Second thoughts on DWC

I did a soil grow with limited success and made tons of mistakes and then decided to do a hydro grow because I became interested in it while trying to learn how to deal with the problems in my soil grow.

I decided to do a bubble bucket method. A mesh pot in a 5 gal bucket with an airstone inside.
I have two plants in 2 buckets in a small tent.
It sounds very basic, but it has been a ton of work so far, and the plants are still small.

I have a soil plant in the tent as well, in case I kill the hydro plants, and it is very easy to maintain. All were sprouted at the same time.
Unfortunately, the difference between the two is incredible. The soil plant is typical, with delicate small leaves and slender stalks, about 11 inches tall. The hydro plants look like bushes.
My wife saw the dense ball of leaves the size of a beach ball and asked me what it was? It doesn't even look like a pot plant, just a thick bush.
The 2 hydro plants are about 10 X the bulk of the soil plant. They have huge fan leaves the size of dinner plates and they are a thicket of leaves and new growth competing for the light. They are very bushy and chaotic and about 15 inches tall already. Sprouted Dec 1. They are all auto plants and are already forming bud sites. The hydro plants have large root balls with fascinating roots.

The problem is that they are so much work and time to monitor the pH/EC/ppm, mix nutes and balance pH, keep buckets topped up, exchange heavy buckets in a small area for rez changes, and be forever mixing more nutes because they drink so much. Once they get big, it will be nearly impossible to exchange their buckets for rez changes, and I may need to consider other options.

I like the idea of some sort of multi bucket system circulating from a main rez, but I don't really have the space now.

The hempy style idea sounds intriguing, but I don't know enough about it.

It seems that soil will be my destiny if I want to have a life. But I am amazed by the lush results capable with hydro growing. I love growing hydro, and someday hope to have the room to spread out into a proper setup.
If I don't screw the plants up with some nute mistake, it should be an impressive harvest.
I'm curious to see if the buds behave like the leaves.

Does anyone have ideas about an easier way to grow hydro plants in a small space?

Here's what I do: I measure out enough nutes for 4 gallons. I put 4 gallons of tap water in a bucket. I dump in my nutes and stir it for a second. Walk over and top off my resses once a day. The leftover water i'll either save for the next day or dump in my hempy buckets.

I get in this routine after I learn a strains feeding habits. I don't bother with ppm or ph after that point. If you use the same nutrient line for a while the pH and ppm rarely change.

Sounds like your hydro plants are doing awesome to me. You don't see many people not liking explosive growth! I have plenty of room for growth, but I do trim leaves off and train my plants a bit. I have also seen people use tomato cages to train their plants more vertical instead of bushy.

Oh and make sure and do some hempy research. About the easiest hydroponic method on the planet with great results.

The more water you use the more stable your ph, ppm, and water temp will be. 5 gallon buckets are very labor intensive and pretty much require daily attention in flower to make sure the ph is where you want.

I use a 4' x 4' 100 gallon res with 12 sites... I don't even do anything in veg but watch them grow becaues the ph and ppm just stay where I set it. In flower there is a bit more going on, but the ph still stays stable for days on end. So, run more water and have a centralized control res so you don't have to ph adjust and res swap each individual plant. In 5 gallon buckets you will probably change the buckets every 7-10 days and check the ph every day.

Hempy buckets will probably be pretty close to soil... I found watering my plants every day in hempy buckets was just as much work as individual DWC buckets.

Here's what I do. I have a 50 gallon barrel with a submergible pump in the bottom attached to a hose. Once a week, I mix full strength nutes and PH the barrel to 5.2 as it floats up anyway. I fill a clean bucket and carry it over to the plant, switch the net pot and air stone over to the clean bucket and go dump and clean the dirty one. After feed day is over, I fill the barrel again and PH the water to 5.2 and I top off directly from that to the buckets throughout the week via the hose/pump. I don't check PH or ppm in the actually buckets, only the barrel.
Keep it simple

sweetleaf76 said:

Here's what I do. I have a 50 gallon barrel with a submergible pump in the bottom attached to a hose. Once a week, I mix full strength nutes and PH the barrel to 5.2 as it floats up anyway. I fill a clean bucket and carry it over to the plant, switch the net pot and air stone over to the clean bucket and go dump and clean the dirty one. After feed day is over, I fill the barrel again and PH the water to 5.2 and I top off directly from that to the buckets throughout the week via the hose/pump. I don't check PH or ppm in the actually buckets, only the barrel.
Keep it simple

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Thanks. What do you mean by "feed day"? Do you only put your plants in nutes during feeding and the rest of the time they are in plain water?
Unfortunately, I don't have the room to try some of the suggestions offered, but thanks to all.
I have been pulling back to checking every other day and just topping up the levels with water.
I have been changing the buckets about every 9-10 days. I have two sets of buckets and switch them out like you do, but it's a hassle in the tent and it will only get worse as the plants grow bigger.
I just wish I had more space to develop a better hydro setup.

Wow, how hard can you make the most simple way to grow? You are making all the work, not the plants or systems. I have done dwc for years now and I start with 5gal bucket and a 2" netpot with collar filled with 5gal of water and nutes to around 650ppm and pH set to 5.6(the pH will rise slightly the first day). After two days I recheck pH and then I won't touch it until res has about 1-1\2gal left in it(7-12days) and then change it. No topping off, no adding in nutes. Making a fresh res only takes a few mins and switching a lid is easy.

Surfer Joe said:

Thanks. What do you mean by "feed day"? Do you only put your plants in nutes during feeding and the rest of the time they are in plain water?
Unfortunately, I don't have the room to try some of the suggestions offered, but thanks to all.
I have been pulling back to checking every other day and just topping up the levels with water.
I have been changing the buckets about every 9-10 days. I have two sets of buckets and switch them out like you do, but it's a hassle in the tent and it will only get worse as the plants grow bigger.
I just wish I had more space to develop a better hydro setup.

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By feed day I mean the day I switch out the buckets with fresh full strength nutes. I mix up another barrel of half strength nutes that I top off the flower room with throughout the week. The veg room just gets topped off with water ph'd to 5.2-5.5 until feed day comes along again. This is made up in a second barrel. I hear ya on space issues, I've used tents also in the past. You can try less buckets with bigger plants. I'm a caregiver in Maine so plant count matters. I run 2 plants under a 1000 HPS. I have them in sort of a scrog frame without the screen. Just a training frame that's attached to the net pot lid.

Super stoner: I tried the recirculating dwc.... I hated it! I want to move the ladies around at will and the attached buckets made weekly cleaning miserable. I have 20 buckets in my main flower room that drink 2-3 gallons a day. It takes me 5-10 minutes to top them off and less then an hour to change and clean them completely. I often hear that I'm crazy for not using a res.

Who said anything about rdwc? I do single 5gal buckets. And I have never heard of an indoor plant(and I've had and seen 8-12oz plants) that takes 2-3 gal a day.

superstoner1 said:

Wow, how hard can you make the most simple way to grow? You are making all the work, not the plants or systems. I have done dwc for years now and I start with 5gal bucket and a 2" netpot with collar filled with 5gal of water and nutes to around 650ppm and pH set to 5.6(the pH will rise slightly the first day). After two days I recheck pH and then I won't touch it until res has about 1-1\2gal left in it(7-12days) and then change it. No topping off, no adding in nutes. Making a fresh res only takes a few mins and switching a lid is easy.

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If I did not top up, the buckets would run dry in about 5 days, and I don't want to be switching buckets every 5 days.

Just add back each day then. My monster right now takes gallon and half per day. I use cleaned milk jugs and simply mix up the nutes and what not right after I add one. That way it sits for 24 hrs. When adding my next batch I just PH both my bucket and milk jugs to be sure nothing changed crazily on me and add. (Looking back I would never let a plant get as big as mine has in a 5gal though, it really is too much monitoring for my taste.) I am cutting my veg time in half next go around. I feel that with the amount of water I am putting back it is sitting for several hours with very low water level which in turn would be daily stressing my plant. Deff should have upgraded to a tote, but lesson learned. You could possibly do a multi site tote. Have one large tote with 2 large plants or possibly 4 medium sized. Would give you a large rez to combat plant drinking/evaporation if kept clean you really don't need to change it every week.

I swapped buckets about every 2 weeks and topped off in-between and feel I had pretty good success for a first time.

sweetleaf76:
I could be wrong but I am pretty sure the idea behind RWDC is that you don't really have to clean anything as the constant current aids in keeping the system clean.

cyanarnofsky said:

Just add back each day then. My monster right now takes gallon and half per day. I use cleaned milk jugs and simply mix up the nutes and what not right after I add one. That way it sits for 24 hrs. When adding my next batch I just PH both my bucket and milk jugs to be sure nothing changed crazily on me and add. (Looking back I would never let a plant get as big as mine has in a 5gal though, it really is too much monitoring for my taste.) I am cutting my veg time in half next go around. I feel that with the amount of water I am putting back it is sitting for several hours with very low water level which in turn would be daily stressing my plant. Deff should have upgraded to a tote, but lesson learned. You could possibly do a multi site tote. Have one large tote with 2 large plants or possibly 4 medium sized. Would give you a large rez to combat plant drinking/evaporation if kept clean you really don't need to change it every week.

I swapped buckets about every 2 weeks and topped off in-between and feel I had pretty good success for a first time.

sweetleaf76:
I could be wrong but I am pretty sure the idea behind RWDC is that you don't really have to clean anything as the constant current aids in keeping the system clean.

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I have a perpetual grow, 2 in 2 out every week. You must have to clean it. I can't imagine the slow flow would keep build up away. I could be wrong, I was a promix guy until a year ago.
seriously though, is 2-3 gallons a day that crazy during flower when a plant is stretched out on a frame? They didn't drink that way when I was just topping them and growing them straight up, but as soon as I tie them down they go crazy! Seriously sometimes the buckets are almost empty less then 24 hours after I top off. It's usually a quarter filled though. I'm not using co2 either but I plan to try it out very soon.

Thats the advantage of using 2" netpots, you can still put 5gal in the bucket and have a 6-10oz plant

superstoner1 said:

Thats the advantage of using 2" netpots, you can still put 5gal in the bucket and have a 6-10oz plant

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I thought that the net pot size was irrelevant to the size of the plant in hydro since the roots have their own large space to eat and drink.
If I use a smaller mesh pot, can I expect to get a smaller plant if all else is equal?

I think the idea is using a smaller net pot allows him to put more water in a 5 gallon bucket without drowning the roots. My honking shit 6 inch pots only allow me to put about 2.5-3 gallons of water in my 5 gallon buckets.

Bucees said:

I think the idea is using a smaller net pot allows him to put more water in a 5 gallon bucket without drowning the roots. My honking shit 6 inch pots only allow me to put about 2.5-3 gallons of water in my 5 gallon buckets.

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Me too. I thought about mesh pot size when setting up, but I thought that too small a mesh pot would limit the size of my plant, or make it unstable.
Right now, one of my hydro plants which is just starting to develop lots of pistils and is about 16 inches tall and very bushy has a base stem 1 inch thick and it still has many weeks to go. How would that fit in a tiny mesh pot?

Surfer Joe said:

How would that fit in a tiny mesh pot?

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It would just seem kinda precarious to me, but I have no experience with the small pots. I read a journal a few years back where a guy pulled over a pound in a bubbleponics tub with four 2 inch net pots. The pots had a 1x1 rockwool and like 10 pebbles of hydroton in them. By the end of his grow they were leaning to the sides and the pots weren't exactly flush, but it didn't seem to effect his output any. He had to tie the plants up to keep them from falling over which is a simple solution imo.

I just pulled 6+oz from a single plant in a 5gal bucket using a 2" netpot and collar. All I use in aero and dwc is 2" netpots from clone to harvest. It cost me 13¢ per plant and I never have to transplant into bigger pots or clean hydroton. The size could possibly limit plant size if say you vegged for 3-4 months but a normal 3-5 week vegged plant would rarely come close to having a 2" stalk. By using the 2" I can fill a 5gal bucket to the 5gal line and be able to let the system work itself, not me. With the simple addition of 4 pieces of pull to length twist tie the plant very securely anchored to the bucket edge and I can just pick the bucket up and move it as needed with no mess. and i get readings and do adjustments without removing the lid by having a second 2" hole on outside edge of lid and running airhose through a collar and netpot.

I've been working my way down the net pots since I started growing. Currently using 3" pots in RDWC. My bag of hyrotron will last forever.

As far as hydro, it get's easier with each grow. You begin to know what is necessary and what is redundant and you devise better methods for everything.

best thing to do is have a system down replace ment buckets if you need to wash them out just have new ones ready to go as for the dumping of water make is so that can drop the water in a pipe in the wall if you have plumbing find the pipe and elivate your buckets so that when its time to drop water you realy just have to drop water right into your wall have a shop vac for the rest of the small water shit make and think of how to cut time and when you mix your nutes get a trash can fill it up and mix your nute in it when its ph'ed and ppm'ed right put a pump in that trash can and pump the new water in make shure you close the out valve of so you dont waste the water.. make shure if you do have plumbing in your walls you tap a hole in your pipe that goes up into the roof tap it low so that gravity works for you thats the way my budy does his dwc trays..