Its great you wote this up when you did and +rep to you for it! I have all my supplies coming in to make a few four plant, 14 gal DWC buckets. I'm really excited as this is my first attempt at any kind of hydro.
The only thing I feel like I'm having a hard time with is.... Do you ALWAYS have nutes in the water? In soil you feed clean water inbetween fertilizings.
And, how do you decied when to up the amount of nutes, and how should it be measured? EC or PPM? I've noticed a lot of confusion when using PPM's due to the different conversion formulas. (.5, .7,... w/e the other one is)