitting in the cool room) so if one fails, the other will still move water.
I have made my fair share of mistakes and will assume that I will make a few more. However, I am a "high risk, high reward" type of a person and honestly feel that when I get the hang of it that it will be just about as easy. It was the same when running my reef tank.. lots of stress and mistakes on the front end, but the reward was such that I'll never run a freshwater thank again.
That said.. when enough people scream fire I actually listen. I could be up for trying an ebb n flow bucket system as DHF mentioned. I could use the same buckets and plumbing setup. Just setup everything as it would be for an uc system but just flood and drain the buckets. The main thing I am looking for is getting away from disposable media. I can still accomplish that doing it that way. Then, I could get used to vertical, the buckets, and everything first then just switch it over to highflow if I get bored.
What do you think?
Yeah, when only half the plant is facing the light there's clearly going to be more to take off, but it's not like you do that at harvest - that plant should be stripped bare of anything not getting direct light in veg (i.e., see the VSCROG in the link above).
You sound like you know what you're doing and that you're prepared for whatever the system might throw at you, so I'd say go for it - you only live once, right?
If you're trying to get rid of your medium, than no, ebb and gro buckets are not for you - they're gonna require a few gallons of hydroton per bucket.
If you've got the capital to invest at the start to build in redundancies and plan for all (reasonably) foreseeable eventualities, I don't see why you wouldn't be successful - hell, I gotta believe if you can run a reef tank that RDWC might actually seem "easy" (I've decided that if and when I setup to grow trees it's gonna be LP aero, which I find much more forgiving than DWC, as an aside).
FWIW, I'm under the impression (I've never run one) that it's the condensor in the Pondmasters that heats up the air that much, so I don't think that where it's located is gonna matter that much for the temp air it blows out (except for not blowing CO2 into your rez, which is important to a degree) - double-check with someone at The Farm who runs them, but that's my understanding (again, have never run one personally).
And the UCs can say "negative pressure" and apply for patents all they want, at the end of the day it's still RDWC (IMO).