Looking for advice and help to switch from soil to anything but soil!! Setup help!!

Hey guys!! Im two weeks into flowering and want to grow anything but soil for my next batch. I'll begin with my current room setup. The room is 10ft by 12ft with a 9 ft ceiling. I have 4-600 watt air cooled reflectors with a 12,000btu AC. Two can max66 carbon filters. The temperature is always between 77 and 84 degrees with 50% humidity so temperature is not a problem. Im currently growing some sour diesal x trainwrek and started flowering them at about 3 ft. I have them in 5 gallon containers with a buddys soil mix consisting of peat, supersoil, perlite, bloodmeal. Ive been experimenting half the crops with fox farms nutrient mix and the other half with botanicare products. Everything is looking awesome and the plants are almost up to my neck and looks pretty healthy except for a minor problem with whiteflys. The person i got the clones from gave us them with whiteflys, however i released about 100 ladybugs and it seems to be controlling them. HERE IS WHERE I NEED SOME ADVICE GUYS.....I want to get rid of using soil because i spend anywhere from 2-5 hours everyother day handwatering many plants and cleaning up the area. Not to mention, excess water always brings gnats. Using soil is such a hassle and mess. However its effective but i want to look into trying a flood system? or anykind of system that does not require me to do so much labor. Im a noob when it comes to anything else but soil. Can anyone suggest me something? Ive heard of drip systems and flood systems but do not know how they work. thanks guys any advice is appreciated. Oh and another thing i'm planning on installing a c02 system on the next batch ill get some pictures of my current setup soon

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"any kind of system that does not require me to do so much labor."

LOL! ballisticdk I dropped all of my hydro and went completely soil because I found hydro to be a lot of work and worry. Most find the opposite, hydro to be easier. I've got a simple soil grow method that takes me only a few minutes a day linked in the grow lab below, but it requires soil to be mixed. Or done with hydro.

The simplest hydro method is a Deep Water Culter (DWC) - a 5 gallon bucket with 3 gallons of water and an air pump. The plant sits in a mesh basket, the basket sits in a hole cut in the lid of the bucket. Cheap and resilient, you can build your system one bucket at a time or buy one already made.

The Kali Mist on the left is a 60" single cola in Recycled Deep Water Culture (water and air pumps) and the right is a double topped 48" Kali Mist in Pro Mix.



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thanks for the input..Im gonna definately look into DWC. Watering soil is such a hassle. It's probably such a hassle for me because i have little room to work with because i have a little too much plants in my room. Im always constantly trying to make space so i can walk inbetween them to water them. Someone told me a method where you let the roots hang from a surface and you have a large resievour and you control it where it floods the roots. im not too sure though? by the way how much did you get off that DWC plant? About how tall was your plant when you entered it into flowering?

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"Someone told me a method where you let the roots hang from a surface and you have a large resievour and you control it where it floods the roots. im not too sure though?"

Sounds like DWC but could be flood and drain, another simple resilient high yield system.

With DWC the roots stay in the water 24/7, the air pump feeds enough O2 to the roots to keep them healthy. The bubblegum on the right was grown in a 2 litre pop bottle, the water and nutes changed only once during 10 weeks of flower. The plants will live through a lot.



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"by the way how much did you get off that DWC plant?"

It produced around 3 litres of 4 week cured bud (~180 grams). Less than the Kali Mist on the left that took up 1/2 the square footage.





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"About how tall was your plant when you entered it into flowering?"

It was around 6" when I put it into flower, Kali Mist grows like bamboo. I've had 1.5" clones going into flower end up 3'. 3 Kali Mist in the back right (from 1 1/2" - 3" in veg to 30", 32" and 33"). The tall spear on the left is Taiga, Big Laughing in front of the Taiga.



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...I've been where your at, grew in soil for a couple years. I switched up to ebb'n flow and got my life back.




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I think recirculating deep water culture or RDWC would be your best bet thats just my opinion. RDWC can incorporate a drip system. Like flood and drain, you want to make sure different strains are separated so you can tweak nute levels. I run 4 plants per 600 hps and use a 50 gallon roughneck jumbo for a res for each 4 plants. You could also use a float valve attatched to a 55 gallon drum to top your water off automatically and make it even easier. Install a 3/4 IN BULKHEAD FITTING AND BULKHEAD SCREEN to attach each bucket together and prevent root clogs and then get a micro pore diffuser from deep water innovations for each bucket and the res. These are the most expensive part but they wont clog so its worth it down the road. Now get a 20 watt 45 liter/minute pump per 4 buckets to pump air into the solution. Now get a 20 watt eco plus 264gph water pump to pump water out of the res into an irrigation manifold, and from the irrigation manifold into 1/4 in line which will go to dripper baskets in your hydroton in net pots above buckets. So now you have oxygen rich water circulating through your buckets. The eco plus pump also comes with a venturi attatchment so you can hook up an airline straight to the pump to get even more air. Your lat airline and airstone out of 6 goes into the res. This system works amazingly well and is extremely low maintenance. All you have to do is switch out the water every two weeks and add a little ph down every once in a while.

Flood systems are good too but I've heard of people having problems with large systems such as the C.A.P. bucket system where one end of the system filling higher than the other and buckets are leaking. Check out THIS VID for a review of an ebb and grow/ flood and drain system.

Peace,
IF

I use a DIY ebb & flow system (found in my journals) and it's a lot easier and requires a lot less time than my soil plants. Depending on your nute line, pH is something you'll probably need to adjust or check everyday. However, I've been testing dynaGro and have found their pH to be rock-solid and something that doesn't need adjusted.