I have failed miserably using several methods and now am having my first success! I have a five gallon bucket with about 3" of RO water. I cut a round piece of 1/2" styrofoam and punched in 5 holes using a pencil, then put the cuttings in with maybe 3/4" or less of stem exposed. I did not trim the leaves which were fairly small. Placed the styrofoam into the bucket with an inverted bucket on top with an air gap between the two for ventilation and a 13w CFL mounted to the inside bottom (now the top) with vent holes drilled around the CFL to let out the heat. Changed the water every 3 days for 12 days and - voila! 100% success and ready for planting. An air bubbler would probably speed things along, but this is strictly for personal use so ghetto is fine. No complicated misters and PVC plumbing and such.
My DIY LED is working perfectly and is clearly outperforming the commercial LED of the same wattage. The plants are loving it. I am going to do a complete rebuild in the next four months or so. I used a plywood case as a proof of concept. Now I want to make it look slick. Also, because parts were built piecemeal, I have seven power cords coming out of it - one for each driver and would like to reduce that to one power cord and 3 drivers maximum - maybe fewer, but getting the right one with excellent efficiency and high power is expensive. I also have some new ideas on better passive cooling even though that has not been an issue. Also might install an overdrive (50%) function for late flowering which will be superbright, but will shorten the LED life somewhat. Will also be adding a specular aluminum reflector hood - possibly adjustable. Not sure if I will be adding any more LEDs as it is working fine for my space.
I could post a pic, but not sure what a plant floating on styrofoam in water at the bottom of a bucket is going to tell you.
Clone at 12 days in tap water. 3 clones in 3-4" of water in bottom of the clone bucket. 13W CLF in bucket lamp on top.
16" * 16" painted 1/4" plywood. The white LEDs have the heat sinks on the top along with the 8 LED drivers. The bottom sides are straight up and down and need to be beveled at a 30 degree angle for a better spread and could use some real reflective aluminum. This is the unit powered on. The center LED is a 20W 630nm red. The top and bottom large blues are 465nm 10W. The corners are full spectrum warm white (3000K) 45W powered at 20W. The top blues are 3W 450nm blues and the bottom red are 3W 460nm red. The light came about this way partially because of what I had left from other experiments. Obviously the 3W red and blues should be mixed. I might add some 13 or 23W CFLs mounted sideways in the empty spaces. Next spring I will do my final design and make it look totally professional. I may go with 9 of the full spectrum warm whites for a 180W unit for my 2' X 2' space. That is the max heat I can take. Like I stated previously, this unit was a proof of concept and is my third and most complex lamp.
that light looks awesome and high quality check out these roots in the hybrid cloner 5000 my sensei showed me this its a mix of rockwool and dwc (oxygen to the root zone) unlike most diy cloners the roots are completely submerged like yours cloning nutes used are gh rapid start and clonex gel these pics are at 14 days i was gonna make a thread but havent gotten around to it yet
Yours obviously look way better; however my project was to see how simple I could make it and still have it function. With my tiny grow space, optimization was not required. Good job though!
thanks sensei says its 100% success and i know from the posts on here that cloning is not the easiest thing to do
Bongboi, is the clone set up like an ebb n flood table or do you just empty the new water and refill every couple of days?
Swami, I've noticed that you're pretty good at clones. are these clones you've acquired or did you cut them from a mother plant yourself? also, I noticed on your other thread that you mentioned your sativa plants getting too tall for their space. how tall is your space and how tall did they get? I'm wanting to grow some and was wondering if my space would work or not.
I don't exactly have a mother plant. Just cut off a bunch of clones of whatever I am vegging and label them. When the donater plant show sex, I toss the male clones. My grow space is somewhere around 4'. When they got too tall I just visciously bent them in half with a snap. Cruel, I know, but they recovered. I am not that interested in this grow simply because it is all wrong for my space. I am getting ready four indicas in a single 8 or 13 gallon tote DWC style. Those I will baby. Someday, I am going to grow a giant sativa horizontally. It will look somethng like the simple diagram below and be 'woven' into either string or horizontal dowels. ___|____|____|____|____|____|____|____| | | This would be a perfect setup to use 4' fluorescents. It will have a dozen 'main' colas and will totally outproduce a vertically grown indoor plant because of the even lighting.
that's a good idea. even better would be to bend it back horizontally a few times, maximizing the width of the growspace, too. your plant would probably be under a foot tall!