@Deez I have a whole hydro set up from a lot on Craigslist (was only after a tent) no idea how it works!
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The things I’m still wondering about are:
Are there organic Hydro nutrients? Are they more difficult to use than mineral-based? Or
Does one Hydro system produce better results than another or is it really a personal preference and differing levels of complication?
DWC seems really straightforward and I totally understand it but also it seems like a total pain if you had to take the plant out of the bucket to service your air stone or clean the bucket for some reason. maybe that’s not a thing? I can picture myself struggling with a plant halfway through flowering and trying to take it out of the bucket to service something
I can also understand why some kind of Reservoir based system like auto parts or even something as simple as drip lines makes it really easy to maintain your solution at the right pH and ppm as opposed to something like DWC where as the water gets used up the ppm‘s & pH start to drift
I think it’s gonna come down to cost for me. I don’t wanna spend a ton of money just to try something and not like it. It seems like I’ll need a full set of nutrients, whatever Hydro hardware they decide to go with, and then a couple of pieces of testing equipment. At the very least a decent pH and ppm meter. I think my biggest concern is water. I really don’t want to have to deal with a reverse osmosis filter, my water is absolutely wonderful for organic soil growing right out of the ground as it is and I really hate messing with it. It’s really good water, it’s just got a lot of minerals in it. I have water test results so I know exactly what I’m working with but I can tell you that the P PMs straight out of the tap are like 350 if that sounds like a problem right from the jump then it’s gonna be a problem
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Yes there is organic hydroponics like Aquaponics for example (basically growing in a fish tank).
I’ve no experience with organic hydroponics but it has to be harder I would assume as its alot more work.
Mineral based is straight forward and simple.
Idk if id say any one produces better then the others and my experience tells me its more the grower, do they understand what they are doing and are they doing it right…
It’s really 95% the growers knowledge of what there doing…
Im not saying a person has to be an expert to get good results, because im no expert and I think i do pretty good.
Im just saying some people are better learners then others for different reasons and we all learn differently so way to many factors…
Get you 1 bubbles bucket and do a dwc.
Also get you some coco coir and perlite to grow 1 plant. You can actually hand water the coco from the bottom (bottom feed) daily, and this is basically all auto pots do.
That way you aren’t out much money at all and you can test both methods.
Of course with the actual autopots you wouldn’t be watering daily, but the experience would give you an idea of what they produce maybe…
If i wanted do hydroponics on the cheap, it would be bubble buckets.
If i had a grand to spend of either RDWC or autopots, I’d spend it on autopots without hesitation…
As for cheap easy nutrients, i have used nothing but generally hydroponics maxi-gro for veg and maxi-bloom for flower.
I use silica blast and hydrogaurd but neither is needed, though i suggests something like hydrogaurd or useing h2o2.
So it is very possible to use nothing but these ingredients here.
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Thank you! This is really helpful!
Ok mineral nutes I can deal with. I’ve got a decent shop nearby where I can get nutrients and parts.
I’m not sure if hand watering coco every day will work for me for an entire grow. But That is a brilliant idea for a low cost way for me to dip the toe so to speak.
Isn’t there someway to do Coco with like a drip line around the base of the plant sitting right on top of the Coco and then maybe some kind of pump on a timer regularly waters in a little bit? Did I just describe auto pots?
My only concern/hesitation to do DWC is what I described before about the fear of having to pull an entire flowering plant out of its bucket if I had to clean something or whatever. Is that a valid concern? Am I worried about something that just doesn’t happen?
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Never happened here, that said I do have a spare tote and air stones on standby. So it would not be that much of a task to do a change out if needs be.
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Yeah the real worries that I’m gonna scrog this and I could see it being a real pain in the ass to try to switch a bucket with the top half of the plant attached to a screen!
Having to change out your actual DWC container during a grow should never happen, unless there has been multiple days of complete neglect and even then it’s unlikely.
So long as you use hydroguard or similar I believe you can get cheaper equivalent products over there.
At worst if you’re roots start to discolor or there is any bad odours, you may have to add a dose of 3 percent H2O2 @ 2mls per litre of your reservoir capacity and that has always worked here. I don’t have the option of hydroguard here, which should prevent that occurng in the first instance.
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There is drip systems with timers and pumps, the autopots are basically gravity fed and it waters from the bottom unlike drips.
Autopots are gravity fed trays that have a really cool and “patented” mechanical double float.
Water flows into the tray till it fills up and sets both floats. .
The plant begins soaking up the water, once the water is gone the first float is down and it actives the 2nd float and it takes like 15mins for the 2nd float to bottom out and open the valve so the tray can refill and start over.
It’s genius really. The plant determines how frequently it gets water where the 2nd float dosen’t even start moving till the tray is empty…
I probably make it hard to understand but check out on YouTube “how autopots work”. Its kike sorcery 
but so simple…
It is a legit concern because it can happen, but very unlikely. I feel like it’s not really a concern to worry bout to much.
I would imagine if its so bad it cant be cleaned up or powered through with some microbes or h2o2, then you probably want have much over a scog to deal with 
.
If you fill a scrog you’ll be good with whatever tje roots through at ya I bet 
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So i always used h2o2 and after so many people telling me i “need microbes” i bought a $50 32oz bottle of hydrogaurd and i see no difference at all.
After this hydrogaurd is gone, I’ll be back useing h2o2 as its so cheap
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Been there, done that @Deez with soil. I couldn’t get good enough yields even though I only grow for 3 people. Maybe 4 zips per plant average. Also bugs could not be completely wiped out no matter what I did. I switched to hydro using 5 gallon buckets then 55 gallon totes from Home Depot as tanks. Grew great plants. 3 tanks + a 17 gallon nutrient res is a lot of water to flood a room if something happens. Something did happen. Now I run 4 nice plants on a 4x4 flood table that cannot overflow for any reason.
Flooding just as I was posting this. Overflows back to reservoir.
5 weeks into flower. Your turnaround time will be much faster than soil.
All I had to buy was the flood tray and a 50 gallon Walmart tote. Had all the other pumps fittings from previous hydro setups.
The main thing is keeping the water cool enough and the ph balanced from 5.5 - 6.2. It’s critical and because you will have to adjust it at least once a day.
This was my ph after 30hours of not checking due to a quick trip for one day.
If you don’t want to deal with this, I would stick to soil. I spend around $20 a month on ph up
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Thank you @OldSkunk you are hitting all the reasons I’m considering switching, the limitations I’m hitting with soil, and the concerns I have with big buckets of water
One thing in my favor is my grow space is in my basement and because of how it was built in stages over 25 years my grow room is about 2” lower than the rest of the basement and has an adjoining door to the outside. Water would drain out pretty well in the event of a big loss of water but drywall might get messed up. Biggest concern is the rest of the basement is finished in the last two years and looks really nice. I’d be in deep doo doo if that got messed up.
I’m glad that flood and drain came up. I had a couple of buddies who grew that way 15+ years ago and got great results. Your F&D table looks amazing. Especially the medium. The whole thing just looks awesome.
Also really glad you talked about how maintaining the Rez for flood and drain works. I think we’ve managed to cover at least three different types of Hydro in this thread at this point. DWC, flood and drain, and auto pots. (i’ve noticed no one has piped up about using NFT)
my next indoor grow is sort of my last attempt at maximizing my yields in soil by using a couple of large scrog tables. Not gonna lie, growing an organic soil is easy. Maybe it’s because I’ve been doing it for a long time and I’m very comfortable with it but I typically will not have to touch my plants or even really do anything at all for days at a time. I typically spend a bit of time on maintenance feeding and watering on a Sunday and don’t really have to mess with much of anything until Wednesday or Thursday and that’s usually just a quick watering.
The idea of daily checking and maintenance on a Reservoir is not a check in the pros column on my pros and cons list but it is what it is. There’s trade-offs for higher pay out here as far as I can tell. It also sounds like with auto pots I can fill the rez and sort of set it and forget it until it gets drawn down enough to need a refill.
I have a tendency to take short overnights or two nights away camping or whatever during the summer so I do need a solution that similarly to my Bags of Dirt I can walk away from for a couple of days without too much negative consequence. If I’m about to go off camping for two nights right now I just give my plants a quick drink whether they need it or not and walk out the door, they’ll be basically fine when I get back, the only thing that would really happen in the course of two days would be like a branch gets too heavy and falls over or something like that. Good problems.
Thank you for discussing the level of maintenance and potential problems with the methods you’ve tried. It seems like I need to just make sure that whatever method I choose fits with my lifestyle and it seems like there’s enough ways to go about it that it shouldn’t be a problem.
I’ve been the auto pot route too…still got gnats. Others love them. I really hate bugs. I’m about to buy an automatic ph monitor/adjuster for $150 that will pretty much fully automate my setup. Then I can go away for days at a time. Even if I lose power, everything will start up once it comes back. I have a thread in “show your grow” that I’m going to add to about all this. I breed dogs so I don’t have time for a grow journal, but I can share what I’ve learned from soil where I started to all forms of hydro but nft. I earned a lot of it from being in the lab and here on this forum from a bunch of good teachers. Thanks for the compliment bud. The great thing about flood and drain with clay pellets is the roots have much less chance of any rot or insect infestation. Not so with tanks or buckets. Other than pruning and ph checking it’s pretty much set it and forget it once the plants hit the net. I change the res about once a week, but I use Z7 and Hydroguard, so I probably could do 2 weeks. It sounds like you wouldn’t need a chiller or AC down in the basement most of the year so that would be a big plus. I’m glad I could clear things up without you having to read 10 threads to get answers @Deez
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I appreciate it. This whole thread has been a great discussion so far. I could search and read ad nauseam but I’m such a babe in the woods I don’t even know what to search for! 
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Just payin back for all they taught me here @Deez I’m hoping to make it easier for others than it was for me to go through all that to figure out the perfect place for me to be. I owe it to a lot of people like @peachfuzz and @dbrn32 @Myfriendis410 and many others for my soon to be fully automated setup.
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