first time hydro grow, water change out question

hi all this is my first hydro grow. I am running 4, 5 gallon buckets RDWC , .

question, when you change your water do you just drain the reservoir and refill, or do you drain reservoir and suck out all the little bit from bottom of each bucket, then refill ?

Once a week change fluid,pour water down through your medium to clean root system ,I use hose,

I dump do quick rinse and refill. I never go past 7 days on change out. Depending on salt buildup I'll add clearex and run a hour to pull excess salts.

In a perfect world...you would clean the water/gunk out of the bottom of each bucket after draining out the old water. Being in a recirculating system this may not be so feasable to do though. If you cannot get down their and get that last bit of dirty water out, you could always fill it up with clean water, drain it again, and if you're obsessive like me maybe repeat that process a couple times to rinse old nutes off the roots and sort of rinse the salt build up on the bottom out. With that being said....if you're adding back nutrients along with the water you top back off with to keep the PPM's where they need to be, you can go longer than seven days between res changes...personally...I go between 15-30 days between res changes. But when I add water back, I add all of my additives and base nutes back at whatever strength I feel the plants can handle...figure out what works for you...res changes can cause more stress on a plant than you think. If your PH is stable, then I wouldn't worry about changing the water...if their is an issue with your res water, the PH will indicate it...if the res water is stable, your PH will be as well...Keep in mind, I use beneficial bacteria, or else I would need to do res changes more often...good luck bud hope all works out!

Good lord!

I often do DWC without changing nutes for the whole grow. Once a week is crazy and wasting nutes is like wasting food. A sin! Unless you are having root issues don't worry about cleaning out stuff.

I don't ever run bacteria in hydro. I do chill the nutes to 65F so don't even need peroxide to keep the roots happy.

I just monitor the ppm and add small amounts of nutes to keep the ppm in my target range. I've done tubs side by side changing one a couple times in one and no change at all in the other with no difference noted. I use good RO or distilled water with AN nutes and have 50 tubs worth under my belt. Doing soilless in pots now so I don't have to mess with a bunch of tubs.

OldMedUser said:

Good lord!

I often do DWC without changing nutes for the whole grow. Once a week is crazy and wasting nutes is like wasting food. A sin! Unless you are having root issues don't worry about cleaning out stuff.

I don't ever run bacteria in hydro. I do chill the nutes to 65F so don't even need peroxide to keep the roots happy.

I just monitor the ppm and add small amounts of nutes to keep the ppm in my target range. I've done tubs side by side changing one a couple times in one and no change at all in the other with no difference noted. I use good RO or distilled water with AN nutes and have 50 tubs worth under my belt. Doing soilless in pots now so I don't have to mess with a bunch of tubs.

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are you using RO water or tap, what brand chiller are you using, if I can save nutes I am definitely game

RO water since my distiller died. DIY chiller I made using a water cooler.

There is no need to change out nutes for most of the veg. I'd start my clones at 300ppm then as they started showing signs of good growth and had roots in the water I'd just bump up the ppm as they got bigger. Most times I'd wait until after the stretch then change out the nutes for a fresh batch using the Lucas Formula. No Grow and the Micro and Bloom at a 1:2 ratio with Big Bud. Just before the flip I'd add Big Bud and use all 3 nutes equally to make sure they had some of everything.

When using tap water, unless it's really low ppm, you need to change out your nutes more often to prevent the minerals in your water building up in the pail or rez. If your water starts at 250ppm by the time you've added back the same amount of water your rez holds you now have 500ppm of minerals from your water in there. Too much and toxic salts buildup starts killing off leaves in the middle of flowering and can really mess things up.

When you start with pure water you know that the ppm you read is all nutes that you put in there. Lot of guys will bitch saying you don't know how much of what is there but it's not rocket science. I start with a 1-1-1 ratio then switch to a 3-2-1 ratio until just before the flip then top up the ppm a bit with 1-1-1 again. This round in soilless I also added Big Bud, Bud Factor X and Bud Ignitor. Flipped them to 12/12 on 4/20.

OldMedUser said:

Good lord!

I often do DWC without changing nutes for the whole grow. Once a week is crazy and wasting nutes is like wasting food. A sin! Unless you are having root issues don't worry about cleaning out stuff.

I don't ever run bacteria in hydro. I do chill the nutes to 65F so don't even need peroxide to keep the roots happy.

I just monitor the ppm and add small amounts of nutes to keep the ppm in my target range. I've done tubs side by side changing one a couple times in one and no change at all in the other with no difference noted. I use good RO or distilled water with AN nutes and have 50 tubs worth under my belt. Doing soilless in pots now so I don't have to mess with a bunch of tubs.

Click to expand...

No doubt! Total waste of nutes and water, both of which cost money. I use 40 - 50 gallons in my dwc. After a week of transitioning from veg to flower, where I feed a mix of veg and bloom, I do a flush. A week before harvest, I'll flush again, and go light on nutes till the end. That's it. If, however, I smell any hint of an odor in my water, I immediately flush a couple times, to strip the bad stuff from the roots.

I'm finding that the methods I'm using is preventing any problems, which allows me to go a long time between flushes, if any are actually needed during the grow. Old timers know this, I'm sure.

• Keep water temps between 66f and 69f
• Sterilize everything between grows. That means taking the system apart and cleaning out the pipes. So when you design your RDWC, make sure you take into consideration, how far you can easily disassemble and reassemble the components in your system. Sterilize everything with bleach!
• Don't go heavy on the nutes, and don't necessarily go by what the brand's nutrient feed charts instruct. They don't know what strain you are growing, and each strain can have different needs. I max out at between 800-850ppm in mid to late flower, even though GH says I should be in the 1200 range. Overfeeding can cause problems in the roots, as well as the rest of the plant. Unhappy roots start to smell, and you know the rest. It's better to read your plants. If they look healthy, more nutes doesn't mean "even better". This takes practice, but it's not all that difficult.

Check out my 2017 grow thread link below. I started off where you are, with respect to a 5 bucket RDWC, but changed many things up along the way that has greatly improved the performance and maintainability of my system. A lot of really experienced growers helped along the way. I did have a fair amount of past experience with building DWCs though.

Good luck!

OldMedUser and JSB are dead on point. If ph is stable, and your roots are healthy, then it is a big waste to change the water...a lot of people change water oftenly because they're obsessive, which is totallly understandable as most good growers are obsessive to a certian degree anyways. You also have to consider that when your babies get big, it is stressful to the roots to be getting lugged from one bucket to another while you rinse out it's permanent bucket.

Madfrog56 said:

or do you drain reservoir and suck out all the little bit from bottom of each bucket, then refill ?

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Forgot to comment on this. When flushing, it's not necessary to get the last bit out of the buckets. When I flush, I drain the water, fill with tap (mine's only 50ppm) to the most the system will hold, run that water for a half an hour or so, then drain and do the final fill. That's usually enough to clean everything up.

In between grows, when you drain your entire system, you can use a wetvac to suck out any remaining water.