New Hydroponics System, Need you guys to tell me what I might be overlooking

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Originally Posted by meandmine

Does anyone else have any tips? I expect my gift certificate in the mail today or tomorrow and I'd like to be ready to start when it arrives. Happy Birthday To Me :)

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Try waterfarms or power growers. They are self contained continuous recirculating systems. Basically set it and forget it, (minus changing solutions every 1 or 2 weeks.) They are roughly 12-15" tall and 10" wide. They hold 2.5 gallon of water in the reserve bucket. I have 4 of theese running independanlty. I am pretty new to growing, My current grow is only # 4. But for being a "newbie" it is very easy with theese. My last grow i had 4 plants, got about 9oz total dried/cured nuggz. I was using 125watt compact florescent (600watt equivalent) for a 2 week veg, then switched to 400watt hps for 8 weeks of flowering. I was using Gh 3 part flora nutes. I also added kool bloom in weeks 3-6. Very happy with this setup. I grew way more than i expected or even needed. Now my homies get free medicine too!

I ended up building my own system. I don't want a system that only does one plant at a time, though I can definately see the benefits. My little system will hold six plants comfortably. We may make anorher one to put the males either to collect the pollen or to pollenate the female we put with them in another room in another closet.

I highly recommend a TDS meter along with the pH meter... you can pick one up on ebay for around $20... this will help you keep track of the nutrients your plant is/isn't using so you can make adjustments accordingly. As far as the multi-site tubs go, they're nice when you're running clones or a very uniform strain, but you'll find that each plant has different requirements when grown from seed and they'll all grow at different rates. This can make for an uneven canopy and can ultimately hurt your yield due to reduced light exposure (one plant towering over another). You should be fine with your auto flowering strain... those don't grow to be that large and they stay pretty uniform for the most part, you're just sacrificing quality for simplicity imho... Another thing that I haven't seen mentioned yet is resevoir temps... this is rather important although it is overlooked regularly. Ideally, you don't want your water going over 72 degrees, preferrably in the low to mid 60's. This strongly reduces the chance of certain bacteria growing in your resevoir and killing your plants. When I first made my tubs, my temperatures were in the high 70's- low 80's and I noticed a film developing on my lines as well as the inside of my container... I used Reflectix to insulate and lightproof my tubs and I have no more funk in my res while my temps stay around an ambient 70. I add a 22oz frozen water bottle once a day to my resevoir to bring the temps down to around 64. If you have any other questions, please feel free to ask. I run (3) dual site tubs perpetually at the moment, each tub holds 3 gallons of water and has (2) 5" air disks... but I'll definitely be moving to a 1 container/plant system as soon as this next run finishes.