Indoor hydro 1st timer Qs

[waveguide]

scuse me for not thinking too deeply about this.. saw how well people were growing in hydro and figured i'd give it a shot and started to piece together gear for a really small cab.

halfway thru (eg. today) i realised i was combining various things i'd heard of without following any one method exactly....

the buckets (2) i intend to use are red plastic folgers coffee cans.. they're just over 6" wide and just shy of 9" tall. just right for my cab. i can wrap them in metal tape if they pass too much light.

i purchased a small airpump with two outlets, and sometime soon i'm going to pick up a few net pots to fit to the top of the folger cans. probably ~4" net pots (i understand it's not the size that counts hehe..)

i intend to use perlite for the medium, i've seen it work and i've got plenty of it already.



so... great! except then i realised that DWC uses a water pump, and air pumps are only supplementary... exoterra makes a cheapie adjustible water pump i can afford, but that's one more thing to plug in, which i'd prefer to avoid.

in other words, i've seen the DWC done with water pump no air pump but not with air pump no water pump..

...but it should still work okay, right? the bubbling water should still hydrate the medium above it some, and if i manually add water to the top a few times a day, i can make it work without a water pump..... yes, no?????

thoughts/recommendations..

also, say the buckets are 9" tall and the net pots are 4" - how high should the water be? say an inch below the bottom of the net pot??

tia and thanks for the inspiration..

 

[The Squid]

Hey wave. I'm no hydro expert, but I know a thing or two. With DWC, all you need is the air pump, not the water pump. You need a water pump with a drip system or flood and drain hydro.

DWC is Deep Water Culture, so it's literally just the net pot that hangs down and the roots into the reservoir of water that is bubbling away 24 hours. You change the reservoir once a week, some do more frequently some less. And you add to it as needed, but no use for a pump necessarily.

I would definitely wrap those because you don't want the light getting to the water in you reservoir. And it's all about keeping cool in hydro. Water needs to stay around 68-73 degrees for optimum oxygen.

Do you have rockwool cubes or root plugs to start in? You'll need something like that to start in then place in the net pot surrounded by perlite. And depending on the size of your perlite and the net pot, it may fall though more than intended. Just some things to think about.

Everything else sounds fine though that I see. Hope this helps.

 

[realcarlos]

Mr. Squid is right. Airpump and temperature are very important. As well as pH when it comes to hydro.

Krum has made a nice tutorial you could follow
https://www.autoflower.org/f43/my-16oz-party-time-tek-9234.html#post177016

You may also want to think about doing hempy buckets. Basically a bucket filled with perlite and a hole 2 inches from the bottom. This would be easier than DWC

Either way you would need a pH meter. Good luck

 

[waveguide]

sounds like the water level is way lower than the 'net pot' or diy equivalent

i've got enough plants in soil atm to book my torture chamber for the next two months so i may be able to afford some rockwool and meter by then. if not i'll be faking it with ph drops, maybe dry some peat moss into a plug shape..

could be interesting.. i've got a rudimentary library of organic nutes but have been following raw salts guys. i've got some big bloom and such to fake it thru hydro nutes but my plans for acquisition go more into raw ingredients than premixed nutes.. next on the list is calcium peroxide, fulvic acid, peters STEM.. in other words.. enough flaky ambition to really balls it up

 

[waveguide]

q on netpots -

i've got enough headroom in the cab to grow up to say 24".. not bad for a micro. what size net pots would you recommend? i can go up to 5" on my res, but i figure since it's about roots in water, the size of the net pot doesn't matter.. is smaller better? just big enough to hold the plug?

selections are 2", 3", 3.75" and 5"

 

[agito]

id go the the 5"