it's a hydro grow freedom so here's a little background info (it is nowhere near as complicated as you might think, imo its easier than soil because you can see actual numbers to work from in real time
A few grows back I built a homemade DWC (deep water cultivation) waterfall (it uses running water dropping into the reservoir for aeration) with a bio matrix (fancy lingo for I let bacteria grow in lavarock to combat algae and fungus)
It's just 2 bins - one smaller one on top of a bigger one with a PVC drain that lets the top reservoir (the root zone, where the plants grow) drop water back down to the reservoir using a 400 GPH pump:
The pump should cycle the water a minimum of 7 times per hour and the drop from the drain to the res should be at least 6-8 inches (its the agetation that aerates the nutes) even with an air pump its still just the surface movement that adds o2
The waterfall (or river as Mr GS liked to call it) was the simplest method to try because it doesnt need a timer or flood schedule or anything, just a pump and a pair of bins
There's three numbers that I think are all that really matters when it comes to growing hydro - ph, ppm and temps = the trinity
if you keep these in check (at about 5.8, 1250, 21C or 67F) - MJ flourishes
For nutes I use Floranova Bloom (lucas formula in a bottle) and the only "hard" part about growing like this is lucas math. Its a formula to figure out how much nutes you need to addback to a system to reach a desired ppm
((targ-cur)/targ)x8xcap is a short version of
((target - current) / target) * 8 ml per gallon * res gallons = FNB (ml)
You need to know how much water your machine holds and then you just minus the current ppm from your target ppm divided by your target ppm times 8 times res volume
a real world example is my rig (30 gallons) at 175ppm and I wanted to get it to 750ppm
750 -175 / 750 x 8 x 30 = 184 ml FNB to hit that mark
The only problem I have with my setup is it get too warm, painting it black was a bad idea because it just absorbs all the heat from the HPS. Mylar or aluminum tape would correct that and someday I might even put some on it!
I hope that helps clarify whats what in the IMgreen gorw machine setup
