Clean setup, Lions. A few questions.
-How long had those SUs been vegging for up until this point?
-How much and how often will you gas them with that HydroGEN?
-Can you give a better cost estimate of what it might run to put something like that into operation? Under $1000 USD after everything?
-Can anyone give me some rough percentage improvement yield-wise per watt of light when using a Co2 regimen as opposed to nothing at all? 25%? 40%? 2gpw?
(obviously in some optimal SoG-specific soil, hydro or coco scenario)
Thanks.
Here they are at 3.14.2009 - wilted almost to death as I switched out a DRT-1 and forgot to change it to 24hr from Day operation - duh! At at that point, the smaller cuts were rooted but not on nutes yet, the bigger cuts had been on nutes for about a week I think. The two batches were taken 10 days apart - but I swapped up a few slow rooters from the second batch to the first... The first batch has been in the flower unit (still vegging on half wattage light) since last Thursday. I put the second flower unit in action last night.
I hook the Hydrogen up to a CO2 controller set at 1600PPM - during the daylight hours the controller will emit as needed - I have the deadband set at 100. It was using a Cap controller but in my new Stink room I have the Sentinel CHHC-1 to handle CO2 and environment.
Here is a general price breakdown to get you running - though there are many options...
The cheapest and most efficient method is to use the Hydrogen with an existing big body of water - like a swimming pool or pond, etc. In this mode you just need the Hydrogen $340, plus a good pump like a little giant $140 - some hosing, and of course a CO2 monitor - $250 - $750. I suppose you could use some sort of timer to turn the pump off and on but that is not efficient and you could easily over gas yourself as this baby puts out!
For most people you will hve to use some sort of res... to get away with passive cooling, you will need a 100 gallon res or more depending upon how much CO2 you need to generate. The cheapest 100 gallon res you can get is a kiddie pool - but they are flimsy and have a big footprint. A quality 100 gallon res will run you $200+. You can use a smaller res (as small as 5 gallons), but you then need to use a chiller... so a 35 gallon Brute trash can is about $40 and a 1/10 HP chiller is about $300. Add tax, labor and misc tubing, and hardware - and either a gas hook up or a propane tank and you can get close to a $1000.
Here is my setup:
Hydrogen - $340
Brute 20 gallon trash can - $20
Little Giant 50500 - $130
EcoPlus 200 GPH pump - $20
ActiveAqua 1/10 chiller - $330
Tax and labor - $priceless
CO2 typically adds 10 - 30+% to your yield... Stink was doing about 12 oz per rack without CO2 and then went to 16 oz per rack with CO2... but now he gets 27 ox per rack and his next harvest will supposedly be even bigger! I have seen about a 20% increase myself - but it is hard for me to compare as I keep changing things up...