recap....
Adding soil to my coco was a bad idea. I should have used perlite and coco alone and treated it like hydro.
I found myself not knowing whether to treat it like soil or hydro because underwatering hydro is a bad idea and overerwatering soil is even worse. Coco is a hydro medium. It needs some perlite to keep from compacting. hydroton at the bottom of the pot would help as well.