Anybody use the Alien V system?
Amazon
Automatic irrigation
$30
My last comment was flagged
This looks ridiculously expensive…
Timer and pump.
Tees and stakes style water inputs
TeamFatOnes
Maybe so but not relevant to the question.
Yes it is…
Aliens cost $489
Mine costs $30
And works like a charm…
Spend away my friend
TFO
Man, that’s more like $2000.00! That makes the $400.00 autopot seem inexpensive
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Amazon 30€ gets a great working unit.
I could never buy a pump that looks like that above…
Ridiculous.
TFO
Welcome back
Check out my 4x4 grow posted in the Indoor section
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So I just finished a RDWC build after upcycling an older DWC build. Technically speaking, from a functional point of view, my build is the same as the AlienV.
A $30 build might describe my DWC system, but putting the R in used about $5000 worth of my time. I would happily pay $2000 for an AlienV. I’m intrigued by what system you have, I can’t find your post, can you reply with a link?
Now for $2000, on the AlienV right off the top you are getting a chiller, so that cost me $400, so now it is $1600 for the rest of the thing. I spent wayyyy to much on my wide-pipe interconnects, by the time you factor in the flex pvc, the bulkheads, and the camlock connectors, I spent about $300. And then the air pumps, the water pump, another $200 if I don’t count the ones that were trash. Then the base buckets, and lids and fittings hoses and parts at least $200, though I actually spent a lot more. So to me the AlienV is about $900 worth of “pretty”. You can call it ridiculous, and I don’t disagree, but if I were not the tinkerer that I am, and I was still wanting RWDC I would buy an AlienV and be happy that I did. I think the $900 worth of pretty, is also $900 worth of no trial and error on system design. I started with 5 gallon buckets in the 1980’s, before adding the R I was only slightly different than the 1980’s, so the level of trial and error for me is much lower than the average person in a newly legalized state.
I got lucky with chilled water. In the 1970’s, Rosenthall published indoor grows should be kept around 68°, so I was accidentially chilling my water and preventing root rot. A few years ago a guy at the hydro store asked me how I was chilling my water, when I told him he remarked that it must be expensive. Last year I did a summer crop and it was expensive. After some study I found Rosenthal was not wrong about growing cool under low light, but I would do better with warmer air and cold water. So after the summer crop was down I started working on a Rdwc design. Had I known 6 months ago what I know now, I could have saved a lot of time with an AlienV. But now that I know it, AlienV is just pretty. I did just now go look at the competitors for AlienV, and I see they are in the $250-$500 range with no chiller, so 650-900 when you add a chiller. For $900 what you get is functional but ugly, So me personally, I would have to think about it a while, but I would go with the $500 system, if those were my only choices.
The one I made was over-engineered for convenience. The AlienV does not have any convenience features that I could see, but it may have them all, but the fat pipe does not look reconfigurable… Convenience features allow me to rapidly reconfigure during an active grow. None of the cheap systems allow for that.
Also, I notice you like to recommend the competition’s seeds, instead of the seeds being sold by the company hosting this forum. I have scanned a number of the seed sellers, and they are selling the same seeds, all for very close to the same prices, so I wonder about that. Do you work for the other seed company? Did you get bad service from homegrown and this is your revenge? Looking at your posts while trying to find your grow I saw a lot of recommendations for competitor seeds, almost seeming disproportional. If you like posting here, it would be nice to recommend people buy seeds here. But if you had bad service, then go for it… People with bad service should never run forums. I have had pretty good service from https://homegrowncannabis.com/ so if someone here in these forums asks for seeds, that is where I would send them.
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TFO
No link, search for the words “automatic Irrigation” on Amazon.
Small box with a pump and stakes system.
If you still can’t find tomorrow ask again for a link.
I will find time
TeamFatOnes
Did not know we sell seeds here.
I like my sites filters.
Sorry for pushing the competition.
Total accidentally.
Ok
TFO out
Ok, I see several systems that are small pumps with stakes for irrigation. I know those systems well, I have a couple I was using when I was attempting remote farming from 650 miles away, using dirt. Buuuut that isn’t RWDC unless you ramp up the pumping action. That is just automatic irrigation.
So let’s put some context on why I see a big difference between automatic irrigation and rdwc. The plants we prefer to grow are actually rather high performance, they will grow faster larger and stronger in optimal conditions. And while soil is natural, it is also a large limitation. It limits oxygen, slowing root growth, which is why cloth bags are popular for soil growers, and if you examine those root balls, you will see the roots lining the outside walls right up to the edge of the air/wet soil interface. Plants breathe oxygen to live, co2 is only consumed for storing energy, and it is not consumed in the same parts or in the same way, oxygen is consumed where it is needed, so oxygen is needed everywhere. Soil blocks oxygen, that is it’s main issue. A secondary issue is it is harder to control and change the chemistry of soil, it will accumulate waste salts, and slowly drift away from ideal during your grow. AND it is actually contributing very little to the roots other than structure. Your plant consumes available nutrients at about 30 times the rate organics can decompose in the soil, so soil amendments are more about the future grows than they are about today’s grow. I would prefer to grow in soil, the plant seems to taste better to me when grown organically. But in the 1980’s I saw first hand cloned of the same plant planted in soil and in hydro, under the same lights in the same room, and the difference was night and day. The best soil in the world will never outperform hydro, if the hydro is competently deployed. In hydroponics you have the ability to tune your grow for maximum results. Every test scenario will be different, but I found the hydro to be double the performance of the soil grown plants.
so yes I can spend $30 for a way to grow some seeds. Or I can spend $2000 on a way to grow my seeds twice as fast and they are twice as heavy at the end. AND if you are comparing the 2 pounds you produce in soil with the 4 pounds you produce in half the time with hydro, hydro will pay for the cost of the grow system in the first crop. Even at “giving the shake away for almost free” prices of $100 an ounce, 2 pounds of extra weight is going to cover the expenditure of the alien system.
Unless you tell me you spent at least $1000 (or someone gave you $1000 worth of parts), there is no way on god’s green earth you are doing what an alien can do. Not for $30.
If you are on a budget you can do wonderful things with a $30 irrigation system. And if there were no way to justify the $2000 of the alien you would be right that $30 is all you should spend. But in my shoes it costs me $300 a month to power my grow in the winter, and it costs $1600 a month to power it in the summer. The cost difference is all consumed by air conditioning. If I grew outside it would be free, but because I grow inside I must find a way to get the most out of every dollar I spend, and a $2000 alien system producing twice as much twice as fast costs less to operate for a given volume of output, by allowing me to maximize what I can do in my little slice of the desert during the winter.
If we could grow outdoors, I would laugh and say you don’t have to spend anything, other than buying seeds, and paying the water bill. I grew up on organics, my family was poor and 90% of our food came out of our back yard where we had a couple large gardens, several compost piles, and ducks and chickens… water and seeds… Water costs the same no matter what, so we can ignore that cost. (water actually costs $25 a month in the desert for excess consumption due to watering lawns daily, and $350 a month in my other house where there are lakes everywhere… and we are restricted to watering once a week… What’s up with the cost of water??)
But the alien is a formula 1 race system. A $30 automatic irrigation system is a Volkswagen beetle. Both will produce great results. And depending on your situation, the $30 might be more than enough. But when I compare your $30 to the alien $2000, to ME the alien is cheaper and better.
I like my industrial buckets with my 4" flanges feeding 3" camlock connected stream plumbing, with the chiller and the air pumps and the results… OMG the results…
I love the $30 systems, and I love the $2000 systems. Equally, as they both do the same job, and they can both produce great results. $2000 is actually less than $30 when you consider the cost of the grow. Of course the $500 plus chiller is less still, but the point is $30 is a false savings if it makes you spend more on power to get the same results. Put another way, the $2000 is an investment in a technology that is actually proven to produce excellent results.
Did I mention how much of a pain hydro is? Plants in soil are sooooo much easier. We have been doing hydro because it actually performs. Just like the formula 1 car is faster than the vw beetle. Both cars can get you to the grocery store, and if you don’t need what hydro does don’t use it. If your state allows outdoor grows, even better.
I grow in a laboratory test tube because my state makes it expensive to do it any other way. As a result I think ridiculous systems like the Alien are just what some people need. And $30 automatic irrigation is great for the people that don’t need an alien. So not making fun of your irrigation system, only pointing out why some people see the alien as a good, affordable, thing.
There is one downside to a rwdc system, that I did not have with a wdc system. In my wdc system, I could have plants with different solutions in the tank. In an auto-flower regime with 24 hour lighting, it was common for me to have mature plants on plain water preparing for harvest, while next to it was a new plant just rolling into veg. So my wdc systems allowed me to have each bucket being it’s own world, unique to the plant’s needs. In a RWDC system, you have one flow cycle for a given water circuit, so there is a little less flexibility, unless you have a couple of water circuits. So RWDC is nice because it allows me to chill the water more than the air, reducing energy costs from cooling, but at the cost of flexibility of a wdc. WDC was better I think, RWDC is a cost savings measure brought on by REDICULOUS electric bills last summer. Yeah, I got 13 pounds, so shut up about it. I’m going from cooling a summer oven to 65f to keeping an ice-box cooled to 73f. I can barely see my grow show up on the power bill this month, so there IS some joy in the world. Running the AC in the winter is like winning a downhill race…
Now if I had a space about the size of my grow, filled with water and a specially constructed Styrofoam roof, I could make a desert water chiller capable of about 3 tons of cooling, enough for the grow AND the house. Then cold air would be free. Another pipe dream… A 30,000 gallon insulated water tank will chill to 6 degrees below the dew point on a cloudless night using a evaporative mist surface facing the -3f radiative black of the sky. Summer dew point here in high desert is in the 35-45f range, so you end up with 30,000gals of COLD water to circulate to your heat exchangers… Free AC only works in the desert, all you need is a $30 automatic irrigation pump (and an insulated space to store 30,000 gallons of cold water)… 
Time to take a road trip to Roswell and hang out with the aliens up there… All this alien talk…
It’s ok… Not only did you not know, but the people asking the question did not know either. I came for the seeds, and found the forum… different path in. You were being honest and helpful, can’t fault you on that.
Since I have stopped smoking, I can no longer taste the harshness of the hydro… I forgot to mention that. I’m old, and my lungs are shot, so I had to stop smoking. I use a “Plenty” for flower, and a “Peak Pro” for oil, and my lungs are sooo happy. I waste a lot of oil to the machine, and I only lightly vape on the flower, so it is pretty wasteful consuming 20 times more green than I did when I smoked, but it is higher quality, no more black tar in my life at all. Just food grade oil warmed to very precise temperatures. According to webster’s dictionary, smoke is a visible vapor, so according to webster’s I can still call myself smoky keoki, even if I say I stopped smoking and only vape…
But the point I was making is hydro pot can be a real harsh smoke, organics seems better when I side by side compare them. But only if you are burning it. When I vape I do not taste the hydro. Of course good genetics make the flavor better too… But when you vape all you taste are your terpines and other live essential oils. So I don’t get to smell the burning aroma any more… I miss that a little, but I do not miss the endless coughing.
I did try eating it, but it turns out that when you eat it you don’t get the same meds from it, you end up with some different compounds that for me just put me to sleep. Delta 9’s I think. Less delta 9 if you vape/smoke, not sure why. If you eat it, it all turns into delta 9, and the terpines are lost completely. The terpines are psycoactive, but to eat them you need 200,000 times more (drinking turpentine was a thing in the old days) So inhaling is the only thing that works for me, I just don’t want the smoke any more. I have a machine here that can roll cigars… So I can wave a fatty… but I’ll not be burning one.