Hello all- my first post so please excuse any mishaps. I have a room that is 9'x4' and we will have 10 ladies in there soon. We have, until recently, relied upon the ever-popular 2 liter co2 generation technique. This method mixes yeast, sugar, and water in a 2 liter bottle with holes in the top and the bottle is then hung above the plants. However, this is a pain as we need to change out the bottle's so often and as they do not produce as much co2 as is desired. We will attempt to translate the 2 liter bottle technique into a 5 gallon bucket technique. The plan is to fill the 5 gallon bucket with the appropriate levels of water, yeast, and sugar(which has yet to be determined), cap it with a secure air-tight cap, and attach hoses to the cap so the attachment point is air tight. These hoses will then be hung above the ladies with holes in them. However this theory has a few problems I was hoping I might find help for. For starters, we are not sure what sort of porportions to use when it comes to yeast and sugar, we could simply stick with our current 2 liter bottle porportions but that leaves us in fear of the 5 gallon bucket exploding due to too much pressure. Also, we are unsure if this will create too little pressure and thus no co2 will make it up the hose. Does anyone understand the science behind this or has anyone tried this before? Ideally I would love to hear that someone has tried it before and knows what size hose to use with what yeast/sugar proportions. Any information will be greeted with open arms! Thanks in advance.
Yeast and sugar water do not produce a lot of CO2. For your money, you're better off doing it correctly. Go lift an actual CO2 tank and compare it to an empty one. The weight difference is huge. Consider that the liquid inside will expand to a rather huge volume, and it's enough for your plants to thrive. The CO2 from the reaction has to come from somewhere. CO2 is a fairly dense gas, and you can kind of figure that some of the weight is going to come from your sugar or yeast. Basically, with yeast and water, I'm afraid you'd have to go ultra large scale to even see any improvements. For your case, I think it'd be wise to save your money and not waste it on yeast. Yeast isn't cheap, and if it's not helping, there's no reason to continue using it.
Another thing to watch out for is if you have a seriously active fermentation and liquid comes out of the bucket and all over you plants. I would do this on the floor. Another thing to be careful of is, if some of the liquid gets stuck and clogs the tubing your using for distribution and gets plugged you've got yourself a dangerous bucket full of compressed gas and liquid. For example the first time I brewed beer I used an air lock that got plugged and came home to beer all over the place one day, dripping from the ceiling 8 feet above. It was like a geyser when pressure got too high the bung and airlock shot off.