HI. Great stuff on the grow, man. Your bubble bucket walkthrough became the basis for my own current grow setup, and I am using the Lucas formula with clean water addback just as you. I am on my third grow now with bagseed. I have just a couple of questions.
When you say that you use a 60 gallon pump per bucket, how does that compare to a pump that puts out 65 liters/min? I have just ordered a coralife super luft sl65 for my setup. My eventual plan is to have four buckets, with four airstones in each. I will have two of these pumps, each one running two of the airstones in every bucket. I feel that this is way overkill, but I have no real idea.
Also, what kind of airstones do you recommend? I really want a lot of bubbles. As I said I am kind of a newb, but I have noticed first hand the effects of more bubbles on root growth.
My first grow was with ebb/flow, and it worked well, but it did not seem nearly as fast as the bubble bucket method.
My current setup is vegging two plants in a small (19l) sterilite container, so far I have ended up with one male on both grows like this.
On my second grow (first DWC) when I was vegging in the veg box, I used two of the cheap ass aqua culture double outlet fish pumps from wal mart, with four of the 5" airstones they sell there. The pumps were new so they still worked well. The amount of bubbles in the container was awesome, and the roots grew at an unreal pace. After a few weeks the roots had actually grown to fill the container, and they would stay in a container shaped brick whenever I transferred them to a new bucket with clean solution.
On my third grow, I was still using those two pumps on the other bucket so I just used one pump on the new bucket, with two of the 5" airstones. The plants grew well, but the roots definitely did not grow like before. I am on into flowering with that plant and the roots still are not really impressive.
And lastly, the aqua culture pumps are quickly crapping out, I would highly recommend that anyone stay away from these pieces of garbage, as they are not old and are already pumping less and less air.
Sorry for the long post, just thought I might share my limited experience to try to give back to the City.
