Cool.
What I would do, is get a 3" hole saw and some 8 oz solo cups- smaller than the regular ones. In any case, you need cups that would sit in whatever diameter hole you are making in the bottom of the bucket.
Carefully tip your bucket on it's side, and then use a 3" hole saw to carefully saw through the bucket, taking care to disturb the roots as little as possible. Now that the hole is there, take your cup, poke just a few small holes in it, only a few around the bottom are needed, don't try to make a netpot.
Now, you need to fill the cup to overflowing with promix or whatever medium. Don't pack it into the cup tight, but do make sure that the medium is completely filling the cup, i.e. no air spaces.
At this point, without spilling out too much of the medium, you need to "buckle" or fold the edge of the cup just enough to fit the rim through the hole, then pop back into shape, thus attaching the cup to the bucket.
With that done, take the time to drill about 40 small holes in the bottom of that same bucket all around the large hole. Once all this is done, pick the whole thing up and put it in the outer bucket. Now you can either put a bulkhead sitting in the outer bucket, just below where the inner bucket sits, or just a hole there. It should look like this, but with the cup sticking out and without the fill tube.
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From this you can see how the fill tube was put in, too hard to do it once the medium is added.
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This is what they look like put together but empty.
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Since A: you didn't install a fill tube when you put the original medium in the upper bucket, thus making it really hard to install now, and B: the whole point of this was to make this stuff automated- I would install a bulkhead fitting so you can tie all your lower buckets together to a common drain, then use a float valve or similar to keep the level of water just below the level of the inner buckets.
Oh man! TB's got the 411 on SIPs as well as aero! J/K wicking properly is a concern. That said, I've done SIPs in Ocean Forest, Fertilome, Vic's Super Soil, Store-Brand potting mix, straight coco, and mixes of old soil of any of the above. They all work fine. Most any pre-packaged soil or "soil-less" mix, is going to have a ton of coco or more usually peat moss added in. Plus perlite and lots of other particulates. They will soak up water to the top of the bucket, no worries. Hard to go wrong here.
And you said you used straight promix, which a soilless mix containing about 99% Peat and perlite- it is an ideal medium for use in SIPs and will wick as well as anything else.
Now, if all this just seems too much work- there is another way to solve the watering issue without doing SIPs. You could drill small holes around the very bottom of each pot or bucket, place said pots/buckets in a tray, and flood the tray periodically, to a level just above those holes.
In fact, I keep my mums in square pots that in turn sit in low sterilite tubs. When I water them, sometimes I just dump about 3/4 inch of water in the tray, and the pots wick it right up! I keep mums in straight Ocean Forest, and it works great because the larger mums that need more wick more, and the smaller ones that are still damp wick less. The one thing I don't do is leave any standing water in the tray after about 30 minutes. If there is any, I put too much water in.
Watering from the bottom up is the way to go, unless you're trying to get nutes into a specific plant, then I top water that one.
If you need more help with converting your SIPs, I might be convinced to make a pictorial while I convert some of mine to be on a common fill/drain- I'm gonna do some tomatoes this year in them, and some squash and cucumbers I think, but I'm not making any more SIPs that aren't all watered from one point.
Crawling through the weed jungle every other day to water my 9 flowering SIPs individually is a sweet, sticky irritation!
thanks for that im going to try one out. but some of my girls are in air pots so I might the tropf blu mats
The biggest issue here is most people don't even do Hp aero correctly, so that it turns into more of an nft experience anyway. It seems even alot of the commercial companies and innovators don't understand some of the most important aspects that actually seperate it from other forms of hydro. Not to worry though- you can make some monster plants with simple methods, though it's my contention that hp aero probably has a competitive edge in the right hands. Like DIYer said, ultrasonic fog just doesn't perform, the mist is actually too small apparently, not to mention heat issues etc... I think it might be ok for cloning at best.
Mech- I don't know much about sips except the global bucket site r0m posted earlier, I remembered them mentioning the wicking of the soil and it made perfect sense. I must've overlooked that DH mentioned his mix already... I just figure anyone in a tent is looking at their plants everyday for fun so how important is it to auto-water besides wanting to be able to leave for extended periods occasionally. I guess I like to actively engage in my hobby, but everyone has their preferences and reasons.
Im in my garden every day but yea Im planning on going away and would like something that can feed them. and it would be nice to have that anyways it gets annoying watering and mixing every day id like to set it and forget it lol