Going Hydro what all do I need and how do I set it up??

Tired of slow soil growing even tho I like the flavors of soil growing better.. What all do\ will I need how do i sit it up.. Chillers are way to much so may build 1 out of my old ac or use a mini fridge to cool water unless y'all have some better ideals to replace chillers??

Probably be a week before a reply on this

lots of choices for hydro systems ,,all depends on your space and what money you want to spend..you could go basic using coco or go balls in with aero or nft ..lots of people try coco because it is similiar to soil and gives hydro speed and yields .

coco u basically need pots and trays ,coco nutrients and a grow schedule,an e.c metre and ph pen and a few hours spent reading about coco

Look up Hempy Buckets,
Dutch Buckets,
Water Farms,

and these concepts:

'air lift' water pumps,
evaporative cooling reservoir tubs with cooling fans, (if you use some kinda recirculating grow method: these have to have, generally, chillers)

trickle filters,

and more technologies you'll use a lot are

fountain pumps,
aquarium air pumps,
drippers,
15 minute timers.

There are a lotta choices, you should probably start with Hempy Buckets because the investment is the least, it's the lightest weight stuff so you can move it around, it's ROCK SOLID RELIABLE and you can speed them up by putting a hole at the bottom later, snugging in a piece of hose that goes to a drain pipe, and make Dutch Buckets.

It kinda depends on your technology aims, Hempies are definitely by far, FAR, the simplest, most reliable, and the least work.

Hempy Buckets, true Hempy buckets, are done the way they are, and then manually fed. Hempy, the guy from Australia who discovered passive pot hydroponic growing is possible after governments lied to people saying it wasn't possible - he has always sworn that if it's anything more than a passive, hand watered bucket with a hole near the bottom to set the reserve levels, it's not a Hempy.

These do best being fed water about every two days, till water drains out of the hole.

I use a small fountain pump about the size of half a pack of cigarettes, a little hose, and a T and - some drippers I just stuck in the ends of the hose. It's so low pressure they don't fall out.

I turn the one on, that actually pumps water, one hour, per day.

I have it plugged into a previous identical 15 minute on/off timer, and that's on 12/12.

Now - what this does is ya see, is it makes the 24 hour pump timer run only 12 hours, per 24.

And so - I have created, a 48-hour Hempy Bucket Timer

from two $3.95 15 minute on/off 24-hour timers.


I can tell ya right now man that once you kinda do the deal-i-yO,

Yo, you get the bug and I don't mean like... in a bad way. There's a lot of really satisfying, basics, fundamentals in just ... I dunno, basic ''not as dumb as a bucket uh dirt'' type growing.

You know as well as I do that to be a decent dirt grower you gotta know your shit. You do. But - you can't look into that soil. It catches all kinds of disease and vectors of it, and it's very presence leads to moldy dead leaf matter below your plants, there's just a lotta gritty, dirty, nasty to soil growing.

And if you've hauled dirt buckets around you know what's up.

If you go into hydroponics kinda thinking about it as you go along, you can start out with some fundamental technologies, buckets, quarter-inch tubing, and barbed couplings, Ts, and this sorta thing,

you can be using little just a FEW gallons per hour fountain pumps, if it's just a few plants ya know,

and then you move on to figuring out how to evaporatively cool water by just splashing it around a little with a pump and continuously blowing fanned air over its' surface,

and you can get a feel for the hydroponic technologies, with a GOOD feeling, because you're going from point to point, not throwing stuff away,

finding that instead of 'theoretically,' you can re-use your previous technologies that you really can, as you go from completely passive, to pump fed, - and these things work FINE. PUMP fed DRIPPERED pure-perlite buckets are sorta - they're one of THE pinnacles of easy, lightweight, kinda space-age groovy-cool, low cost, low power, low noise, no disease, no pH problems, hydroponics.

But you start thinking about those water farms and how cool they are, and those faux aeroponic tubs with just a little bigger fountain pump than you're using, and all that extra aeration - theoretically that's a longer sentence than just that but the point is,

you start craving seeing different stuff work. You get where you can just see the sense in growing that stuff in goldfish water because you'll read the smoothest hydro on the planet is grown symbiotically with these fish, and then it goes back to keeping it simple again.

It's a kinda cycle man and - it's not one you regret later, like.. you learn SO much about stuff you'd never: not in a million years - care about all together,

and it makes you smarter, it makes you scheme on how you can combine these really kinda low impact technologies, the way I kinda came up with my 48 hour Hempy bucket timers.

Those also go out to another day by splitting that first timers' day into THREE parts. This has your actual pump timer coming on, once every THREE days.

You get inventive and you get the crave, most of the time, so I just wanna tell you that - there's a dozen ways to go, so be kinda savvy when you start, and don't tell yourself one of these ways, is really the kinda superior one.

I grew up in a pets, plants and fish shop and then later went to work in fields that are very highly developed technologically, radiant communications electronic engineering's the name of the game, and I've seen nearly everything under the sun. And yet now that I'm retired, what's got me still inventing things?

Hydroponic pot growing. Why? Well, because the government wants to keep us all stupid and the minute you start combining these technologies you're gonna be seeing that the government education we all get specifically keeps this kinda knowledge away from us to keep us dumb, and - it's VERY inspiring and mentally stimulating to go into hydroponics, ok?

So - know before hand that there's a kinda cycle, to being in hydro, where you either start over your head, and crap out, because it's all so complicated,

or - hopefully - somebody explains to ya early on there IS a way to start simple and be GUARANTEED not to fail,

and that method can then be immediately turned into a fully powered and still very efficient and reliable mechanism by just intelligently applying a couple of low power fountain pump/timers.

This Hempy Bucket style with you getting a bucket of water and drizzling water through the things, in a very regular, slow rate - this is some efficient sh** bro because it's SO low energy and SO disease resistant and SO easy on the water such that pH isn't nearly so big a problem.

You can feed a five gallon bucket with a float and have that float fed with a big barrel,

and have that thing pulsing a buncha otherwise Hempy Buckets every two days, using two conjoined or series fed timers like I was explaining to ya, and that thing is JUST about, commercial level reliability ready. It really is.

So that's my take on it since you're askin, and I'm fulla vitamin tablets, coffee, and fine weed my wife and I grew. Wait actually I didn't grow this, I've been moving around some, so my own pot growing's been interrupted by having to hide all my outside weed.

Incidentally when people used to try to go out to the deep back woods and install modern living hydroponically, the way I described above with this initial Hempy Bucket design, then fed by pulsed fountain pumps, used to be the way people actually tried to keep themselves fed, because of the extremely high reliability, and low power demand of this type.

What your sorta proto-typical situation would be, is that - they'd feed the plants, via two, separate paths: instead of a single barrel at one end, feeding another one with a float so it always pumped at an identical rate, (as the water level lowers, you pump less per hour, right? That's right)

They'd put one, on either end of the plants, assuming they ever got electricity run out there.

They'd have a solar power fed one, with a lower demand pump, but still WELL, WELL within your local cheap-0 timer, on one end, and a buncha cheap small diameter tubing, feeding these things with drippers

and on the other end they'd have their electrically fed one: and if some storm or whatever cut the power off on the electricity, they'd be just a tractor battery and a fountain pump away, with a solar charger for the thing,

from complete food supply security.

Now - you know obviously technologies sorta rotate and evolve with the times, whoever is peddling what ever, sells this or that technology to more people, and things are classed as ''better than those old'' methods but really it's just human interest in things at times because let's face it - few people have to hydroponically feed themselves so MOST hydroponics is either commercial green house for tomatoes etc - or hobby hydroponics.

The point is, - when the people who kinda were the real tech-heads of recent years, the ones who won WWII and were inventing transistors, and all this stuff, - when they were analyzing what the most reliable type food production using hydroponics was,

they were very often giving the nod to pure perlite - Hempy buckets are perlite and some sort of moistener, everyone's favorite lately is coco because of it's great plant friendly characteristics-

they'd go to pure perlite,
fountain pumps often on tractor batteries and solar chargers,
and drippers.

They'd feed a bucket with a float,

install a TINY - ya know, relatively, a SMALL little fountain pump,

put that baby into like a cloth sock or wrap it in a cloth for fantastic filtration -

put it on cheap-0 timers, and LET' ER RIP.

The fondest dreams of mice and men being what they are, you never hear about things like this working out long term, because of the many reasons we all go to Wal*Mart and eat at fast food places.

Nobody sweats,
Nobody starves,
Nobody comes home to find the village is gonna starve because somebody's dog got caught in a sticky fly strip, freaked out, and tore all that shit up.

There's a lotta fun in hydroponics, there really is, and it isn't all just in spending money, you can grow a lotta pot using it.

And people do, I'm not a commercial grower, but I've grown some pot so big so fast using an aeroponic unit I built,

that I built a glass faced container and drew a ruler on the back wall so my wife and select friends could see the roots grow an inch and a quarter a day for a while there as they race forward to maturity.

That's about all I can tell ya just off the top of my head about it.

For your nutrition, you don't have to go crazy. I used to mix a regimen of lawn fertilizer, potassium nitrate and rock dust, and equal the growth of plants fed General Hydroponics Flora Nova.

Do yourself a favor when you start and get a commonly used brand, that a LOTTA people use and trust, so you can establish yourself a kinda baseline as to what proper nutrition does, and then you can start to vary the diets of your plants, to help yourself understand how to grow cheaper.

Hint: Calcium Nitrate, Rock Dust, a little dash of epsom's salt, and a standard old B vitamin tablet, and you can cover a lotta shortcomings in this world, for awhile.
For a LONG time actually.

Don't tell anybody I told ya, cause they'll tell ya, I'm a pot head and don't know wtF I'm doin.

Welcome to hydroponics you'll probably find the ease and speed of growing, and cleaning up after yourself when you've been handling your hydroponic stuff, well worth it.

I recommend you go passive hydro in big pots using two thirds perlite, one third vermiculite. Just hand or automatic water-to-waste using a ready made complete hydro nutrient such as Canna flores. If you want to complicate things and spend excessive time maintaining the system and balancing solutions, then use any of the recirculating hydro methods. if you decide on one of the latter methods, don't expect a better yield for your efforts.

Cheers

to the OP:

i went the recirculating PPK route and definitely got a LARGE increase in yield (sometimes as much as 300% on individual plants, and always 100% increase) over handwatered passive hydro using the same size containers (12 liters) and identical medium (50-50 coco perlite) and the same nutrients at the same strength. (jacks 15-12-26 plus calcinit).

no chillers required for PPK systems! the idea is that the roots arent in fluid 100% of the time, just once every 90 minutes or so depending on medium used.
my tents were running at 88 degrees, reservoirs the same last summer (i am in south america, so its not summer now).

also: with active PPKs i am working WAAAYYYYY less than i ever did handwatering passive hydro plants.

And i dont fuss with adjusting. I DO check concentration and PH - have monitors running 24x7, but very rarely have to take any action other than adding plain tap water to the system when its getting too strong. PH is very stable. i will say my water is a good match for Jacks... i dont adjust the PH at all, not even for a new batch of nutes.

These experiences are common for folks using PPKs - we often joke about having to find an other hobby to take up the spare time, since we arent so busy growing.

If the OP is interested he should look :
https://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?t=336515

my system is running pots about 1/4 the volume as you'll see in that thread, because i grow in tents - and i am only running about 20 gallons total volume of reservoir (not including the tanks which feed the float falves in the the central reservoirs ) per 5 plants! still works just GREAT!

Ravenboy said:

I went the recirculating PPK route and definitely got a LARGE increase in yield (sometimes as much as 300% on individual plants, and always 100% increase) over handwatered passive hydro..

also: with active PPKs i am working WAAAYYYYY less than i ever did handwatering passive hydro plants.

Click to expand...

Hey Ravenboy, I respect that that is your experience but..

As I already get around 20-22 ounces per plant every 10 weeks (under 600w hps) with hand watering, there is no way using PPK will give me a 100% increase in yield, let alone a 300% increase. Oh and watering takes a whole of 5 minutes.

Cheers.

Natural high said:

Hey Ravenboy, I respect that that is your experience but..

As I already get around 20-22 ounces per plant every 10 weeks (under 600w hps) with hand watering, there is no way using PPK will give me a 100% increase in yield, let alone a 300% increase. Oh and watering takes a whole of 5 minutes.

Cheers.

Click to expand...

Environment is the most important thing

And ni matter what you do when changing nutes remember to treble check everything is reconnected

AND TWO SPARE PUMPS FOR YOUR CHOSEN SYSTEM AS WE'VE ALL HAD A PUMP DIE

Apart from that study your chosen system and check ph and ec daily

If ya wanna shoot the breeze or run ideas or whatever shoot me a pm I'm useally about

Pick a container.

Pick an inert media.

Pick a Nute line.

Pick a good pH and TDS/EC meter.

Mix solution and adjust pH to 6.0 for veg and 5.8 for flower.

Top water like you would for soil. By hand is fine. Allow some runoff every watering. So it's drain to waste.
If you got the money put a tray under your containers to catch runoff...or let it run all over your carpet. Shit it's not my house!

This is hydro in a solo cup... Imagine what a couple gallons of media can do.

I use something called “Emily’s Garden” for hydro. Works like a charm.