My plan is to have a 3 bucket drip system, 1 bucket being the reservoir. I will have the water pump pumping into 2 drip lines and my idea was to have 1 inch return lines that returns any excess water over the ideal water height in the bucket. This will be my first time with hydro and just wanted to see if this is a working idea that anyone else has used. Excuse my mockup drawings. I am not an artist.
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A lot of work for a couple pails unless you plan on expanding later. Basically a RDWC setup and used by many. I just use Rubbermaid tubs. Nothing but an airstone in the bottom to worry about. No need for top drip.
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The only reason I am entertaining the idea is because I bought a grow tent on CL and the person selling ended up giving me all the equipment they had because it had been on CL for a month already. It included a blue lab controller, 4 way air pump, some water pumps, buckets, net pots, a second grow tent, etc. I wanted to have a control bucket so I can use the fancy controller 
. I would like to expand if it turns out to be my cup of tea.
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Hell of a deal then. Biggest concern with any hydro setup like that is nute temperature. Anything over 70F can easily lead to root rot and wipe you out overnight. Some people use beneficial bacteria to prevent it and I used to use strong hydrogen peroxide but made a DIY chiller from an old water cooler and that worked fine without peroxide.
What are going to use for nutes? I like the AN 3-part tho any will do but the AN is pH Perfect so you never have to check the pH if using RO water. Never have to change the nutes if you don’t want to either. The 3-part costs no more than others and the only AN supplements I use is the Big Bud for flowering and Rhino Skin to add some silica but that’s not essential. Any CalMag will do and of course Epsom salts. That’s all you really need to grow shitloads of bud other than good lighting. I use HID lights but you may want to look into LEDs which I know very little about.
What is that Blue Lab controller all about?
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I might just stick to a single bucket airstone setup for now. After explaining my reasoning I now see that I am just making it more complicated than it needs to be for just experimenting. Got a bunch of GH nutes in the deal too and I have some Cutting edge solutions 3 part. I will probably start after this week when the temps go down.
Controller is Bluelab Guardian. Has a temp/ec/ppm probe and a ph probe that sit in the reservoir to constantly monitor. I can still run it in the single bucket.
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Ah. So a sensor and not really controlling anything then. Thought maybe it metered out pH or nutrient stuff.
Don’t freak about pH. Let it move around but keep it in the range of about 5.5 - 6.3. You’ll have to keep an eye on that with the GH/Monsanto/Scotts/Bayer stuff you have. I bought gallon jugs of AN for $40 each about 5 years ago and have about half left. $44 for the jug of Micro.
Make sure to have proper pH Up and Down too. I only ever had to use pH down when using the AN nutes before they came up with the pH Perfect tech but that was some years ago. I use concentrated, 96% sulphuric acid and 4 or 5 drops in a 50L tub was enough to drop the pH from 6.3 down to 5.5 or lower and only needed that every 3 days when I did top-ups and testing for pH and ppm. I’ve done about 50 DWC grows since 2001. Mostly growing in soilless ProMix HP these days.
What are you using for lights?
I have a couple 600 watt Mh/HPS setups I use and an LED for seedlings
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Excellent! I’m running a 600W eBallast with an MH bulb in it now but now that buddy just came over tonight and picked up 4 plants I can get ready to flower my two larger plants in a few more days. I think I’ll switch to a 400W for them. 600 is more than 2 plants need I think tho I might get better results with the 600. Either will be using Hortilux Super HPS bulbs.
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Using the CES 3 part. Got it all setup and running. Threw an unknown strain rooted clone in for funsies. Had to ph down but very little. Ppm of my tap was 190. Have some bottles freezing for temp control through the next couple days. Does that look ok @LabRat?
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That looks pretty good.
What’s it like getting in and out of that pail? Do you have to lift the lid to check the depth or does it have some sort of level indicator?
After adding nutes what ppm did you get? I always went for around 300ppm to start clones off at and increased in increments as the plant started growing faster and faster as they will in those rigs. Veg can go crazy under good strong light so don’t let your plant get too big before flipping. I’m bad for vegging too long and end up with a jungle when doing multiple plants in one tub. I’ve had 16 going at once for the hell of it. lol
These are the tubs I used for the 16 each run. I used to use 1 - 12" airstone in each but later went to 2 each. Nice grooves in the bottom of the tubs that hold the stones in perfect spots.
The row on the far left got 2 clones in each 3.5" pot then in each for the rest. The 4 - pot one got 4 clones in each 6" pot.
L8r on.
What size net pots go with that? Most I’ve seen like that have 10" pots which is overkill and go pretty deep into the pail leaving less room for nutes which should be about 1" below the bottom of the pot. I’d use a turkey baster or big syringe to suck up some of the nutes and water from the top once or twice a day until roots started growing out of the pots then they can be left to do their thing. Popping air bubbles keep things nice and wet under the lid.
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Nice root porn.
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That is after nutes, so ppm is probably a little high on this and I will adjust tomorrow. The lid has a 6 inch net pot built in. The air pump is a 4 channel air pump but I used T connectors to make it 1 powerful channel with a flat disk air stone. The bucket does not have a level indicator but the lid is easy to get off, water is about an inch away from the bottom, and I checked to make sure the bubbles were popping enough to hit the whole net cup.
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Once your plant gets big you’re going to need to top it up daily or as your water level goes down the ppm will go up. That’s one of the main reasons I use the tubs is for the extra volume and I only ever had to top up every 3 days. Pails are great for RDWC but as a stand-alone rez they are more hassle.
Also with each of the tub lids I made an extra hole for adding/removing water and using a 60cc syringe with tubing on the end could stick that in to draw out samples for pH and PPM testing or add small amounts of nutes to keep the ppm at the target range I wanted as the plants ate it up.
My procedure is to top up with RO or distilled water, allow 15 min or so for it to all mix up then do my testing. Before the pH perfect I would add my nutes using smaller syringes then allow some time before testing the pH as it would normally go up to 6.3 or so by top up. The nutes would generally bring the pH down a bit so you want to wait before adding any pH Down to get to 5.5 or so. It was so regular that I often skipped checking the pH and just dripped in a few drops of conc. sulphuric acid knowing that would bring it back down to around 5.5. Sometimes it might go as low as 5.1 but I just left it as I also knew it would begin rising right away. That swing between low and high makes sure that all nutrients are at some time at their optimum pH level and the plants will get lots during that time.
You actually have to be consistently out of range with pH before you start seeing problems with your plants. Mostly it’s the pH is too high which is common with soil/soilless growers using high PPM tap water but can happen to hydro growers using tap water who don’t change their nutes very often. Each time you water your plants with that they drink up the water but very little of the minerals that are in that water so they are left behind like the scale that builds up inside a kettle. Eventually they are blocking mostly micro-nutrients like iron and others so that problems show up first in the newest growth. Then serious flushing is the only solution to fix it.
Using RO water I often never change nutes even once during the whole grow. I tried it once using two tubs. One I changed 3 times during the grow and the other never at all. I couldn’t tell any difference in the growth or yields so said fuggit and didn’t bother changing at all after that. One change I try to do is right after the stretch then change to feeding Lucas Formula style. Zero Grow nutes and half as much Micro as Bloom so a 0-1-2 ratio of 3-part nutes in the GMB order.
Even using hard tap water there is no reason to change out weekly in the early stages of hydro. The small plants drink and eat very little so a good rule-of-thumb is to keep track of how much water you use to top up then once you’ve added back as much as your system holds it’s time for a fresh batch.
You will still need to add extra nutes as you go along and the plants get bigger so high ppm tap water makes that a lot harder to determine. Using pure water makes things a lot easier.
Have you checked your tap water for ppm? Even that only gives you some info so it’s best to get a water analysis report from your supplier to see exactly what all is in your water. Tap water can be high in minerals that are perfectly fine for drinking but can build up in your system and screw up your plants. It’s generally free and they can email you a copy on request. If they ask any questions just say you are raising fish or brewing beer and need to know but it’s really none of their damn business. 
A lot of problems can be avoided by using pure water in hydro and even soil/soilless growing. I never bother getting extra runoff in my potted plants to help reduce salts buildup as I try to not overfeed my plants so there is no extra salts to get rid of. Hard tap water adds in all sorts of extra salts that cause problems.
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Well it didn’t take me long to kill my clone. No biggie anyway and it had been severely neglected to begin with. Going to start a couple autos in rock wool tonight, throw up the other small tent in a couple days just for them and see if I can do better this time. I will start up a grow journal when ai get it going.
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It’s really not that hard to do. My mother grew up helping feed her immigrant family and then us with a pantry full of canned stuff she either grew in the garden or killed by hand to stuff into a Mason jar so we never had to do without.
I think canned chicken was my introduction to anatomy as a kid. lol
It’s a plant! Not a science project! Plant it, grow it, leave it the fuck alone!
Better luck next time!
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