how often should I change water in DWC

Hello everyone. New to DWC. I have 16 five gallon buckets connected by 1\4 inch PVC pipe and water chiller running. When buckets are full to the point where it meets the bottom of the baskets it's about 40 gallons. Lots of water. How often should I do a 40 gallon water change? Using house and garden nutes.

As often as you want or not at all just keep filling. Some will tell ya to change it every week others (like me) only change once between veg and flower and just keep it filled and ph good. 40 gal. is a bunch of nutes to be dumping once a week to me.

I ran 70 gallons once and yeah, changing that much water every week is a huge expense. If you are running a bunch plants and a ton of wattage then I'd just consider it the cost of business but when I did it it was under a KW and only 8 sites, so I only changed the water once after they began to flower. It's great if you have everything dialed in.. it allowed me to leave it completely unattended for up to a week at a time.

Even now I usually only change the veg solution 2 or 3 times because they hardly put a dent in the solution and I'm slowly bumping up the ppms. By the time they are flowering though I change it every week or so.

Imho water is cheap compared to electricity used. Why waste electricity and hinder yields by being stingy with water.

SnapsProvolone said:

Imho water is cheap compared to electricity used. Why waste electricity and hinder yields by being stingy with water.

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Please explain how that would be.

OP you want to test out the limits of your own setup. 40gal, 16 plants? I bet you could safely go 2-3 weeks before seeing problems. If you pushed it 4 weeks I bet the ratios of nutes would be all outta wack and the plants would start showing signs of deficiencies. (From lockout)

if you are a noob and chose to supplement a specific nute ie calmag, this would only exacerbate the problem and you'd be looking at a full week or two of recovery (in my experience)

better safe than sorry, and for me this means changing the water (in full flower) every 2 weeks. 1 week for smaller setups.

hope this helped.