I love your design I read your whole thread a while back just need to save up some funds to get it going. I'm just in straight coco and jacks 321 right now cause it's cheap startup but want to go back to organic sips eventually.
To be honest their isnt a cheaper way to grow, once everything purchased. Only things I ever have to buy is em1 and kashi (which can be made) and some basics like kelp, neem, amite, you know the basics for recycling soil. But that's it, and it last for ever! What most ppl spend to run a single cycle, I could prolly run 5-10 cycles! My soil only gets better, and amendments are dirt cheap
Oh I know it's just that initial purchase I need money for. Mines like 30 bucks a cycle right now but they started charging me for water so multi feed dtw with ro is pretty wasteful for me. Definitely switching over to your style in a couple more rounds.
To be honest with you, before I stumbled onto this I was going to quit. Just too much work and wasnt paying off. Now I couldn't dream of doing anything else.
The vermiculite pic reminds me of the hempy buckets
It works very well, I've got plants growing roots 6 inches above the soil the dam things are so healthy!
I'll take some pics
I love it, I build a very similar fill tube for a sip grow years ago
Do you also run em in the rez and kashi up top?
nope,, i dont put anything in my res,, just plain tap water ( i am on a well) ,, nothing on top but the plastic cover,, the super soil was mixed up in a wheel barrow and placed in the wicks and soil area,, just plain water in the fill port the whole grow,
To say I am impressed with your water clarity is an understatement! When my sips start smelling, I like to shop vac them out (through the fill hole) and my water looks as bad as it smells. The sips hold 8 gallons and I use activated EM-1.
LOL @ magic sauce, you got me man, I load up the sip with my super soil mix ( varies but usually fox farms ocean forrest with some dry amendments mixed in) dampen the soil as your loading it up, cover with plastic , put the plants in, and fill the res,, and then go to the bathroom sink , fill the watering can with well water , walk back to the grow box and top off the Res when needed, I usually let it get about half or better empty before adding more, lately they drink about half the res per day, and its a 4 gallon res, you can see air stones in my res picture, but i didnt like how the air pump sounded so i didnt run the air stones but they are too big to pull thru the fill port on the SIP, so they are just laying in there for this grow, , i have done this on every grow for several years,, sometimes i have added cal mag to the res, but my soil has enough mixed in that they havent needed any thing but water, the
My 30g can hold around 8 gallons of water, I like to add around 3/4 of a solo cup.
So I'd take that as you use approximately 1 oz. of em1 per gallon of water.?.
Around that yea.
