New Setup - Aeroponics - first ever grow

[builderdan]

Well, this is my first proper grow (tried one a few years ago and buggered it up right royally with very very wet soil).
I've setup a cabinet with a 400w HPS, temperature control (the location is very cold with us being in the middle of one of the coldest winters ever so I have a bathroom heatlamp/light/fan unit - the heat lamps are attached to a thermostat which turns them off when it gets above 20degrees C)
I have to apologise for all the metric stuff in here - NZ has been metric for long before I was born and I know no different

The setup itself is for a single plant (thats all the seeds I could find without making any noise, my town is way too small - 344,000 people but everyone seems to know someone you know, we have 3 degrees of seperation)
I have a single 3.something litre plastic pail with lid. This container has a hush ballcock valve (like you find in quiet toilets) to fill it from a larger resevior tank, a ultrasonic fogger unit, and a 20mm flexible ducting pipe that is above the water line and exits the container. In the lid there is a 12v 60mm pc fan ducted in through some house spouting down pipe which is being run at 3v to make it slower.

The 20mm ducting pipe feeds into a second identical sized container about 100mm down from the top in the center of one side. In the lid of this container I've cut a hole for the cage pot. Basically the first container generates the fog (5micron droplets) and the fog is forced out of that container into the grow container due to the small pc fan - it then has nowhere to go but up and out through the cage pot. The cage put is full of clay pellets with a very small rockwool cube just buried beneath the surface.

3 days ago I placed my single seed into the rockwool - at this stage the seed had a half inch tail on it. I was going to leave it until the tail was an inch long as I had read a few articles about it being this length before going into a hydro setup. However doing a bit more reading from horticultural stuff about more legitimate hydroponic growing I found that if you let the tail get too long the plant doesn't have a lot of energy for binding/attaching to the medium and they advised putting it in asap - so we did.
Now three days on the plant is 25mm (an inch) above ground level, the second set of leaves (first spikey ones) are very clearly defined and basically I have been able to see the changes on a nearly hourly basis.

I'll get some photo's up this weekend (8th) and I would love some feedback about any ideas you guys may have. Any pitfalls you may know of and any suggestions for making this better.

At this stage my cabinet still needs to be painted inside (only the ceiling and two side walls are white because I made them out of seratone which is a white shower/bathroom lining product)

builderdan Reviewed by builderdan on 07-06-2006. New Setup - Aeroponics - first ever grow Well, this is my first proper grow (tried one a few years ago and buggered it up right royally with very very wet soil). I've setup a cabinet with a 400w HPS, temperature control (the location is very cold with us being in the middle of one of the coldest winters ever so I have a bathroom heatlamp/light/fan unit - the heat lamps are attached to a thermostat which turns them off when it gets above 20degrees C) I have to apologise for all the metric stuff in here - NZ has been metric for long Rating: 5

[latewood]

looking forward to the photo's...I love when we get new buildermembers...peace

[Opie Yutts]

my town is way too small - 344,000 people

Funny, I thought the nearest town to me was small, with 6000 people.

You planted one seed, and went to all that work? For your sake I sure hope it's female. Love seeing fogging set ups. Can I see?

[sb420treydad]

can i get some pics pm'd to me? Im interested in a similar setup.

[Cyclonite]

You might run into problems putting fog through a PC fan...unless its sealed.