Another growing question

for those that do hydro...

when changing nute's weekly do you when draining the 55 gal drum totally scrub it weekly or is this really necessary....also is there any reason to take plants out of containers totally drain the small buckets and wipe them down on a weekly basis.?
with the plants getting 3 ft tall I am so afraid we will bump the buds around too much at this point in the grow..we have been scrubbing the filters taking the pumps apart weekly etc. and I was just wondering if this is going overboard on a weekly basis.

seeing how this is a first for us we where wondering what everyone else does in tending thier medicine..

thanks for any info you experts could impart to us....

Scrubbing everything weekly might be a bit much. I wouldn't recommend removing your plants from each bucket to scrub weekly either, imagine how hard this will be to do on week 7 of flower. When I was using hydro applications I only scrubbed and cleaned my equipment after each harvest. As long as your res temp doesn't allow for mold or other "bad" fungus' to grow, you should be fine......

Happy Growing......

you'll be breaking plants if you keep that up. In between cycles is plenty. Considering the rootball is going to hold on to any molds/fungus/bugs anyway, you aren't accomplishing anything.

you change nutes every week ?

Unless you're using organic nutes I highly suggest H202 to kill off any unwanted stuff in your system and keep your res sterile. Res changes every week is overkill and a waste of nutrients, every 3-4 weeks is suffice.

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Originally Posted by SoCoMMJ

you change nutes every week ?

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aren't we supposed to change the nutes every week....serious question...and the ph is checked everyday with water being added for evaporation as needed.......are we wasting nute by doing this weekly ???

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Originally Posted by denverbear

aren't we supposed to change the nutes every week....serious question...and the ph is checked everyday with water being added for evaporation as needed.......are we wasting nute by doing this weekly ???

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This is where growers will agree or disagree. Some growers change weekly and some go as far as just topping off res with nutes throughout the grow. Whatever works for you is really what matters. I was draining and replacing weekly but I was only using a 20gal res. I don't think it's a waste of nutes, example: let's say you top off res with a ppm of 1200. 3 days go by and 10 gallons less in the res, check the ppm's after you top off res and before you add nutes. If your ppm's dropped down to 800 after topping off, you can see that your plants are taking in the nutes......

Happy Growing......

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Originally Posted by denverbear

aren't we supposed to change the nutes every week....serious question...and the ph is checked everyday with water being added for evaporation as needed.......are we wasting nute by doing this weekly ???

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Not sure if we are supposed to or not :). We change our reservoirs out after week four in flower to make sure any nitrogen used in initial flowering is removed for the end run. We also change out for flush at the end. That's 3 tanks for the duration of flower with daily top off of water and nute.

We use Botanicare in a semi organic [live biologicals] environment. Maybe chem nutes are different but I believe that once a week changes would be a huge waste of nute$...not to mention killing the planet by dumping volumes of water.

You should not need to scrub your components during the growing process. Scrub between cycles.

If you run a sterile res, look into hydro fungicide from groovy hydro. It will keep the res clean.

When you clean out the system, run Physan20 for a day or so to clean it.