If you’re seeing air bubbles in them you should re connect them under water, don’t need to re soak if they’ve been in use and weren’t dried out, but any air inside will effect the accuracy of the diaphragm opening and closing, and that’s almost ways the cause of runoffs from what I hear. Only trouble I’ve had is the drip rings getting clogged every couple weeks, I just open them up a spin till they unclog then dial it back to where they were. I think maybe from the times I top water microbes/feeds maybe some bacteria starts to colonize the little holes or something like that 
Been using them for about 2.5 months so far with no runoffs, my plants are super happy, and frankly I’m getting a bit bored because all I have to do it check on them, fill the res once every 5ish days, and I give em a hand water of some food once a week. Besides that 1 day I week I hand water I could honestly leave them completely alone and not even open the tent. But of course I don’t 
Just can’t help but to check out my ladies daily
Yea I know, once they have a bubble I can see I should resoak them. But I look and if it’s just a small air bubble I use it again as it’s not super affected but once a bubble is very noticeable I grab another that is already soaked and ready. Then once I have a bunch with air bubbles not in use I resoak them. I have probably double the amount I use so I’m able to let the ones with the air bubbles build up until I need to resoak them. It’s kind of a pain the butt to do it so I try and do them all at once.
If you are using living soil you can just topdress dry amendments right under the drip lines. I just dig a big hole and fill with gaia green dry amendments. Works pretty well but gnats love that stuff.
Another reason I hand water atleast once a week, throw some BTI in that mix! but lately it’s been every other day with some bti battling a fungus gnat outbreak that started getting really bad in like week 2 of flower 
I should try those things out. I have like 20 of the non-brandname ones.
Right now my stuff is setup with Root Quencher drippers in the back, and 1/4" water line drippers on the others.
I do assemble them underwater, and tap several times to free up all the air bubbles that cling to them. One time in particular, I later found a fairly large air bubble, that continued to get bigger. I just let it go, since I had two carrots in that same container. But I did find it a bit strange how large the air bubble eventually got, even though it was assembled underwater and the top remained tight.
I’m much happier now mixing 5 gals of feed at a time and just dumping it all into the res. Plus less frequent mixing/watering. Massive improvement for me over individual watering every other day. They have definitely paid for themselves in time savings alone, not to mention keeping everything happy and alive while I’ve left town.
Anyone use agsil 16 in the reservoir? I know it’s fully water soluble so should be safe, just never let it sit in solution so see if it will precipitate after a day or a few…
Edit, answering my own question, called sustainable village because the guys there are always super helpful, they confirmed my suspicion that the silica in the agsil would be the one to cause problems in a gravity system, but recommended potassium sulfate for use in the reservoir as it’s fully soluble.
Happen to have some solution grade on hand so I’ll give em a little boost tonight! The bag of down to earth solution grade says 1-2 tablespoons per gallon for drench without soil analysis, that seems super high to me…? I’m more inclined to do 1tsp/gal, to google I go…
You can always just do a soil drench instead of running it through the BM.
I ran 3 last winter. Pretty trouble free. Was using megacrop single part not the cleanest but no floods.
I run a 5 gal res on the floor with a 1 gallon up high that feeds the carrots.
Run a pump down below with conductivity relay up top with a cycle relay. The cycle relay once tripped will run the pump for one min. Small pump with 1/4 hose. So I’d doesn’t flow much. Maybe adds 1inch to the gallon bucket. Prevents the level relay from short cycling.
Worked great except if the 5gall runs out the pump runs dry. No lifting water up high to fill is nice.