New Grower 2nd grow, 1st time AF, 7 year gap

[xyberg]

Hello Everyone! Thanks for taking the time to look over my journal. Hopefully you learn SOMETHING from reading my struggles. For the experienced growers, thank you for taking the time to read and help me!

Also, I apologize for how large the pictures are.

Strain: Bubba Trouble

My setup :
Grow Area: 2'x4'x7' Tent
Fan : iPower 6" 442 CFM inline fan + carbon filter w/ Fan speed controller
There is a small fan at the bottom of the tent for an active intake and it is pulling through a milk jug that has been punctured a billion times and has been filled with Orbeez water beads.

Lighting:
Veg: HydroFarm t5ho 6700k 4' 6 tubes

Flower (week 4): I have 2x HGL 260w kits. (4 qb288v2 3000k lights in total) I will only be using one in this tent though because I think two will actually be too much and I will eventually upgrade to a 4x4x6 and do 3 plants at a time after I successfully navigate my current set up a couple of times.
You can see 1 kit sitting above the t5 in the picture.

Nutrients/Supplements:

I am actually only used 1ml/gal for the DiamondNectar(Humic Acid) & CalMag.


Medium:
5 gallon DWC bubble buckets using 5" net pots with hydroton and rapid rooters.

I am also running a bucket of pH'ed water with an air stone at all times

The original two seeds went into a cup of water overnight on Saturday, July 21st and then left in Rapid Rooters in a humidity dome until Tuesday morning on the 24th when they were showing their cotyledons being fully open. I dropped one of the two seedlings during transplant and she died completely a couple of days later ;(. I dropped another seed Wednesday night, and it's day 1 in the tent was on Sunday, the 29th.


I have been playing with the opening and closing of vents and trying to figure out exactly how to best control my environment as I have struggled with humidity and temperature.

While I have learned a lot I honestly don't know if I want it to be cooler with less humidity or hotter with higher. The water temp is also swinging from about 72 to 85 as well depending on how sunny it is. The outside temperature is just the temp of the outside room as a whole.


After everything though it seems like my girls don't like what I am doing really. The girl at day 10 is just NOW starting her second set of true leaves even though she has two massive roots down out of the net pots and into the res itself. The girl at day 5 seems ok really but just really odd leaf shape on the first ones.
Day 10

Day 5

Any thoughts/ideas on what to do? Anyone spot any problems/issues with anything?

Thank you again for taking the time to read!

 

[xyberg]

Things I have learned thus far:

1. Don't turn the Rapid Rooter upside down.
2. Use some sort of holder for the rapid rooter
3. I would like to try putting a skewer through the center of the Rapid Rooter so that the path of least resistance will shoot it straight down first.
4. Aerate water and nutes 24 hours BEFORE you use the res or pH drift will be MUCH more (SO THATS WHAT THE PROBLEM WAS THE ENTIRE FIRST GROW SMH)
5. Opening vents will lower temperature but also humidity (DUH I know)

 

[bad dragon bzzz]

Hi and welcome welcome to autos..a happy medium avoid chasing things mostly out of our control.sort of the basics and the other bulits and bobs will follow.temps i dont care unless its lower that 15 higher that 30 degrees,humidy could be 40 or 65 depending what time i open the cupboard door.
Looks sppt on for 5 and 10 days hydro/dwc are meant to start a tad slow but soon speed up.

 

[xyberg]

Thanks Archie! You don't know how much I needed to hear that lol.

 

[Death The Cultivator]

I struggled with humidity and temperature issues my first grow. I found that leaving one of my netted flaps open with my exhaust fan only running to remove humidity when necessary but otherwise a humidifier with towels. My humidity is always 70-75 with temps between 79-84f. The easiest way I found to control mine was using a humidity controller with a humidifier and an exhaust fan. I pour a gallon of water on the floor, soak four bath towels in hot water, and run my exhaust fan from the controller that I set and leave alone.

You want to aim for Vapor Pressure Deficit values. Staying in that orange is best but I would think you need lower temperatures to avoid root issues.

My First Grow
Me vs. 00 Seeds Automatik Collections 600w Top Fed DTW

 

[xyberg]

Thank you for that incredibly handy chart! Now I know that I had no reason to freak out when it was at 65% while it was raining. This chart kind of pushed me to try and see how much higher I could get the humidity but I didn't see much more than a 10% difference for my environment after adding the initial humidifier. As we get out of summer and into fall and winter I think the chart will be much more applicable for me. For now, it seems like adding a 2nd humidifier is the best thing but my other one is extremely tiny

Here is an update of them:
Bubba Trouble [HASHTAG]#1[/HASHTAG]
Day 13

Bubba Trouble [HASHTAG]#2[/HASHTAG]
Day 8

Here is a wider shot of them both and you can see the last 5 days range on the Hygrometer

So really just sitting back and waiting now for things to ramp up. I mix a new res every week for them on Saturday/Monday. This is the method have been using, first I use 2 gallons of refrigerated distilled water, around 2 gallons tap to get it down to 67-68 degrees then adding my nutrients, aerating for 24 hours, pHing to 5.8, and then swapping it for the old res. I will probably never use distilled water or refrigerate it again though.

 

[richykn]

Hi there mate and welcome .
Things are looking great in there I wouldn't worry , you seem to be keeping track of things great and doing a lot of work to keep them happy .
I'm a new grower and started a dwc grow I'm on day 30 now , I also had slow growth at first and after reading up about it I found this to be pretty common when growing in DWC , what happened next however was massive growth from around the 2 week mark , you can tell from your pics that the older girl has grew alot in just 3 days and she will start to take off and surprise you from now on .I also change out the Res every week like yourself what I do is use the cheap air pump that came with my set up and aerate the tap water in a separate bucket for about 2 hours before I add the nutes and whatever else you put in I then leave it for about 20 Min and then pH accordingly . As for Res temps i add a 2 litre bottle of frozen water every 12 hours and it seems to keep it in range ( I don't test the temps just a touch test and it's always cool to the touch ) .

As I say I'm new to this myself but a few things IV learnt throughout this is that it's important to have a good air pump my first came with the bucket and was only 78/lph so bought another at 200/lph which you can pick up really cheap , you could also add foil or a reflective material around your buckets not just the tops I sprayed mine with mirror effect spray paint .
Sorry for the essay I just know how worrying it can be and good luck with the grow mate .

 

[xyberg]

@richykn Dude thank you so much for your advice. You got me through the past 3 weeks by letting me know it was okay to put a frozen water bottle to get the temps under control. It was up to 85 (29.5) in the grow area but due to the frozen bottles I could keep the rez temp at around 72 (22) np. The girls seemed to love this environment and have absolutely exploded.

Shortly after the August 5th post I noticed that I had some root rot going but I have only pretty white growth since fixing the rezz temps with frozen bottles.

The better news is that I now have fixed the cooling and heating situation and the environment stays between 67-73 (19.5-23) with the rezz always a degree or two below that.


Really, and truly I want to thank everyone for taking the time to read and comment on my posts. Due to the sage advice I have received I am going to be turning out a better end product for myself. This is a great community with a lot of incredibly smart people!

I will try and post pictures of them tomorrow evening when they will be on day 38 and 31. The following day they will be moving into a 4x4 tent so that they each have their own lightning fixture and more space to bush up since they've crowded the 2x4.

Here they are last week but the humidifier is gone now that temps are stable. Day 29 and 24:

 

[richykn]

@xyberg , you're welcome mate it's nice to be able to help someone after all the help iv received myself , the girls are looking great good job

 

[MedCzech]

Good job guys! Looking nice

Welcome to AFN! Peace and happiness man, there are so many great people here to help and or consult with, you are going to love it. Keep up the good work.