Does reservoir change frequency w/No. of plants?

Something ive been wondering…i drain, wipe down, and add a fresh batch of nutrients w/fresh distilled water every week, and ive been doing this since the start, but if i started with 5 plants, and now i have 2, shouldnt i be able to go longer in between res changes? I feel like im wasting nutrients. Or is it required bc the 2 plants i have now are much bigger than the 5 i had?

Edit: sorry its an aero/hydro setup. 8 gallons of water is what i start out with each week.

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Yes, however it will also depend on how large those two plants are, and what stage of life they’re in.
Flowering you may have to change it more often, because this is the heaviest feeding stage.

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Got you. Thanks. Probably smart for me to just keep doing once a week this late into flower, with my experience then. Will have to experiment with the next grow while in veg.

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For whatever it’s worth, I did it that way for the first several weeks of my grow. I think I inadvertently tossed out most of my “good” microorganisms and kept perpetuating the growth of the bad nasties (especially root rot because my reservoir temps were unregulated). I’ve since gone the way of recirculating my water with a pump through a chiller and loads of airstones at every stage. I haven’t changed my reservoir after the introduction of the chiller. I do have to top it off at least once a week, depending on how thirsty my plants are. Approx 30gal H2O and 2 plants in flower at the moment. I add 1-2 gallons every few days. Sometimes with nutes, sometimes plain.

I dunno if that tangent added anything helpful at all. Moral of the story here is I’m lazy and will happily top off a res and check ph/PPMs but it’s hard to convince me it’s worth doing a full water change. My plants worked hard to build up a symbiotic relationship with whatever is living in their roots.

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I have a chiller so i think the nutes would be fine for awhile, id just be concerned on how to know if they were depleting one mineral faster than another and always lagging behind on it. Definitely think i could stretch these nutes out some, though.

Something i noticed this last res change was the color if the nutes coming out was at about 50% of the nutes when theyre fresh. Thought that was pretty interesting.

Right now my 2 plants are soaking up about a gallon a day and after about the third day of a fresh change, its another gallon of ph treated distilled water every day to keep them up to my low marker. I was topping off with nutes but i noticed the tips getting get more burnt with each week, so now i just do straight water until the nute change

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Just realized if im adding clean water 4 days out of 7, of course the color will be diluted, so it tells me literally nothing…a dunce moment :laughing:

It tells you that the color changes when they dilute! :rofl:

To be fair, I have no idea what my girls are consuming in relation to what is in the res. I just feed once a week when I’m topping off and assume they will tell me if they aren’t getting what they need. I.e. I have had to add silica on plain water days, and some extra CalMag between feeds. Nothing unusual.

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:joy: true that.

Sounds like you got it down pretty good. Thats awesome.