Think if going NFT any input?

[dankmn]

I'm thinking of going to NFT this dwc setup I have right now is not very neat or light efficient. As far as my understanding goes all you need for NFT is some sort of water carrying drain/pipe, a water pump, a res, and an air pump/airstone...for some reason this seems a bit easy not sure why.

Could anyone with some experience with NFT tell me what they were using for pipes, did you just get PVC? If so what size does it need to be huge?

Then can a single water pump feed two pipes? What gph am I looking for in a water pump?

 

[ChaosCatalunya]

I have made many NFT systems, starting days after I bought my first commercial system, a Nutriculture 5' tank. Molyneux's "A practical guide to NFT" is the best money I ever spent in a growshop, you can homebuild any hydro system from scrap after reading that book.

a 6" wide run of NFT needs 1L/min iirc, divide your table into "runs" so you do not get pooling on a wide table

use hard black 15mm uPVC hydro pipe from the growshop, never any softened PVC, metal, porous surfaces.

Drainpipe is great use as guttering, plasterers baths make great reservoirs for 8'x4' tables.... low too.... 2m2 of table needs 100L res minimum, 200 better

you cannot oxygenate too much, do not overwater... it is nFt ... the F means FILM as in 1mm deep, no more.... hence 6" wide "runs"

it is easy really, a bit of science, basic common sense really

you will have floods BTW, triple check everything and [if poss] design the whole thing with a pond liner in at the bottom so that when you do flood it, it is all caught safely and does not flood your house, wife's underwear drawer/policemans flat below etc.

i am not joking about the floods, in the UK and Holland I know several people it has got into trouble....

 

[ChaosCatalunya]

+ Rena C40 Turbo pumps, iirc $40 ish, 600L ph I think, you can route this through T pieces to feed 9 runs easily, taps on the end to control flow but you need to spend time setting up ,monitoring and checking.

I ended up running a piggyback second water system [a little pump with 2 or 3 drippers per channel, in case anything goes wrong with the main event..... NFT is a real knife edge, but growth is unparallelled.

 

[PermaBuzz]

I had some spectacular results with NFT system made out pvc gutters, 1/2 inch pipe and an aquairium pump. Small rockwool cubes placed in gutters. Ridiculously easy to put together. Don't use round PVC pipe for the channels. Use gutters as they have a flat bottom which is way better with wider flatter surface area more like a "film."

Have the gutter channels pour directly into the res. like a waterfall. The waterfall aerates the solution so no extra airstones are needed. Run the solution continuously during the light cycle and intermittent during the off cycle. They won't get overwatered as long as the rootmass doesnt get too huge which is why small plants SOG works best with this technique. Try to build in some redundancy like dual aquairium pumps running simul. If one pump fails, the other keeps things humming. Its good to place a burlap bag around the pump to keep gunk out, especially if using organics. Eventually, algae does start growing but it didnt seem to matter much. It also didnt seem to matter much having the roots in the channel exposed directly to the lighting.

 

[dankmn]

Something like this? Will the water flow down all those tiers or is one tier the max?

Beautiful drawing huh? Oh noes!! I just noticed no plants..well imagine them there smaller ones on the higher parts taller ones on the lower parts.

 

[PermaBuzz]

heres an example: take like 2 or 3 plastic gutters about 3-4 ft long.
Glue on a gutter end piece to one end of the gutter with silicone glue.
Do same for all gutters. When done, each gutter will be open on one side and glued shut on the other. Now place gutter on table so that the open end is higher and over the reservoir. Do same for the other gutters in corn row fashion. That means there will be a waterfall for each gutter going directly into the res. This is more of a "parallel" setup as compared to your pic (nice pic) which is "series." On the closed side of the gutters will be the solution inlet piping made out of 1/2 pvc pipe and elbows. Take your main pvc pipe coming out of the aqaurium pump and split it with T's so that each gutter get filled on the closed side. The gutter is slightly elevated so that the solution goes downhill to the res. as a waterfall.
You might need a plastic ball valve to "throttle" the flow some if one channel get more solution flow than the others, but its really not much of a problem unless you have alot of channels to split into. hope that helps. This design worked wonders for me and super cheap.

 

[dankmn]

Thanks for all the replies it's helped clear some thing up, there's not really too much out there on nft setups...

 

[stinkyattic]

Dankm- in regards to your picture, there's something to remember, which is that nute strength falls over the grade as the plants feed. IF there are very many plants between where fresh nute solution enters the system and the exit point, plants at the lower end may show deficiencies and perform poorly. So longer is not necessarily better.
Have you considered a vertical waterfall style NFT? It's pretty neat...
http://boards.cannabis.com/grow-log/131118-stinkys-crash-course-noob-hydro-welcome-darkside.html
http://boards.cannabis.com/grow-log...-nft-take-ii-stinky-kinda-likes-darkside.html

There's 2 rounds of logs. I'm not using it for production any more but will be keeping mothers in it.