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 GlasPlandai
Stranger
Registered: 02/17/16
Posts: 9
Loc: Ireland
Last seen: 8 years, 9 months
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 CO2 by Fermentation It Does Work!! 
#806163 - 02/18/16 12:35 AM (8 years, 10 months ago) |
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Hi guys,
I been loafing around reading this and other forums for some time now and decided to register here so I could ring in on this topic. Its a long read and contains a lot of detail on to how you can use Sugars and yeast to produce CO2 for your grow room. If you want to learn take the time to read and understand what I am saying as it come from years of experience and a PHD in horticulture. If you just want to mix and go the directions are below but please if you fail before you ask question read the entire post and I assure you will likely find out what went wrong. There are many variables at play here so some fine tuning may be require for your own preference of everything from yeast to mixture and tank size. Consider these number a baseline that needs adjusting.
Directions: (For 512cu.ft Room) (20 Gallon holding Tank)
(NOTE: some of the numbers are rounded for ease of mixing.)
1) Kick start the yeast by heating up 2cups of water and stir in ½ cup sugar until it is dissolved completely.
2) Let it cool back to 80-90 degrees and place it in a sterilized glass dish. Then add about 1TBS of yeast. Cover with plastic wrap and place it in a warm place that is 80-90f until it starts to foam and you can see bubbles forming on the inside of the dish. Be sure your container is not too small or it will over flow and make a mess. This can take from a few hours to a few days depending on the yeast used.
3) While your waiting for the Kick starter to begin fermenting prepare your main tank by dissolving 24lbs of sugar into 10 gallons of water. You can heat a few gallons on the stove to help devolve the sugar but you MUST let it cool to 80-90f before adding the kick start batch or you will kill the yeast.
4) Recharge Weekly with 3lbs of sugar devolved into 1 gallon of water @ 80f.
Before we Begin
Consider that CO2 enrichment will only help healthy plants grow faster and bigger. Adding CO2 to a poor grow can actually make things worse. If you have droopy plants with purple stems and messed up lower fan leaves you have other things to worry about that will only get worse when you add CO2 because the plant will photosynthesis faster only intensifying the problems.
Before you consider enrichment you should be sure you can get the air from the bottom of the room back to the top as CO2 will settle to the floor. A $30 6in air duct booster fan from the home improvement store will do the trick. Also NO VENTING or your just waisting time and money. The better sealed your room the better this will work. If you have to you could use a fan on the floor pointing up.
About CO2 Enrichment
Typical ambient air will be around 300-400ppm and is just fine for cannabis growth if you have a good exchange of fresh air into your grow area. You should reach for about 100% air exchange every 1-5 minutes. If you have an open flame gas / propane unvented heater or stove when your heat is running or you are cooking your CO2 may spike. Depending on how ventilated your house is you will sometimes see as much as 1000ppm CO2 concentration in a home. Prior to going off grid all electric I had open flame ceramic Propane wall heaters and stove. On a cold winter day after cooking dinner with all 6 kids the wife and 2 cats eating. My small 1200sq.ft double wide would spike to 900ppm for several hours. You can monitor your CO2 for around $100 with a desktop meter like this one.
Desktop CO2, temp and , humidity Meter
CO2 enrichment at or around 1300ppm will increase growth of cannabis by around 100%. Enrichment however is not linear. Meaning that an increase from 300ppm to 500ppm gains more yield increase than say 1300ppm to 1500ppm. At 1500ppm to 1800ppm the benefits will start to decline and over 1800ppm will become toxic for your plants. Ideally you want to shoot for 1000-1200ppm. Going from 1200ppm to 1400ppm will not be as noticable as going from 300ppm to 800ppm but if you get down to the gram and a perfectly identical grow each time then you may see that small increase and over time a few grams per flower can result in what could have been a new car. Here is a nice chart that represents that.
Once you are sealed and have good air flow from the floor to the ceiling you now need to produce CO2 at least to 300ppm+ to keep the plants growing. There are many systems but here I will only be covering the Sugar Yeast Fermentation method. I have read many of post with people saying this does not work. And I find many times it is because they are trying to boost CO2 to 1200ppm with a gallon jug for a 512 SqFt room or a 12oz bottle for a grow tent. Added to the complication they offer some mixture or ratio that just does not produce a good yield of CO2 or a good environment for long enough for the yeast to thrive and have a noticeable impact.
About Yeast
There are different kinds of yeast that preform differently and are able to survive the toxic(to them) swill they produce longer. Like most living things yeast once activated needs food oxygen and nutrients to grow and reproduce. As it consumes the nutrients and sugars it will produce what I like to call yeast farts(CO2) and yeast piss(ethyl alcohol). A pound of sugar will break down(ferment) into ½ pound of ethyl alcohol and ½ pound CO2 gas. If the alcohol content gets too high (~10-15% for common bakers yeast from grocery store). The yeast will poison itself and die. Too much sugar and you can stunt the production of yeast and too much yeast will make lots of CO2 but taper off fast and not last long.
Show me the numbers
First lets take a look @ a Typical grow area that is easily reduced for smaller operations.
Say 512 cu.ft. Will work out to the following.
8x8x8=512cu.ft. 100%
4x8x8=256cu.ft (50%)
4x4x8= 128cu.ft. (25%)
2x4x8= 64cu.ft. (12.5%)
I used these numbers because it will be easy to reduce 512 to smaller numbers if your room is not 512cu.ft. So lets say we do all the calculations for 512cu.ft but your grow area is 1.5x6x7= 63cu.ft. Just take any value discussed hereafter and multiply it by 0.125 and you will have your value.
So our example grow room is 8x8x8 divided in ½ for a 4x4x8 veg area and a 4x4x8 flower area BUT connected together via ducting and blower fans to circulate the air from the bottom of the veg room to the top of the flower room and a 2nd fan from the bottom flower room to the top of the veg room. I'll not get into room design CO2 sinks so you need to move it up from one side of the room to the middle top of the other side and let it fall down threw you canopy. I'll add a pic latter.
We need to fill the room to 1000-1300ppm. To do this we have to consider yeast fermentation speed vs volume. Not going to get into why because this is already a long post but we need need
TIME = Every 4 hours 512cu.ft x 0.0013 = 0.66cu.ft.
Volume = 3% the volume of our room in gallons 512cu.ft x .03 = 15.36 gallons of water
So any container about the right size will do. Don't go too big and going smaller is not the way to go you will see why latter. I use a 20 gallon fish tank because its easy to clean glass and seal the top of the tank with a piece or ¼in Plexiglas and some aluminum duct tape.
My setup is 6 weeks Veg and 6 weeks flower (5weeks flower + 1 week Flush) on the rotation I change out the tank that sits in my flower room once I harvest. Clean it, and reset it on my veg side. I then flip my lights around so the veg side is now under flowering lights. This allows me to 100% sterilize the empty side prior to moving my now ready clones into the fresh side. Your timing will depend on your strain and what system you use. With my NFT Hydro setup 4x4x8 will house 8-10 plants and they are damn near a foot from the lights @ week 6 flower and IMO thats too close. I prob should be Flowering longer but no one complains about my medication being weak or not flavorful.
So onto it.....
We need for six weeks of fermentation We figured out above that we need 0.66cu.ft of CO2 every 4 hours.
2lbs of sugar makes 1lb of CO2
1Lb of fCO2 works out to 8.7cu.ft
So we need 0.1518 lbs of sugar to make 0.66cu.ft of CO2 every 4 hours
How did I get that?
0.66cu.ft is 7.59% of 8.7cu.ft ---->>0.1518lbs is 7.59% of 2lbs
4hours x 6 = 24hours
So we need 0.1518lbs x 6 = 0.9108lbs of sugar per day.
So there are 42 days in 6weeks that means 0.9108lbs x 42= 38.2536lbs of sugar total.
But lets not go dumping in all 38.2536lbs in @ once. We need to keep it going for 6 weeks and grocery store bakers yeast will typically only ferment for about 7-10 days until it runs out of food or poisons itself with the alcohol.
So we need to get some yeast kick started. The amount you start with will be slightly different depending on the yeast you use. The only way to know is to let it run the 1st week and watch it like a hawk. If you see production slowing way down before the week is over you started with too much or too little yeast.
If the mix stops bubbling and it is sweet tasting then there was not enough yeast to start you should kick start with more yeast.
If the mix stops bubbling and it smells of boose and taste like cheap gas station wine. You started with too much yeast.
Pro Tips:
Heat kills Yeast and cold will stunt production. So you want to keep your yeast @ 80-90f. I use a 20 gallon fish tank so its easy for me to slap on a fish tank heater set @ 85f.
Putting a fish tank bubbler in the weekly add gallon for a few hours help add oxygen to the mix and will help the yeast preform better. You can also run a bubbler from outside your grow room for an hour after lights off in your main tank to add oxygen as plants will not use the CO2 @ night and you will have 4-6 hours to make up for any CO2 lost from injecting air into the mixture.
Seal up your room as best you can. And purge @ lights off. Plants will not use the CO2 in the dark. So I have a Fish tank bubbler, 2x sealed 6in air tight louver, and a 6in in duct fan that purge my room @ lights off for 1 hour. Lights Off -->bubbler in fermentation tank on--->intake/exhaust louver open-->exhaust fan on. This helps evacuate any stagnant air. It cost me extra for the air tight louvers and an additional carbon filter for oder control (I have another one inside the room on 24/7 scrub). But it makes me feel better knowing my plants do not live in a tomb.
Tank Design is a good thing to invest in. I use a 20 gallon fish tank with a 1/2in thick Lexan lid sealed with some refrigerator seal. The lid is held on with two 1in ratchet straps. I ran a ½ in hose from the lid to an oversize Mason Jar. The hose goes to the bottom of the jar that is filled with plain water. This acts like an air lock and is a good indicator then it is bubbling that you have CO2 production. If you drop to less than 1 bubble a minute you ned to charge or change your main tank. From the Top of the jar I run ½ hose into the room to the ceiling and tap off with ¼ in stiff hose I found @ the home improvement store used for refrigerator water line. Those feed to a T that form a halo over each Plant. This way any new CO2 will fall onto the plants.
Air circulation is important. Using 6in ducting I pull air from the bottom of one room to a 12inx12in manifold in the other room with a 500cfm inline fan. From each manifold I use a 4in aluminum flex duct with a defuser pointing @ each plant. Both rooms are next to each other and the manifold for one room is fed from near the floor of the other room. Each is 4x4x8. This keeps the CO2 moving over the plants by sucking it from the floor where it settles and sending it to the other room to fall back down allowing one room to share the same CO2 tank. Only my Flowering Plants have halos.
Waist not want not. Using NFT I have 10 gallons Grow neuts and 10 gallons of Bloom neuts to get rid of each week. I simply mix them together and use them to feed less picky plants like Deep Water Culture lettuce, spinach, and cauliflowers, etc. Each weeks of what would have been discarded neut water feeds a 20 gallon 10 spot 3in netcup bin for 6 weeks. Believe that?
Dr. Plandai's swill.....
16 gallons of fermented sugar swill every 6 weeks is a waist. So I have my own tweaked recipe for my tank. When mixing my sugar water I add in a ½ can of concentrated fruit juice cocktail. NOT the 100% juice the kind with high fructose corn syrup or sugar in it and 1/8 of a Centrum multi vitamin. The extra complex sugar really helps the yeast and the vitamin adds B12 and other great things the help supercharge the yeast. Instead of dumping it I distill it to 100 proof and jar it in pint jars. My friends sure love it and the change of flavor every 6 weeks yeilds me about 12-24 pints that they love to trade me for sugar and yeast. When I was running CO2 bottles NO ONE would trade my empty bottle for anything yet now I have more sugar and some of the best wine and beer yeast I ever used.
Edited by GlasPlandai (02/18/16 01:35 AM)
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 Magash
The Feminizer
Registered: 04/21/08
Posts: 6,634
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 Re: CO2 by Fermentation It Does Work!! [Re: GlasPlandai]
#806273 - 02/19/16 05:42 PM (8 years, 9 months ago) |
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It's good information but seems to be way way way to much of a pain in the ass to use in a average grow room. Most growers have found that it's easier to have constant air flow threw the garden then to ad co2 at all.
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All creatures tremble when faced with violence. All creatures fear death, all love life. If we can only see ourselves in others, then how could we possibly hurt another creature?
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budgrowerwannabe
Bum fighter
Registered: 01/28/12
Posts: 3,360
Last seen: 3 years, 21 days
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Re: CO2 by Fermentation It Does Work!! [Re: Magash]
#806291 - 02/19/16 07:56 PM (8 years, 9 months ago) |
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Wow that was alot to read .thanks for the info,but im with Mag more air flow is the only way to go.
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GlasPlandai
Stranger
Registered: 02/17/16
Posts: 9
Loc: Ireland
Last seen: 8 years, 9 months
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Quote:
Magash said:
It's good information but seems to be way way way to much of a pain in the ass to use in a average grow room. Most growers have found that it's easier to have constant air flow threw the garden then to ad co2 at all.
Quote:
budgrowerwannabe said:
Wow that was alot to read .thanks for the info,but im with Mag more air flow is the only way to go.
If you want to skip the education you can just do 1) 2) 3) 4) its a fairly flexible calculation that will @ worst deliver 500ppm.
I can appreciate that some people Would feel its a bit much. Fermentation CO2 or CO2 in general is to much a PITA for some people. Some are happy to get what they get and leave it @ that. I wrote this for those people who want to literally double there crop each grow. I have a friend who wanted to try this so I set him up a batch and he just had to add the 1 gallon a week that I pre mixed for him. He loved the extra crop but as a draw back (if you want to call it that) he ran out of room in his grow tent by week 3 flower lol.
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Dr. Glas Plandai Ph.D.
Major in Horticulture
Minor in Sustainable Agriculture
Glas Plandai on FaceBook
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amp244
Stranger
Registered: 02/19/16
Posts: 1
Last seen: 8 years, 7 months
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Re: CO2 by Fermentation It Does Work!! [Re: GlasPlandai]
#806552 - 02/23/16 10:09 AM (8 years, 9 months ago) |
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This seems pretty damn easy to me. So the key is a sealed grow room and a dialed in recipe.
How sealed are we talking? What about a single car garage that as of now has drywall up, but is not sealed with compound, so there are very thin cracks in some places throughout the room. Just wondering exactly how OCD with the sealing you've got to be for this method, or co2 in general...
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GlasPlandai
Stranger
Registered: 02/17/16
Posts: 9
Loc: Ireland
Last seen: 8 years, 9 months
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Re: CO2 by Fermentation It Does Work!! [Re: amp244]
#806574 - 02/23/16 07:55 PM (8 years, 9 months ago) |
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Quote:
amp244 said:
This seems pretty damn easy to me. So the key is a sealed grow room and a dialed in recipe.
How sealed are we talking? What about a single car garage that as of now has drywall up, but is not sealed with compound, so there are very thin cracks in some places throughout the room. Just wondering exactly how OCD with the sealing you've got to be for this method, or co2 in general...
You don't have to get stupid nuts for the 8x10 room that I started with all I did was hit big cracks with TuffStuff expanding foam, paint a couple good thick coats of flat Titanium White. I globed it in the cracks of the dry wall real good, and I sealed the door with 1/4in door weather stripping.
That room took six 5gallon water bottles starting with 2gall watter and 5lbs sugar charging with 2lbs sugar in 2liters of water each bottle every 4-5 days. And that was with grocery store fast rise yeast.
My 2nd room I went stupid on with orca film on top of Thinset the door is all steel and a steel frame sporting a refrigerator door seal. The electrical is even run thru foam sealed pipes. This one takes 5x 5gallon bottles and is supplemented with a controller to make sure it never drops under 1200ppm with an exhaust fan to dump anything over 1350ppm. Room cost was 10x the 1st one and the only difference in the 2 rooms isn't even yield its the AC not running as often by a whopping difference of a few hours over the entire grow. The 20# CO2 I use has lasted me over a year so far. The 30-40 pints of 180 proof stilled moonshine with the right recipe sells for $15 a pint and is gone b4 I can dry and cure my harvest. More than pays for all my neuts and supplies for a grow.
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Dr. Glas Plandai Ph.D.
Major in Horticulture
Minor in Sustainable Agriculture
Glas Plandai on FaceBook
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dmtcorey
~The time police~
Registered: 08/06/09
Posts: 1,041
Last seen: 7 years, 6 days
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Re: CO2 by Fermentation It Does Work!! [Re: GlasPlandai]
#806672 - 02/25/16 03:54 PM (8 years, 9 months ago) |
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this kind of a co2 method may be better for a micro grow ..
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