I started doing a little sketching on an idea and realized it might save me a lot of time and mental exhaustion posting here. I also have almost no experience in this realm. I did coco for about a year but other than that all in/outdoor soil. I made an aero clone machine a couple years back and since seeing it work have been churning around something larger in my head. After this last round of taking my choice cuts from the machine I went ahead and dosed the leftovers with some stuff I had laying around and they quickly outgrew everything I put in solo cups. With winter here I have the time on my hands so figured it was time to do some tinkering. The idea is based on multiple 5 gallon buckets chained in lines by the drains. (Think Bato/Dutch bucket system) I know that's a bit of a rough sketch but hopefully it gets the idea across. I will be using low pressure on this first try which reading the web doesn't sound like "true" aero but more of a NFT/Aero maybe DWC hybrid. With the aero cloner the reservoir is obviously in the bottom so its sort of a hybrid between DWC and aero? These buckets will drain to a separate res. I had originally thought to put the drain in the bottom of the bucket but couldn't see a way to deal with roots getting in there. With it on the side I could turn the bucket cup top which will pull roots out of the drain and wrap them around the bottom of the bucket. Thoughts on that? What about putting the drain a few inches higher up the side so I would also have that buffer zone of a DWC in case of pump failure. (Or is that defeating the purpose of this?) On that note, rather than the picture I could have two main lines coming for each bucket with the transfers off of that. So say 2 main ins supply a total of 4 or 6 buckets, but only barb to half the sprayers on each bucket per main, and have two pumps? Or have a pump wired to fire only if the first failed. I'm hoping to hear any thoughts or suggestions, any experiences, whether success or failure. Is there a glaring flaw I'm missing that makes this a nonstarter? I also understand I might be over complicating something that DWC could do just as well with much less headache. Trying this out just sounds fun and well, you never know. I should mention I will be building a separate "experiment" house specifically for this and while dead plants will be a bummer, I'm expecting trial and error and it won't affect my bottom line. Thanks!
maybe a picture would help more, i'm kind of lost. but it does sound like a really complicated dwc I guess.
I’ve bin messing with hpa. It’s a run to waste system. I lowered the drain on the cooler so it won’t hold any water. There are six 12v solenoids controlled by a 12v timer. That goes off for two seconds every 300 seconds. The one is so much smaller because it almost died ( I forgot to fill the Rez). Next round I’m going to add multiple levels of some plastics netting in the root chamber to keep them off the bottom as best I can