Grow Mediums Fabric, air, or plastic pots?

[Olderfart]

That brass fitting is a no no. You can leach way to much copper and cause a toxicity.

Most brass also contains small amounts of lead, unlikely to affect the plant like copper, but any lead exposure is not good for humans.

For some reason, I missed these replies earlier, for which I apologize. I didn't notice any toxicity issues in the completed grow last winter, or with the veggie grow this summer, but I take your comments seriously, and will check out alternatives.

 

[Mañ'O'Green]

I used a brass fitting in my top-off tank and everything started to die. As soon as I pinpointed the fitting as the culprit and removed it the problem went away! I threw that plant outside and about a week later when I went to throw it on the compost pile It had beautiful new root growth. So evidently if you remove the excessive copper the plant can recover. unfortunatley for this plant I had no place to grow it out as I was building my new grow space.

 

[MANNIK]

You are right, I was originally referring to the version III single part. As I understand it, the main differences are more calcium and less potassium, and more consistent physical particle size (no more white balls) but there are likely other differences as well. Although MC has been criticized for changing their formula so often, I give them big credit for listening to feedback and trying to improve their product. This sort of performance, particularly at the price they provide, is beyond top notch in my books.

Anyway, if I needed more MC, I would be much tempted by the two part. OTOH, I am not really sure that I do enough growing or know enough about this stuff to improve on the performance of the one part mix. The one part stuff already works really well, and dialing it will be simpler for us home growers than fiddling with the mix of two part.

I don't think you can go too far wrong with either approach, and more experienced peeps on here may be happy to help with dialing the two part if you need some advice.

Innovation is the key to success! The white balls of calcium used to bug the hell out of me. I never know how much of the mix should be powder/balls. When you grow on the smaller scale, a few grams of nutes at a time the mix would be drastically different from mix to mix.
I would be more inclined to go with a 2 part mix if I was currently growing photo-period plants as veg/bloom is necessary. Autos seem to thrive on lower nitrogen anyway so usually I run bloom nutes only to keep it simple.

 

[Olderfart]

I used a brass fitting in my top-off tank and everything started to die. As soon as I pinpointed the fitting as the culprit and removed it the problem went away! I threw that plant outside and about a week later when I went to throw it on the compost pile It had beautiful new root growth. So evidently if you remove the excessive copper the plant can recover. unfortunatley for this plant I had no place to grow it out as I was building my new grow space.

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Bugger! It looks as though I got lucky, I'm certain that the brass fitting I used exposes a heck of a lot more brass than your smaller fitting did. I did a bit of digging around, and it seems that some plants find even 0.2 ppm copper toxic, and that is a bloody small amount of copper. Anyway, I am going to figure out a way to replace the brass fitting with some sort of plastic tap setup with the same filter arrangement. Thanks again for the head's up, I would have responded earlier, but somehow I missed your reply.