Welcome to ODWC

Overflow DWC. My take on a recirculating DWC system where buckets can be placed at different heights to accomodate different strains or plants at different stages to keep your canopy even.

I also wasn't into using a float valve to control my water level, I wanted more simple. The level is self controlling.. it's wherever you drill the overflow drain. Only your res level drops, which I just manually refill.

Another advantage is a smaller pump can be used, and more oxygenation is achieved through breaking the surface with the pumping water, twice, once in the bucket, and again when drained into the res.

When you have young plants with roots that don't reach down enough, you don't need to hand water. I pull the feed tube from the side of the bucket, and tape it on top so it drains through the hydroton for a few days, until the roots have grown enough.

To drain the whole system I use a drain tube with a manifold that attaches to each bucket and goes outside. It just drains by gravity and I leave the pump on to empty out the res.

They seem to be liking the ODWC. I clipped off a huge amount of fan leaves up high, I had to, there was no light getting in, it was really quite ridiculous how many leaves there were, it looked like you could have laid on the canopy for a comfy nap. Roots submerged are stained a bit brown by the nute solution, the big ones look like rat tails, fickin' awesome.

Each bucket only has a 7 liter/min 6 watt air pump right now, but I just received my 45W pump

(plants in back are left over from when I was a still a dirtbag)

Feed and overflow drain in my bud closet and veg cab.

It's hard to tell, but they're all connected to the same reservoir?

How does that work with different strains at different times?
Do you just keep the PPMs exceedingly low?

Yes, all connected to the same res. Well, there are 2 resevoirs, the bud res is brown, with 2 plants hooked up to it, soon to be 3 and then 4. Veg cab res is the black bucket. It's really simple, just pump water into each bucket from the res, and then drill a drain hole in each bucket where you want the water level. Water pumps into each bucket, and then drains through the overflow back into the res.

If you're using a a standard RDWC where all you're buckets are attached together with hard pipe, and level is controlled by a float valve, you can't raise one bucket higher than another. The water level wouldn't be right and nothing would work properly. With ODWC every bucket has it's own water level set by wherever you drill the overflow drain and it doens't matter, you can move them around, up and down, and they're still all connected.

I run 1100 PPM in veg all the time, and 1430 PPM in flower. I dunno about other nutes, with technaflora though the 1100 PPM doesn't burn new rooted cuttings.