Soil grower looking to move to hydro/aero

I had posted last night that I thought I had it all figured out save one small item and someone pointed out I had overlooked the fact that my five plants would need different nutes since they were in different stages of flower.

After a bunch of thinking I'm starting to wonder if aero just isn't going to work for my space. I'm hoping if I describe what I'm looking to build that someone can point me down a path to helping me move out of soil.

I have a 4x4 area that I use as my flowering area. I keep 5 plants in it on a 10 week flower cycle, 2 week rotation. So the name of the game is fewer bigger plants, rater then many - smaller plants. However I can't raise my chambers more then 6 inches off the ground or I"m going to run into height issues with my light and a/c unit that is above.

I wanted to go aero as it seems to be the best. However realizing that I would then need to manage 5 different remote reservoirs isn't exactly sounding like fun or very doable for my space. My only thought on that was cutting it down to three reservoirs by having the plants on weeks 1-4 on a nitrogen mixed with bloom nutes, weeks 5-8 without or very little nitrogen and lots of bloom nutes, week 9 and 10 chamber as just water. With this setup I could have the weeks 1-8 chambers reservoirs right under the plants and have the finishing chamber be on a remote res. That I could probably deal with.

Mainly I'm looking for input as to which direction I should go. Maybe aero isn't my best option because of my space and I should be looking in another direction. I dont know because I'm just a soil guy looking to make a switch!

Please help!

Look into dwc buckets,

No mister problems,
easy to setup.
lower your plant count,

The list is endless

three lil letters, DWC. they have there OWN buckets fer there own feeding, and they get BIG!! herea pik of my girl right now in DWC, 2 months veg, 2 weeks flowering....

Please tell me I'm missing something other then the obvious water maintenance... I need 5 buckets, a strong enough air pump, some air tubing, a distribution block for the air, 5 air stones, 5 nets, and some clay pellets?

I'd have to replicate this system in my veg area as well.

For veg I'd recommend there you go with some aeroponics. If you have a 18 gallon tote you could fit 6-6" net pots in that and keep them in veg. With that, you could transfer that 6" net pot with roots suspended into the 5 gallon bucket with lid. If you get a lid with a 6" net pot in there already, cut off the bottom or you'll never find a way of getting those roots through the holes. Best way is to get a lid and cut your own hole. Hope this helps you. I've done a lot of thinking around this subject ( hydroponic veg transfers to flowering )

Thinking about it I think I'm going to stay with DWC there too. I'll never be vegging longer then 28 days so when you add in a two week cloning cycle and a weekish to recover from topping I'll never need more then two plants in my veg chamber to keep the rotation of 5 ladies in the flower room going.

I've got my shopping list together. I'll post some pics once everything is up and going.

Here's a thread that I wrote on how to build a very simple and very effective DWC hydroponic reservoir. It works very well, as you'll see from the pics of my plants that I put up through out the thread. good luck to you no matter what direction you go.

-S

My thread: https://www.rollitup.org/hydroponics-aeroponics/272015-how-build-easy-dwc-reservoir.html#post3398917

Also, I wrote the thread I linked below on how to build a smaller version of the same type of reservoir. It's even cheaper but every bit as effective. It's for people with smaller spaces. I use this type of reservoir in my veg room sometimes when space becomes an issue for me.

https://www.rollitup.org/hydroponics-aeroponics/281365-5-gallon-dwc-built-15-a.html

-S