Decide ebb/flow or bubbles or both?

I am planning to move from years of indoor/outdoor soil grow to indoor hydro production units. I am trying to decide on which hydro technique will be best for me. It needs to be scaleable. I am considering both ebb/flow and bubbles. Please help me clarify my thinking:

Bubblers:
Pros:
Easy, cheap, readily available materials.
Cons:
Best to keep one plant per container – this would be a drag for large systems.
Airstones can plug up.
Must have air system and nutrient flow system.
Possible air pump failure but redundancy would be easy to integrate.

Ebb/flow
Pros:
Easy cheap, readily available materials.
Can put multiple plants in large, single containers.
Cons:
Possible water pump failure but redundancy would be easy to integrate.

From what I am reading online, people using bubblers link up multiple buckets and supply them with nutrients from a reservoir and some even use a controller bucket to keep levels even. Seems to me this is almost everything you need to do a ebb/flow except for timers on the pumps. Why not do both? Would the ebb/flow expose too much root to air between floods? It seems the bubbler method produces massive root systems. I believe the only difference between the two systems as far as pots go is the bubblers use pots with many more holes, allowing the roots to find their way below to the nutrients. The ebb/flow pots have fewer holes keeping most of the roots inside the pot. But the pots are about the same size, right? So ebb/flow has a smaller root system, right? So is combining the two methods not practical? What would the issues be?

what you call bubblers is dwc

rdwc is dwc buckets connected together to share nutrients

an ebb & flow can be changed to somewhat of an RDWC. You will need to flip the timer on the ebb&flow so its normally flooded, and drains periodically. You will need new lids with suspended small netpots for the ebb&flow buckets so that most of the roots are in water, and not hydroton. then of course you need to add air stones in each bucket.

dtp5150 said:

what you call bubblers is dwc

rdwc is dwc buckets connected together to share nutrients

an ebb & flow can be changed to somewhat of an RDWC. You will need to flip the timer on the ebb&flow so its normally flooded, and drains periodically. You will need new lids with suspended small netpots for the ebb&flow buckets so that most of the roots are in water, and not hydroton. then of course you need to add air stones in each bucket.

Click to expand...

Thanks for your help. Is there any advantage to doing this hybrid RDWC/ebb & flow? In doing my research it seems the connected RDWC has almost all the same stuff as E&F. I am trying to decide the pros and cons of the two systems for a larger grow operation. I just can't do all those damn soil pots anymore. It sounds like most people do not like to put more than one plant into a RWDC container - why? Do the roots get too intertwined? Would that be bad? I know you would have less flexibilty in moving individual plants around but that would be the same with E&F. I know people often aireate (sp?) their reservoirs in E&F but would aireators in each growing container help or be too much trouble in a E&F system? It looks like I will have to give up moving individual pots around since what I need is many plants in fewer containers.

I've had mixed experience with multiple plants per pot.

1. The roots will just become one huge ball, so if one were to die, you could have some issues with rotted root mass.
2. Unless they are grown identically, once they start to stretch, it's very easy for one to shoot past another and completely starve it or light.

I started off with 4 per 40L container, then moved to three, then to two. 2 was absolutely fine, 3 was still a touch crowded. If you have the space though, i think 1 per bucket is good, means you can get it nice and big without the root system overwhelming the container

Thanks for your reply. That makes sense. What I am trying to ask is: I am leaning toward a E&F system but it seems like it would be easy to add a bubbler to each growing container creating a hybrid E&F and an RDWC system. Since the RDWC plants have larger root balls (the pots have more holes than in E&F so the roots come out and play) that would seem to mean more growth with that method. It sounds like roots from multiple plants in one growing container comingling is not an issue with E&F. Maybe I am just wasting (or wasted) brain power here and should forget about the E&F option entirely. I just don't like to think about having so many individual containers. I am planning something larger than what I have been doing and want to move up from dozens and dozens of damn soil-containing pots to something easier.