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>> You can buy dehumidifiers that pull the moisture from the room. You just empty a little reservoir every couple days or so when its full.
Yeah I've got one in the room outside the tent. It runs almost constantly, filling its 10L reservoir every 2-3 days. It barely makes a dent. I can't run it inside the tent because it dumps out a lot of heat, too.
How big is it? Can it pull air from the tent via one of the I'm sure many ports it has? If that won't work I'd be very curious to see your idea in action.
It's this huge, growling brown monster of inefficiency, belching heat constantly. With electricity here up over $13, I'm not interested in running a dehumidifier, new or old, and I'm certainly not interested in running two of them.
The tent has two ports - one for the intake and one for the exhaust. There is another port up in the ceiling for the electrical, but that's sealed up tight. The only option would be to run the thing inside the tent itself, which I'm sure would only serve to jack up the juice bill even higher while at the same time creating a heat problem.
I'll have the "damp-scrubber" attached tomorrow afternoon; we'll see how that goes.
Well, it works, and was worth the effort and expense. I was hoping to shave 20 points off the rH with this, but I guess I'll have to settle for 14. Before installing this device, rH was reading 69%. It is now at 55%.
Ped's DIY Humidity Scrubber
Concept:
Two wire mesh wastebaskets are used to create a double-walled mesh canister. The space between the walls is filled with silica gel cat litter, a highly absorbent, low-density material. Its large granules allow air to move through it fairly readily.
Silica gel holds 40%-50% of its weight in moisture. 12 lbs of silica gel will capture 5-6 lbs of moisture before saturation, at which point the canister can be emptied, and the silica gel baked to drive out the moisture. The reusability of the silica makes it an economical option for people whose humidity exceeds their budget.
This can also be used to make a home-made carbon filter. Just substitute activated carbon instead of silica.
Materials:
12 lbs silica gel - I used Fresh4Life silica cat litter Two wire mesh wastebaskets of different sizes - mine are 11" and 9" diameter 8" to 6" reducer Foil pizza pan Pre-filter medium, any department store Tuck Tape
To extend the 8"-6" reducer to 9"-6", I cut a 6" hole in this foil pizza pan and taped it to the end of the reducer. This also makes a handy "lid", holding the inner wall in place, and making it easy to remove for swapping out the silica. The ends of the pizza pan are rolled around the outer wall to create an adequate seal.
I wrapped this with cheese cloth to cut down on the silica dust. You can skip this step if you sift the larger granules out of your silica and use only those.
Simply plunk the inner basket inside the outer basket and pour the silica gel around the sides. Fill it up all the way, naturally.
Wrap the exterior in pre-filter padding and you're good to go. Now just connect the duct work.
I used a booster fan, as this does restrict the airflow a bit. Next time, I will be sifting out the smaller silica granules, using only the larger ones. This should minimize the airflow restriction. Right out of the gate, this little mod seems to be effective at reducing the humidity inside the tent by 10-15%. This is not a perfect solution, but should help prevent the humidity from getting out of control. I imagine a two-stage system would be even more effective.
Shit that should do it. So your plan is to replace the desiccant every so often or have a spare and swap it out to allow the spent cartridge to dry out?
Yeah I have a second 12lb bag of silica. Once the first batch is spent, I'll remove the canister, empty it out onto a pan, and refill it with the fresh stuff. I'll either wait for a dry day (they do happen) and just leave it out in the sun, or if need be I can bake it, after which it'll be good as new. Rinse repeat.
Well, I need some stretch because the foliage is getting insane. The plants continue to bush out, vertical growth remains slow, and they're beginning to crowd each other out.
I switched to the Eye Hortilux SuperHPS at the start of today's light cycle, hoping that the redder spectrum would start brining the girls up. It's running a lot hotter than the FloraSun MH. Temps inside the tent are 31C (87 F) right now. The AK doesn't seem to mind, but the Royals seem unhappy. Dropping the wattage to 750 doesn't seem to help at all.
The ballast is putting out a lot more EM radiation with this bulb too. It knocked out my WiFi, forcing me to log into the router by hardline to change the wireless control channel. The EM interference is clearly detectable on AM radio more than a block away.
Today is much better. I was reading on Eye's website that all HID bulbs have a "break in period". This makes sense: heightened resistance in the first few dozen hours generates more heat. Today the bulb is putting out a lot less heat, and temperatures are much more manageable. The EM interference coming from the ballast has also narrowed to within the property line. The bulb is coming up on 36 hours total uptime now.
I had some fun with panoramas today:
Even with only limited experience so far, I must say: the Eye Hortilux SuperHPS presents itself as one hell of a bulb. I have to wear sunglasses in there, otherwise I come out virtually blind.
The plants have a footprint of about 15 square feet. At 145,000 initial lumens, the bulb is dumping 9,666 lumens/sq.ft. (60 watts/sq.ft) right now. They cost a little more, but so far it sure seems worth the expense to me.
A transformer nearby was struck by lightning today, knocking out the power for almost three hours. Today being a civic holiday, I was home to manage the situation, bringing the girls upstairs to the nearest window.
I've read that power failures can confuse the plants, causing them to misapprehend what time of year it is, leading to hermaphrodites. Moving them to the window seemed like the best option.
After the power was restored, I took the opportunity to give the tent a good clean and install a couple more circulators before moving the plants back in. Literally ten minutes after I had everything back up and running, the power failed a second time. It continued to oscillate off and on like this a third and fourth time.
Knowing this to be hard on my bulb and ballast, I did this:
Some pathetic CFL's and an even more pathetic tube. Just trying to keep them in daylight mode. They had an hour of this before I finally felt confident in the power company again. What a pain in the ass!
Things seem to be stable now. How much stress was this on my girls?
These are from two separate plants. Both of them Royals. What strikes me as odd is how these symptoms only appear in exactly the locations pictured here, not anywhere else on the plant (save for a few minor chlorosis spots probably related to excess nutrients).
I have still yet to give them a full strength feeding. They seem too sensitive for it, reacting negatively with 75% or even 50% strength nutes.
The AK's flowers are coming along great. I'm surprised at all the side-branching, as I thought autos were light on that.
The rest of the plants (The Royals) developed some problems. I posted the worst of it above. After some research, a strong possibility of micronutrient deficiency emerged. My soil, Sunshine Mix #4, has only sphagnum peat moss, coarse perlite, dolomite, and a starter nutrient charge with a bit of gypsum. It is basically deficient in every other respect, and since I'm watering with RO water and basic macro-nutes, as time progresses it seems to make sense that micronutrient deficiencies would emerge, specifically in zinc.
To address this, I bypassed my water softener and collected 2L of water directly from the well. This water is extremely hard, and extremely rich in minerals and metals. Because of this, I diluted this two litres into 48 litres of RO water, and distributed this between all 6 plants. I also added 100mL to a 1L foliar spray with SuperThrive and light macronutrients, and have been spraying the underside of the foliage each morning about 20 minutes before the light kicks in.
They have responded well. Leaves are firmer, their colour is healthier, and growth has resumed the pace I'd come to expect. With that said, I'm not totally clear this has anything to do with the introduction of well water. Since I did not add any macronutrients this time around, it may just be that they're happy with being flushed.
I've decided to initiate the flowering of the Royals at the end of week 5. Beginning Friday, I will be switching to the HPS bulb, and begin trimming half hours off the light cycle each day until 12/12 is reached. I'm not sure if this is necessary, but it does seem like a good way to minimize the stress of the adjustment while still getting the most out of the final week of veg.
It's been quite a while since the last update, but there's been very little to report! Basically just day-by-day progress, nothing remarkable to report.
The AK's just about ready for harvest, though! And the Royal's, now over three feet fall, are starting to bloom.
Pics:
AK-47, about a week before harvest. When it chop-time comes, I've decided to skip curing and drying her, and to instead process the entire plant into a topical anti-inflammatory salve immediately. By skipping decarb, and by using a low-temp ethanol extraction, the idea is to imbue a transdermal gel with high concentrations of THCA, a powerful anti-inflammatory with no psychotropic properties.
Royal Medic, 38".
Toward the end of the stretch period, two of the Royals started showing cal-mag deficiency. I added a cal-mag supplement to the watering regimen and have been foliar-feeding the undersides of the lower foliage with a cal-mag spray 3-4 times a day. The stems are still a little floppy and may still require some support, but every day is an incremental improvement. My sense is this will probably hurt yield in the end, as the plants will be putting energy into playing catch-up with their stem structure at the same time they're producing buds.
It was a valuable lesson, though. I learned that calcium and magnesium are essential for stem and branch-building, and that these are locked out when soil pH dips below 6.6. My runoff has been consistently testing a shade below this, but since it was still within the proper range I thought nothing of it. Now I know: after the flip, bump the pH up to around 7. After the stretch, ease it back down to normal.
For all the rookies out there who might peruse this thread, this chart was quite illuminating for me:
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