5 gallon bucket or tote?

if you were going to try out dwc in a 2x4 tent with 1-2 plants would you go with 5 gallon buckets or something like a 14 gallon tote instead? What do you think would work best for the space and why?

Tote for sure.
I find that 5 gal buckets fillup with roots and displace too much volume in the bucket,
That makes it challenging to keep the solution stable because the plant is using such a large volume of nutes compared to the total in the bucket.
I use 17 gal HDX totes from HD, but they are too long to fit a pair in a 2x4.
The 12 gal HDX would fit nicely, I use 6" netlids on my system.
I'd also think about how you plan on doing dumps-need some type of pump/drain so now would be a good time to think about a solution.

GBAUTO said:

Tote for sure.
I find that 5 gal buckets fillup with roots and displace too much volume in the bucket,
That makes it challenging to keep the solution stable because the plant is using such a large volume of nutes compared to the total in the bucket.
I use 17 gal HDX totes from HD, but they are too long to fit a pair in a 2x4.
The 12 gal HDX would fit nicely, I use 6" netlids on my system.
I'd also think about how you plan on doing dumps-need some type of pump/drain so now would be a good time to think about a solution.

New item by GBAUTO

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That set up you have looks spectacular.

I think I will just try out one plant in a 12 gallon for now. Got any suggestions or ideas on a setup I could use for draining or changing the water? How often do you think it would need to be changed with one in a 12 gallon?

stckyprp said:

That set up you have looks spectacular.

I think I will just try out one plant in a 12 gallon for now. Got any suggestions or ideas on a setup I could use for draining or changing the water? How often do you think it would need to be changed with one in a 12 gallon?

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My neighbor uses a handheld marine bilge pump, she just sticks it onto the tote and uses another bucket as a drain and pumps out the old, and then mixes fresh nutes.
I typically do a system dump every 14 days, but it can vary depending on how the plants are responding.

stckyprp said:

That set up you have looks spectacular.

I think I will just try out one plant in a 12 gallon for now. Got any suggestions or ideas on a setup I could use for draining or changing the water? How often do you think it would need to be changed with one in a 12 gallon?

Click to expand...

wet/dry vac is what i use

I use 3g buckets for veg and throw the basket lids onto a 5g bucket for bloom, reason I use the buckets is I doubled up on them, so when I want to refill my nutrient solution I have just make it in a separate bucket then swap the lids from one to the other. Then dump it the old res and properly clean the inside on the buckets from excess nurtient and dead roots. The plants will experience like 10 seconds at most of no solution.

Keep a spare 5g of nutrient solution outside of the tent and a 5g jug of RO water, when the water levels drop during bloom I check the EC/pH and will add nutrients and/or water depending on the E.C. values I am getting