First indoor flood & drain system

Here it is.. My first indoor 6 bucket flood and drain system using GH nutrients. 4 gallon buckets with 3 gallon net pots and a 55gal reservoir with a controller bucket. I have two 600w mh&hps fixtures(1200watts). The bucket spacing is about 4ft x 3.5ft...
I chose to germinate 3 mother seeds in small rockwool cubes. Once the roots poked out bottom of cube an inch I transplanted seedling cubes into my DWC bucket with 4 net pot lid and a cheap air pump with a nice size air stone. I'am using hydroton as my median. Seedlings under four t5 bulbs. Keeping ph between 5.5-6.5 and water temp around 71 degrees. I mixed up a weak nutrient batch and they seem to be doing good. I plan to grow these mother seeds up, sex and clone them. They are 7 days old today..
Goal - Would like to yield 2-3lbs if everything goes good. Seems high but with fimming and a full basement room grow these plants are gunna get fairly big. Let me know what y'all think.

Day 8.
Today I checked seedling "vitals" lol!.. I regularly check these in the morning.
Temp- 69' F
EC- 0.6
Ppm- 397
Ph- 5.87
These are decent average numbers?

Honda9898 said:

Day 8.
Today I checked seedling "vitals" lol!.. I regularly check these in the morning.
Temp- 69' F
EC- 0.6
Ppm- 397
Ph- 5.87
These are decent average numbers?

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These look good, temp is a bit low, mid 70's would be better... 69 isn't gonna cause any major problem, just slower start.

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Internode said:

These look good, temp is a bit low, mid 70's would be better... 69 isn't gonna cause any major problem, just slower start.

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Older home cold basement.. I bet when I change lights to mh the temp will go up some, gunna need a couple fans blowing around then, and hopefully the dwc temp don't get too warm.

Day 9.
I won't post plant vitals everyday on here but Im keeping track in my notebook. I'll post today's vitals but I wanted to post some pics of the roots, they are growing tremendously!!! Compare both root pictures, first one is last night 11:58pm and second root picture is today at 2:12pm. They are growing so fast!
Temp- 69' F
EC- 0.6
Ppm- 403
Ph- 6.5 (Adjusted to 5.5)

Looks good man, I am not sure how others on here would feel about it, but I would suggest not exposing your root system to light anymore.

I wanted to post up a picture of my mother plant/seedlings. They are 12 days old today since they popped. They seem to be blasting off great. I also posted a picture of my daily vital chart, as you can see the ppms are increasing everyday. I think this is because of the ph down I'm using everyday. When I check plant vitals, ph rises to about 6.0 so everyday I have to ph down. I will be changing water/nutes every 14 days so adding nutrients and diluting will not be needed. I'm going by my General Hydroponics feeding chart a bit.. which says
Seedlings: 200-400ppm
Early growth: 500-700ppm
Late growth: 600-800ppm

So I guess let me know what you guys think.. also WILL BE ordering a permanent ppm, EC, ph, temp monitor for reservoir... tired of manually checking haha! I don't like these cheap ppm meters, everytime I dunk the meter it shows a different ppm everytime...

Looks pretty good man... PPM/EC will increase as water is evaporated. Fluctuation of PH is ok, Ideal is 5.8-6.0 however if it ever dips as low as 5.5 or as high as 6.5 you will be fine, in fact it sometimes helps make some micro nutrients more available when the PH swings. Make sure you add water for what evaporates or is transpired by the plants.

As far as nutrient changes, I change weekly at all stages of growth. Up to you as far as bi-weekly changes. but if you notice issues with the plants, like the leaves yellowing or showing other signs of deficiency, you may need to change sooner and/or increase EC/PPM of the mix. I am currently in flower week 5 and am running EC of 1.8 around 1000 PPM. I am willing to bet if you do a nutrient change right now, and bump the strength up a little bit, you will get some pretty explosive growth over the next week... 2 things to remember A, if you ever notice your plants have some sort of weird problem like nutrient deficiency or PH or PPM issue, my motto is "when in doubt, dump it out" - make a fresh batch of nutrients. B, leaves already affected by nutrient deficiency ALMOST NEVER GET BETTER they will either stay the same or fall off. So, when you make nutrient adjustments to try and fix problems, you will usually only see results in new growth...

As far as meters, I have used the constant monitor PH units and had nothing but problems, I have never used a constant EC/PPM monitor. I currently use a PPM pen by Hanna, and PH test drops. If you do end up using a constant monitor PH system, I would still spot test with drops. I lost a whole crop to a PH monitor saying it was 6.0 but it was actually 4.0 because it failed without me knowing. Oh, and, PPM meters will show slightly different numbers, even if you re-dunk immediately, because PPM reads are also influenced by temperature of water. if it only is changing by 50ppm or less, it isn't a make or break deal, not much difference between 800ppm and 850ppm for example...

Stress relieved. Thank you. I agree, I need change out water/nutes tomorrow. I probably will buy a decent ppm,ph monitor still but will definitely occasionally check with my ppm pen also.
It seems like my feeding chart ppms are lower than what other people are running, but I probably shouldn't mix higher than what Directions say?

It looks like your current PPM meter is converting from EC to PPM based on .70 conversion (Truncheon). So, at max strength (late growth on your nutrient instructions) is EC 1.6, but your PPM conversion will be 1120ppm.... With a different PPM meter your conversion may be different, as in EC of 1.6 being 800ppm conversion instead Hopefully this chart will help you better understand how EC-PPM translates and how it is important to not necessarily take someone else's advice on strength because you may not know what conversion they are using... In my opinion, don't go above 1.0 EC for your small plants and work your way up to 1.6 in flower... My biggest advice would be to learn how to read what your plants are telling you they want, because reading a meter can keep you within a range to be reasonably successful, learning how to read your plants will help you achieve maximum success.

Nutrients will be a big deal when you switch to your multi system. I would recommend at minimum ~4 gallons per plant for your reservoir size... So, if you have 10 plants, you would want 40-50 gallons of nutrient mix in your reservoir. I run 2 plants and 8-9 gallons in my reservoir. You can see how this translates. If you have 20 plants you would want 80-100 gallons...etc. The more excess in gallons the less swings you will have to deal with. For me, 4 gallons per plant, I have 15-30 minute daily maintenance WITH AN OCCASIONAL missed day of maintenance.

When I use my ppm meter, I record the ppm and convert it to EC using a ppm to EC conversion calculator. When I use the EC mode it displays a very large number (in the hundreds) not in decimal form, I think it's us/cm2

I agree, I'll have to learn what the plant needs. Looks as if the plants are yellowing, the first batch of nutrients I gave them was a half dose batch mix, I'm guessing lack of nitrogen. We will see, tomorrow I'm mixing a batch of fresh nutrients.

Update.. I changed out water/nutes in my dwc mother plant bucket. I added my nutrients at half recommended dose, and ph'd the bucket.. checked the ppms and read low, like 200ppm. Early veg shows 500-700ppm on my chart, can I add more nutrients to bring ppm up? I'm confused. I used purified water, added half nutes, ph'd.. I kinda want the ppm around 600.
The plants don't seem to be doing bad.. they are still growing so, lol.
Half recommended mix at 4gallons of water:
FloraMicro- 8ml
FloraGro- 10ml
FloraBloom- 2ml

Reading up some on threads, seems as if you can add more to your mixed batch. Good, so I did. Raised my ppm to 600. Now wait and see how they respond.
Using General Hydroponics Flora-Series with 4 gallons of RO water, 600ppm mix.
FloraMicro- 25ml
FloraGro- 31ml
FloraBloom- 8ml

Cool man! I didn't see this till this morning. They looked pretty good. Can you tell us more about the water??? You say purified RO. Is it store bought RO, is it RO from your home, is it softened, do you know the ppm of the water before nutrients??? Regardless the answers to your water, you should order/buy some cal mag asap, I have a feeling you will need it. I use technaflora magical.

I went ahead and bought a crap oad of purified drinking water from Walmart, it was cheap...so I'm using that instead of my tap water right now.. the city water here is so harsh. Reading up on it a little look like RO water is distiilled water? And purified drinking water is more purified than distilled water.

Huh.. When you say the city water is harsh, what do you mean? RO water is filtered water through RO filter media, Distilled water is just that, distilled (evap from boiled water) probably is the purest too. Purified drinking water can vary, some may have minerals added for flavor, some may be softened, on and on and on... Your water is something you will want to make a plan for and soon... Looks like your options are:
A, keep buying water (when you move to the big reservoir this may become a logistical nightmare)
B, buy an RO filter for your city water (this is a better solution, consider getting a magnesium/calcium supplement, very likely you will have deficiency with RO).
C, Just use your city water and battle the PH swings, shouldn't require any mag/cal supplement but PH can be a pain in the ass to keep stable...

I do option C, for my grows, however, with only 2 plants it isnt so bad battling the PH.....

Thank you, sounds like option C is best for me right at the moment then. I say my city water is harsh because just seems to me when it dries on the hydroton and bucket, it leaves a crusty white powder, so it's got some impurityies or chemicals in it? Being city water.

Oh, the crusty white powder you are seeing is probably nutrient salts, though, city water can be kinda hard too (with calcium) and that too can sometimes leave a white residue. You will get white residue from dried nutrient solution with any water used... With option C you will be using PH Down quite a bit...thats all.

Thanks man. Ur advise is awesome. They seem to be doing good, from yesterday's water/nute change increase.. bottom leaves curling a little not bad, branches aren't sticking up or anything so they seem ok. Hopefully they will explode more with this higher nutrient mix! Another thing I was thinking here soon is they are gunna get big and start crowding. As they grow I will probably have to anchor them away from each other, posted a picture.