you can avoid all those horrors with proper maintenance. my dehumidifier breaks completely down for cleaning. once a year should suffice. after each op cycle if youre anal.
gotta agree: anything pulling water out of the air is just going to concentrate airborne dust, mold spores, other pathogens, pollen, pests, etc and then dump them into your res. the very fact that a dehumidifier breaks apart to clean tells you that they are known to be dirt traps. as far as not topping off with plain water, i disagree. plants actually feed faster when ppms are lower. this is a scientific fact. when ppms are high, it slows down the osmolar gradient. a plant will feed faster in 500ppm than it will in 1500ppm. unless you're getting close to zero ec/ppm or seeing signs of deficiency, plain water is fine. have you considered increasing your res size? if you're getting deficiencies between res changes, then yeah, you probably want to add nutes to top-off water. don't worry about not knowing your NPK ratio when you mix old/new batches. theoretically, certain nutrients could build up to toxic levels, but not that quickly as long as you're using a reasonable approach to feeding to begin with. you're going to dump the shit in a few more days anyway. i haven't done a res change in 12 weeks. no toxic buildup or sign of lockout (yet). i top off with plain water and periodically feed based on what i see, not based on an arbitrary schedule on the back of a bottle. consider this example: you mix up 5gal of nutes. a few days later, water level is low, so you mix up another 2gal of nutes exactly the same way, top of the res. how is that different from just mixing up 7gal of nutes and running it all week long (or until you dump)? there is very little difference. topping off with nutes between res changes is fine. so is topping off with plain water.
I know youre not being a dick. we're talking here. anyways, my a/c is a split system. and I have my airmover for the system sitting in my mom room, separate from my flower, and for me to inspect the coil and drain pan for my system just means removing a couple screws and pulling a panel off. my dehum i'll admit is a bit more involved and can only be done in between ops. but to keep things from growing in there I'll just dump a h2o2 solution over the coils and let it drain/run through the system and drain to waste that flush.
really? can I get some links please? that sounds fascinating. i'm always up for a scientific article. and I guess i'm asking is if the juice is worth the squeeze? cause if it is then I would gladly run the larger res and pay for using more nuts and run drain to waste. Can you say it is? will my op be that much better to offset the costs of the res increase? i'm not sure about the whole airborne dust and mold spores and such but your microbial and fungal enviroment should be dealing with crap like that naturally shouldn't it? atleast the microscopic stuff. larger pest will obviously need a regiment of some kind. maybe
Thats funny. do you know what the difference is between an A/c and a dehum? I mean the actual working parts? they're pretty much identical. so those "guys in the a/c biz" aren't making any sense. I can clean my A/c coils more easily than I can my dehum. I have to dismantle my dehum. my a/c is just a simple panel and two screws that need pulling. then I can clean the coils as needed. I can even see how dirty they are for cleaning. just saying not all a/c's are going to gunk up or whatever on you. keep your filters clean on everything and you won't really have crap building up in your system. and you can get uber nice hepa blah blah blah for just about anything now-a-days anyhow. also my nutes are descently expensive (heavy 16) and I live 2 hours away from my garden. its really hard to just pop in and top off the res with water.
I would hate to imagine how much nutrients you go through a in a year! That statement is total bull though. I have run NFT, DWC, and now UC, and do not change my reservoir on any sort of set schedule. If it smells good it stays and just gets topped up daily with water and nutes when the PPM levels drop. In my current grow, I usually top up water and feed about twice a week topping up my PPM levels and adjusting the PH. The only time I adjust PH is after a feeding. I am in week 5 of flowering and have changed my system out once the entire grow including veg.(about 2 weeks into flower)
for an 8 week strain it costs me including mid week dosing. about 160$ for a 15 gal res each week. putting in a 200gal res would increase my nuts costs proportionally. a 200 gal res with my nutes would run 1435$. big difference in money spent per cycle. If I was using a different nutrient then, sure, maybe. I like my nut line so i'm not going to be switching soon.
BINGO. That NPK ratio is more important than you would think. I was just adding a dash of this and a dash of that to my res. Big no no.
