SUPER SILO; Vertical, 2kW, 100 ft² RDWC Trees, water cooled on dry nutrients

I've just completed my first four trellis Super Silo; this cylinder made of mesh fencing material stands six feet above the RDWC, five feet in diameter, has four tubsites and presents 100 ft² to two thouies, one hung from the ceiling and the other standing on a tripod in the middle.

So, this one is two feet taller and one foot wider than the two plant, 50 ft² silo that I'm used to working with. In other words, double the interior growing space, complete with double the watts to light it- but not double the footprint. INTERESTING!

I bought a big fan to blow upwards through the center, to bring cool air from floor level and blow it upwards to both move heat from the bulbs out of the canopy, and provide a breeze on the plants. If this isn't sufficient, I'll add an 8" duct inlet collar on a 90 degree angle- and SUCK the heat from directly above the bulbs and stuff it right through the Icebox exchanger! This would be in addition to the first fan blowing from beneath.

I'm skipping a light mover for the moment because I want the thing up and running. If I can retrofit during the run I will- or, I'll just wait. With two bulbs, the light distribution pattern is going to be much better than with just one in any case. I'm lining the ceiling with Mylar, and beneath, covering the area around the sides of the fan and tripod beneath, I'm using more rigid reflective insulation board.

So, top and bottom will be covered in reflective materials and of course all the walls are directly in range, always just 30-36" from a bare bulb. I'm thinkin' it's gotta be a nice place for some girls to hang out and do some personal growth... Might be nice for plants, too. LOL

I have a trophy crew bursting every seam in the veg tent- and growing directly into the MH thouie in the adjust-a-wing! High time to get them into their places! Tomorrow, the leak test will be finished- already went around it twice tonight, sometimes a drip is just slooow, lol

This is just to get y'all set up for what I'm hoping is going to be an interesting and educational project. We might just grow a lil weed along the way, too- cuz that's what we do in Colorado.

Feel free to wander in and ask questions, comment and shoot the shit- but this thread is officially amateur hour free. Please respect that and take the drama elsewhere.

I've been doing this awhile, but vertical growing is a relatively new development; this represents only my first redesign of the concept. The first, as alluded to above, was four feet tall by for feet in diameter. It was very well lit by a single thouie, although a mover would have made a big difference in how well distributed it was.

The RDWC consists of four 27 gallon tuffboxes from Home dePot, connected to one another and a control bucket by 1" bulkhead fittings. Even here, I'm always tinkering; I've installed airless aeration. Instead of an air pump and stones, the water that would ordinarily be pumped to the head bucket (epicenter, whatever you want to call the upstream end) from the tailbucket is instead sent through a manifold that feeds waterfalls in the lids of each tubsite. Aeration and agitation are achieved with the same pump I needed anyway to circulate water- which of course still happens.

The room is sealed and CO² bottle fed. Instead of AC, I use water chilling to cool the air, dehumidify and chill the water in the RDWC. This is a substantially more efficient approach than air to air AC, and has several more advantages as well, which I can cover later if anyone cares.

The best part of this is it allows me to put the chiller anywhere within range of a pair of waterlines- so it sits on a windowsill all summer and in my spare bedroom all winter, warming my home with the 'waste' heat from my grow. That trick has saved me the cost of the chiller itself, not counting any of the other savings I've achieved with it!

In case it's not obvious by now, I'm the gearhead. I'm interested in HOW to grow the plant, how to provide the best environment for it- and how to minimize the impacts of providing it to your wallet and the planet at large.

By way of a lasting thought, consider that we are Gods in our growrooms; make no mistake, we as individuals hold the power of feast and famine, health and pestilence, life and death for nearly every living thing in our little artificial world. Thus it's not so hard to see the problems and work for the best possible result.

So it is with the planet we all share. We hold the same power over the Earth collectively as we do in our growrooms individually. It would certainly seem to be in our best interest to work together with each other and the planet in order to gain the best possible result.

So why don't we?

This project is my contribution. I aim to slash the cost of indoor gardening to the point where it can compete with sunlight on a head to head basis for a wide variety of crops, from cannabis to cauliflower! In so doing, perhaps I can help to save untold megawatts of electricity, dramatically reduce the footprint needed to support a human's needs indoors, and reuse or recycle nearly everything involved, thereby drastically reducing the traditional waste stream from agriculture.

Or, maybe just grow a few good plants.

 

WHOA! Sorry about posting the same thread SIX TIMES! My phone acted up on me, I had no idea it was putting in overtime like that! A lil help? I think they're all the same, so let's just call this thread the right one.

 

Rock and Roll! Nice to have you aboard! I'll get to pictures (with circles and arrows, and a paragraph on the back of each one...) and explanations as people ask, every site is different and I don't know what peeps have seen or not seen here.

 

I have noticed the glaring lack of a vertical growing forum in this site, something that's included in most other similar forums of any size. If you'd like to see a vertical grow forum on Grasscity, by all means add your opinion to the thread I started in Forum Help here;

http://forum.grasscity.com/general-forum-feedback/1285425-vertical-grows-forum.html

 

 
First, a journal. Then, from that I/we can determine what's most helpful for a write-up. I'm not doing a write-up until a grow is finished, the better to keep all the materials organized once it's time to do it- otherwise, it's such a mess people will give up reading without learning anything.
 
Second, ask yourself the same question before asking others. Why do you suppose you've only seen the same one or two pics? Because it was meant as a teaser, to get people intrigued! So, be curious, and ask more questions. What do you want to know?

 

The other reason I haven't posted a lot of pics is because they really aren't very good at showing what's going on. There's not enough space in the room to get far enough back to get any kind of an overview, and the closeups lose all sense of scale. I'll try anyway;
 

 

RDWC= Recirculating Death Without Cause, lol
aka recirculating deep water culture...

Keep it cool, mine runs in the mid sixties.

Bennies help- I brew up a fresh batch with every reservoir change and add them as soon as the EC and pH are stable.

A great way to make a small amount of beneficial microbe inoculant go a very long way is to put the inoculant, a tablespoon of sugar, perhaps some earthworm compost and I'll add an alfalfa extract in the summer, I want to see if I can spot a difference when using it as a natural source of triacontanol.

Toss it all in a five gallon bucket, add water to fill, drop in an airstone and brew for 12-24 hours. The mixing and aeration action in the water will mix the materials, the sugar will give the microbes something to feed on and multiply with, and soon it's a powerful inoculant against root problems! I've added it directly to the reservoir and I've diluted it some 5:1 with full strength nutrient water (recipes shortly) and crown feed.

 

I use OGBiowar.com foliar pack and root pack, along with earthworm castings, primarily. I brew it up and then mix when RDWC water and crown feed, our just add the tea directly to the control bucket.

 

These are specifically formulated as microbial inoculants; endo and ectomycorrhizae, fungal spores and even biological pest control species. Pretty much everything but the nutrient itself. The idea is not so much to break down materials into forms the plant can use (they're getting fed directly) as it is to have them in situ and ready to deal with opportunistic pathogens before they get a foothold.

 

And no disrespect taken, I appreciate your comments.

The aim with these materials in my setup was solely to outcompete pathogens in the water the plants live in. I agree that many/most of what's in there isn't useful in my situation. I'm also aware that very little or any of what I inoculate the water with will survive for very long, but as long as it stops the snot before it goes, that's what matters to me. There is no question that brewing these things up makes for a rich tea, which seems to be beneficial.

 

This is an excellent conversation for me in any case; I'm not happy with my roots and how they look. I don't seem to get large root masses like others do, and I know it's a limiting factor. I'm still working on my methods, so any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

Well, the water is currently in the low sixties, and there's a waterfall in every tubsite. Nothing looks like it's drowning.

There is a method to mix hydroponics and organics; 'aquaponics'. I was just trying to build my way up to that slowly, lol

This isn't a new problem. I just don't seem to get massive amounts of roots and I'm stymied by it.

 

Oh, and before it goes unsaid, do NOT use Hygrozyme in your RDWC for anything but enzymatic cleaning BETWEEN runs. Do not use it with plants, as it creates a nasty floating sludge that must be disposed of by hand or it will create the very ideal conditions for anaerobic bacteria to thrive. They recommend its use as I've outlined above as well, other forms of hydroponics react differently to it than DWC does.

 

Water Cooled

The chiller- a ChillKing 2 Ton window mount from Hydro Innovations, cools my entire op; it supplies cold water to the Icebox air to water heat exchangers that then suck the heat from the working grow room sure. Since the water temperature sets dewpoint in the room, these Iceboxes also act as dehumidifiers and the distillate rains down and back into the RDWC. This reduces the need for topups. The same cold water system also supplies the cooling coils in the RDWC.

There is no other active cooling device, this replaces air conditioning, a separate dedicated dehuey and still manages the water temp. One unit, instead of three.

Yes, of course it's more expensive than an air conditioner. It is NOT more expensive than all three of the devices it replaces, and it works far more efficiently than running all those will.

I have gotten the naysayers; the facts are the facts, and I'm not going to argue with someone who thinks that running AC is better, the numbers don't lie. The better your op is sealed, the better chilling works, and the bigger efficiency advantage it opens over conventional AC.

I've even gotten the wags who tell me water chilling can't be scaled up from the 1/2 hp toys they see at the hydro store. People, just about every large commercial building is water cooled, both for efficiency and to conserve space. Those same attributes make it a superior choice for growing indoors.

That said, it is also a more demanding system to set up and is likely best for more permanent installations. But that is where the disadvantages end; I bring my chiller in from the windowsill in October and put it on a coffee table in my spare bedroom, where it spends the winter being my furnace!

Hey- I paid for that heat. My growroom might be done with it, but if I can get another bite at it, that's money in my pocket. In this case, enough money every three winters to purchase the chiller all over again, just in the savings on home heating bills alone!