Flood & Drain tables... Do you use capillary mats/hydroton/etc? What are Pros/Cons?

I've got a 2'x4' tray that will be setup as a flood/drain table. I've read a tiny bit about capillary mats and I've seen some people using hydroton/etc in addition to their containers/medium (i.e. Smart Pots or Rockwool cubes)...

What are the pro's/con's of using or not using such in the table?

My plan is to use Coco in Smart Ports with a generous helping of Perlite... The only "con" to using hydroton in the table from what I've read is that it contributes to a LOT of evaporation - which makes maintaing the rez more labor intensive (PH/TDS flucuation as well as water levels in general )...

Anyone fill in the gap on what I'm not "getting" with this?

I've gotta question your logic there.

Hydroton comes in bigger chunks than coco/perlite. Therefore it has less surface area and retains less water. This means after the flood, hydroton will drain more water back to the reservoir than coco. Assuming your reservoir is covered, this should mean that hydroton will leave less water in the pots/flood table to evaporate under the lights. I'd imagine that its actually coco that will lead to more humidity/evaporation than the hydroton.

With an adequate reservoir size and decent quality nutes, your reservoir should be just fine using hydroton.

If you do choose coco, just make sure you either use cloth pots or use some kind of mesh to screen the holes on your regular pots.

hydroton is great, never mind the evaporation, it is better to have more evaporation to keep lower temps at the rootzone, it's recyclable, light weight

I currently use Hydroton in my flood table 2x2 and flood twice a day for 10 minutes during lights on. This is my first time with this setup and am on day 41 of flower and seem to have some issues with root development as I have never seen any roots coming out from under the pots. I'm not sure if the roots are drying out because im not flooding enough but I dont see any dropping in the leaves to indicate under watering. debating on switching it over to a drip to waste coco system instead as I have always gotten great root growth in coco. what the secret to health massive roots in hydroton?

Mr ecio! try flooding about 4 times during the light cycle. I was having the same issue and a few days after i changed my flood schedule the growth really took off. Seemed some clones are damaged for good tho

I can see the evaporation issue if you're filling the table outside the buckets with hydroton as compared to nothing. Sure you're going to go thru quite a bit more fluids. For mrecio, I'd be watering a hell of a lot more than twice a day in hydroton, more like once an hour, but that's just me!

hxvoc said:

Mr ecio! try flooding about 4 times during the light cycle. I was having the same issue and a few days after i changed my flood schedule the growth really took off. Seemed some clones are damaged for good tho

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You know I had it set to kick on every two hours when i first started the girls out in there but it was too much so I kept backing off as I lost a couple of the girls to rot and almost all of them started getting deficient from what I assume was damaged roots. Now that the girls are more established I went ahead and set it back to every two hours during lights on. Hopefully the girls are drinking enough that rot wont be an issue. I myself was surprised i had rot even from day one with watering every two hours didnt think you could over water hydroton that easily. will check on them once lights are on tonight.

@ mrecio

You shold really consider h202, It kills anything in the tank and keeps everything clean. 3 weeks now same rez, crystal clear, just using add backs. I think when clones are young and yo put them under HID, you need to flood plenty as to keep the roots wet. Using h202 also adds Disolved oxygen to the tank and roots love oxygen.

supchaka said:

I can see the evaporation issue if you're filling the table outside the buckets with hydroton as compared to nothing. Sure you're going to go thru quite a bit more fluids. For mrecio, I'd be watering a hell of a lot more than twice a day in hydroton, more like once an hour, but that's just me!

Click to expand...

You're following perfectly! That is EXACTLY what I meant. I have the hydroton as filler in the tray.... The coco itself is in Smart Pots... And at this time the roots are shooting out of the 2 gal pots and going down into the hydroton and the plants look very healthy... They are 'fishboning' even outside fo the pots... So I think things are pretty good... Wishing I had maybe done 3 gals. I've bought some material at the local fabric store to try my hand at making my own smart pots for starting seedlings...

The real key question being posed here was whether there was a benefit to the hydroton in the tray itself which from my understanding would be serving the role of 'capillary matting'... which there are cloth/coco "mats" that can be used as well but they're a bit costly I think (need to recheck that) and I already had hydroton lying around.

Another bit of information to share...

I too was overwatering at first and started noticing gnats... So I did the H202 thing (3% stuff from any local store not the Hydro store highly caustic stuff) just "guesstimating" how much to add and backed off to once a day watering since the plants were still very young...

Once I knew the gnats were gone (or so it seemed) I then added back in a 2nd watering and I'm still sitting there... my soil doesn't dry out as best I can tell... Also I'm using some 2' x 4 bulb T5 lighting for this 'mini' flood table so I don't have the same heat considerations as an HID lighting user would. It's all in the name of experimenting at this point for me... dialing in my technique before "going for it" for real...

My mix is Coco and Perlite.... I wish I had went with a higher percentage of Perlite to drain more in hindsight... that way I could flood more frequently... I'm doing my best to avoid the problems with overwatering/rot by going under, not over - if anything...

i am going with hydroton with my ebb and flow