6-8 weeks of veg. Maybe 10? Can't remember right now to be honest. Lots of people are fending off root rot by just adding benie tea on a regular basis. Even with temps in the 75-78 region. I'm running what I call a "semi-current" dwc. Fuck individual buckets for sure. I am using my ebb and flow controller (basically timed backwards) to always keep the individual buckets full and empty them into a 75 gallon Rez then refill 3x a day. There is about 40 gallons in the plant buckets and 30 in the rez which sits on the concrete floor. This stabilizes my water chemistry and keeps temps around 72(water in Rez acts as a buffer for ph,ppm, and temp)
The controller also automatically tops off the buckets as the plants transpire. Which is good because they are absolutely banging and drinking 15 gallons a day. Weird thing is that my ppm are very high...like 1800 in week 3. Plants not burning so not such a big deal but at this rate week 5-6 is going to be around 2200. Yikes.
I'm with Wolverine on lowering EC/TDS. 1800 is very high for a DWC system. I'm confused about how they're using 300ppm day and also 15 gallons of water. We would typically see high water usage and increasing ppm, as the plants use more water than nutes. You may find that lowering your ppm will help stabilize the PH. I've ran every system out there at every PPM you can think of. Here's what I have learned: 1000 PPM works great on every hydro system out there. It's WAY more effective to change water more often than to run hot nute solution. From day 2 after a water change your solution is not optimum. The rule I use is to change the water when the fresh water I have added equals the size of the res and plant buckets. If you are using 15 gallons a day, and there is 70 gallons of water, that would be every 5 days. Just what I do in water systems.
All that bullshit being said, the plants look great, and that's what's most important. However, my plants looked great growing with Cutting Edge. In fact, they looked better than with AN. But, the AN out yielded the CE BIG TIME, and the quality was superior, as well. This told me that just because they look healthy doesn't mean you are maximizing your plant's potential. Try playing with your ppm and see what happens. I know you won't be chasing PH as much with lower ppm. Also, if you keep your bloom room dry (40% RH) to ward off PM, lower nute PPM is needed because the rapid transpiration that occurs in a dry atmosphere. We are having dry winds here. The RH in my op was 27% this morning. We fed with 600ppm nutes...and fired up the swamp cooler to get some humidity going.
