"OP I would suggest going 100% clay pellets in those Air Cubes."
I just had them on top for when I top down feed isn't messy, im coco perlite vermiculite combo and ive learned to keep my medium 90 - 100 percent wet even fully saturated this medium holds enough air, I found that really interesting,
"It's a nice system, but it's best used as a true flood-n-drain/ebb-and-flow setup. You can also use perlite, but it'd be a tad messy. Peat moss, coco, vermiculite... all those things won't dry out quick enough to tax advantage of flood-n-drain."
I actually had to modify my system going into 10g fabrics I bought 10g buckets and I def see what you mean with messy some of the perlite like to play Michael Phelps I actually am doing high fertigation frequent feeding, these ladies are fed every 3 - 4 hours with 1100 ppm they are drinking like hogs and growing crazy pistles daily it's a really fun process to learn.
"I'm no expert, but I think you want to be flooding those like 4 times a day, so that they dry out so the roots get a lot of oxygen so they can uptake nutes effectively when you flood."
Even fully 100 percent saturated it can breath if I let my medium dry salt build up is quick I learned that listening to people on here on fact " this is my results on coco and feeding 1x a day" that kinda freaked me out I m new and veg was a big learning experience however mixed with hand feeding I decided 1 2x a day was good I didn't want to over due it in flower, big mistake you can see rust covered leaves here and there took a second to realize I needed to flush with my clearex bc salt build up from less feeding, and they are thirsty af stretching and building thicker luckily I only did that for like 3 days we ate back on track now
Did you buy the brain bucket for the system so you can control the flood/drain schedule?"
the original 5g buckets to the system and controller i had to modify a little bit i took a 17g trash can id only used for breaking up coco bricks and it was actualy same size as my controller just way bigger i sim lly cut holes inserted tube and ill just manually flip the switches for now too feed but ecentuslly ill get it all converted from the controller to the GC its all easy stuff i was just gappy i got it to work again in the new 10gs hand feeding every 4 hours 1.5g each lady to make sure all 10g for complete soaked wasn't fun at all esp at night but I know what light exposer I can have (no brighter than moonlight) when I fed at night but still you almost break your neck and or spill small amounts
"I'd also suggest steering away from organics in a setup like this. Too messy, too much cleaning."
I did some good reading that talks about being able to use wc tea at a 25 percent diluted ratio weekly res change.
This run I'm sticking with lotus but the clones are going into said mixture with Southern ag Fungicide.