@Thundercat
I like the simplicity, it's pretty much as simple as it gets. I especially like the fact that you go with pure clay pebbles in small pots, that's practically a zero-waste approach. I assume the tray has high walls and you basically flood the pots completely during the flood cycle.
What was the flood/drain schedule that you used, and how often did you swap nutes? Which nutes have you used?
How did you go about cleaning the system if you had a 4x4 tray perpetually filled with plants, though? Did you put the entire crop into a replacement tray?
If you have good drainage, flood the table for 2-3min, every 4-6hrs. My pump isn’t on a timer at the moment, sometimes I forget to turn it off, and she gets flooded with water for 8hrs till I turn off the pump to drain. Plants still look like the enjoy it.
You can even pump it once a day.
You can also put in heaps of air stones in the trays, and flood the tray constant, making it into DWC. But you’ll need heaps of air bubbles hitting to all rock cubes, so they don’t drown.
You change nutes every 2 weeks. I check and adjust ppm and pH before flooding the table 5.7-5.8.
Plants in flood and drain are real healthy, no sign of deficiency. After 24hrs pH always rises to 6.6 and about 200ppm less in the res.
I have a nutrient bucket filled up 20L of water and A&B only with PPM at 2500ppm.
When I’m low on the tanks that feed the trays, I top her off from the nutes tank and re-adjust pH and what not.
mother plants has yellow leaves on the bottom section as I forget to feed her and it shows. But now I’m keeping on point, and keeping with the schedule.
AlBFuct uses 2K hps cover 4 3ft by 3ft flood. 1K covering 2trays. He pulls every 2 weeks. About 1.5lb each tray. 4 res 100L each. All pumped to 1400ppm canna brand nutes. He trims the 2/3 of the bottom and grow single colas nugs. I’m sure he s running Co2 aswell and H2o2.
He doesn’t use clay pellets in his system but grow cubes in square pots. So he minimise the cleaning work at the end of each cycle.
I will change to that medium surely after to minimise the work. Or just get white sheets over the trays, so we can remove the use of clay pellets, and keep only 4in Rockwell cubes in the tray alone.
I have never reach to the 5th tray, and gone perpetual.
