As I look at your set-up I love it. I never had luck without cutting my coir with 50 % perilite. With that said I saw a guy in Australia pull some monsters with straight coir. I'd like more info on why you abandoned hpa. I've read many dead end hpa and aa threads. It seems you either rock it or fail no in between.
As far as my aeroponics setup went, here is the problem. Think of aeroponics like driving down a mountain on a long and winding road in an 18 wheeler, as long as everything is going right, things are just fine. But at some point you feel your brakes go out, there is nothing you can do about this. You start to speed up, all the time thinking, maybe this will work out. However things get worse and worse at an exponential rate. But you are so invested in this ($1500+) you try an ride it out. But your fate was sealed long ago.
So my plants were getting bigger and bigger, things looked good. Then one of them got sick, and like a cold at a day care center, it spread like wildfire. My system sucked up the infected water and sprayed it in a fine mist over everything. It happened very quickly.
other issue were my root chambers were not tall enough. Mine were 18 inches, they should have been 4 feet. the roots need a lot or room to hang, there needs to be misters spread around based on where the roots will be, so the roots don't cause dead spots in the chamber. This was a reoccurring problem for me.
I could never really tackle the drainage situation. There just wasn't a good way to do it without buying a tub with a built in drain. I cut the bottom of a tub and let it drain into a rain gutter, then it went back to tank. This caused algae problems.
My 100 psi pump was undersized for the 48 misters.
My tubs let i too much light
If i could do it all over again, i would not have done areoponics, at least not now.
My coco/clay pebble dutch bucket system is a total crap shoot too, i have no idea what i am doing. I can read 100 posts on dutch buckets and getting 100 different answers to the same question. so back to the trial and error method for me.
if you consider doing the dutch/bato bucket system, i would say, just buy them from farmtek, for the 2 bucks i would save per bucket making them myself, its not worth the hassle.
