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Old 01-28-2017, 02:12 PM
kevin24018 kevin24018 is offline
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Join Date: May 2016
Location: Virginia
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Alberta_grower View Post
In my opinion, it's not the best aeroponic system. The idea behind aeroponics, is for the roots to hang in the air completely. In a few short days or a week at most, those roots will be on the bottom of those fence posts, sitting in nutrient solution. The problem with that, is at that point, he'll have 3" of aeroponics and a very poorly functioning NFT system. With aeroponics, you only want your mist on for about 1-3 minutes every 10-15 minutes. So what's going to happen is that the roots on the bottom, are going to get flooded by nutrient solution, which eliminates the gas exchange benefits of aeroponics. During the off stage, the nutrients will pool, and become oxygen deficient quite quickly, especially if the nutrient temperature is ambient 25C. One solution could be to tilt the trays to reduce nutrient depth, but the fast moving nutrients won't be used by the roots effectively, meaning uptake would grind to a halt 10% of the time.

If you're planning on building this system, don't bother. It would be more effective to simply build it the same way, but as a NFT setup. In the early stages, use drip emitters directly at the plant sites, and then turn them off once the roots establish in the NFT stream. The only issue is that if you're planning on keeping a plant like peppers for a while, the roots will overgrow this system as an aero or nft setup. You could be fine with a quick finishing crop like lettuce, or various cooking herbs. Something that will grow for months will give you problems.

What did you want to grow in this setup? If I have a better idea of what you want to grow, I can help you find a system that will be cost effective, and give you the best results.
was just thinking about lettuce, the gullies would be at a slant so they would drain. From what I have read an nft wouldn't work so well in round pipe and the flow rate is very picky and or must be very precise. So my thought was sprayers hanging from the top and the pipe slanted to drain, kind of an aero nft hybrid.
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