Minty Grow Diary - GR420 LED Grow Off

[kbag]

Excellent stuff minty keep it up love this sort of stuff.

[Mini-G-Star]

Loving this, hope to tag along on this grow and see how you get on.

[Nanook]

omfg youve built what I wanted to and never got round to!
AMAZING system!

[Keeno]

Thst is just amazing MintyMods, lost for words. This would make so many growers lives a lot easier. Nice work mate.

[Minty]

A very similar build by LED Gardener can be seen in the following YouTube posts:-




I didn't copy him as he has only just posted but the build has similar components to mine and is show cased well.

Plus he has working Mag Stirrers and dosing sorted out already ;o)

[Minty]

I can see me picking your brains at some point as I want to do something similar but without the feeding as I top feed manually.

Sure, I would love to help - what are you thinking of doing?
The Atlas probes and Tentacle shield are probably the most expensive parts.
The Ardunio, shields, RF sender, etc are pretty cheap for what they are.

[Josh]

Dude this is gonna be sick!
Quick question though how is the doser going to know how many of each nutrient to add?
Wouldn't it have to do a continual water analysis the whole time to see how much of each is getting used by the plant?

[Minty]

Dude this is gonna be sick!
Quick question though how is the doser going to know how many of each nutrient to add?
Wouldn't it have to do a continual water analysis the whole time to see how much of each is getting used by the plant?

I wasn't initially going to do any level of analysis as my controller only really records the E.C. and P.H. levels along with water temp & air temp / humidity.

The main plan is to have it automatically dump all the water on a weekly basis using the pumps within the Res and each pot shown in the following image with the clear pipes attached.

The white pipes are the recirculating pipes with the clear being drainage.

The main recirculating pump from the Res pumps into the bottom front and bottom back of each IWS Oxy Pots and recirculates back via the top white pipes.



Then refill using R.O. Water from the main tank into the Res and Pots, before dosing a pre-determined amount of each nutrient based on ml required (dosing pumps cycled at specific speed and for a specific time to dose a known amount).
This gives it a weekly feed and the Res will be topped up with plain R.O. water for the remaining week until the Dump, Refill, Dose cycle repeats. Not sure how well this will work but it's a start.

The main stopping point at the moment is the requirement to 'shake well' each nutrient prior to dosing which I have purchased some PC fans (Cooler Master with Green LED's ones as they were on offer) and intend to make some magnetic stirrers to resolve this as per the video above.

Another problem I have is that the water level in the pots at the moment is not really variable and a little high for my liking - the following image shows the level while the pump is running on low:-



The level drops to the following safer level when not running, but it obliviously needs to recirculate and this is a little too low:-



So my plan is to introduce another return pipe from each pot (under the existing one) with a flow control tap which should allow me to control how high the water level goes into the net pot.

Hopefully that will resolve the issue and I can move on to popping some seeds ;o)

[Minty]

Seeing as I am in Category 3 "LED grow lights with up to 600w draw" for the competition is it wrong to want to get another 121.2‬ Watts of LED just to fill in the gaps?



I reckon I get a couple more strips in the back running front to back and it does say "UP TO 600 Watt" ;o)

You can see the joists and the problem I had with 'other lights' from this image. The Invisible Sun R-Strips are perfect for me. Just need a couple more...

Ironically, Rich from Invisible Sun still owes me a " ISH120 PCB" which he never sent me the 'delivery cost link for' nor the actual fitting. Does he hang out here or would Invisible Sun be willing to uphold the original offer made?

[Minty]

Just checked the web site and they are out of stock on the R Strips god damn it...

@InvisbleSun - if you have any returned boards with a couple of diodes out or something I would be willing to purchase a couple along with heat sinks and a driver?

Can you help me max out the remaining 120 watts?

Come on, it's good advertising and I would like to stay with 100% Invisible Sun LED's if possible especially with your good spirit of sponsoring this competition ;o)