You have to get a pump to drain the reservoir through a hose out to somewhere - some people drain every couple weeks, some don't drain throughout the grow. The bigger the pump, the faster you can drain it. Hydro is still work. You have to drain the reservoir, scrub it and the tray or the pots with clorox, refill the reservoir, carefully measure out your nutes. Then you have to monitor the ph and the ppm (the concentration of nutes) daily and make any necessary adjustments. Then you have to top off the reservoir. You also have to check daily for clogged hoses, timer issues to make sure the plants are getting watered or that the water doesn't flood your house. At the end of your grow you have to dispose of your medium. If you have 40-50 plants that's a lot of work.
spend some of that $ on a growing contractor to set up your grow op. or do some research yourself. its fun reading about growing imo
[quote name='"plants2fresh"'] Sweet, did you just pick it up on amazon or something? I think that sound like a he'll of a deal, would I need to buy anything else to go along with it or does the kit come complete with everything? Thanks for the tip bro! [/quote] I got mine on ebay and another one from a friend. If your really that impartial read some of the grow journals on this site. There are do many different setups that are viable although if you are gonna run alot of planta i would suggest the ebb n gro or a similar system
Take a vacation!.. Seriously, If you have 12k to spend, use it wisely..IMO invest in your environment...Everything else i.e nute brand(s), methods used, coco, RW, dwc, ebb&flo etc etc, is not as important as dialing in your garden..IMO.. It's the gardener, NOT the methods..
I am in the process of switching from soil to hydro and have researched numerous systems over the past 3 months. I just decided to go with an undercurrent system over cap ebb&grow buckets. Home : Current Culture Hydroponics, superior hydroponic systems. Large PVC pipes so no hoses to get clogged, no drain and fill cycles, water circulates constantly through the buckets and back into the res. A common problem with the cap system seems to be some failure in the control bucket that causes your room to flood.
I have 2- 12' x 15' rooms (was a single car garage that I split into 2 rooms) that I use mainly for bud. They are offset time wise to allow me to crop one room every month with a 6 week strain (with a yield of around 5 lbs per crop) I have 4-1000 watt lights in each of these rooms and utilize 12' x 12' for actual grow area I also utilize part of a bedroom for cloning, mothers and the initial veg stage on a flood table using 1-1000 watt light. My timing has large clones veging on the table during the last two weeks of the bud cycle in one of the bud rooms then into the bud room right after harvest. There they veg for another week or two then right to bud My initial plan while setting up the rooms was one for veg and one for bud. However I realized that the veg area could be much smaller than the bud areas so I adjusted to two offset bud rooms for this perpetual grow system. I use slightly sloped ramps (2x10s with 1x4 sides ) covered with poly to return overflow nutes to the res (one end of the ramps overhangs the reservoir )and sit 3 gallon buckets on the ramps with rockwool as the medium. Feeding is accomplished with a reservoir pump pushing nutes through 1/2" main lines with 1/4" drip lines running from them to the buckets. The reservoirs are framed with 2x12s and covered with pond liner. The res is 12' long, 2' wide and 11.5" deep and 4-12' long ramps run perpendicular to the res in each room. I grow 5 plants per ramp for a total of 20 in each room. I have tried varying this number but got no more yield from more plants and had to veg longer with less plants. I have inline fans for ventilation and utilize air cooled reflectors and portable AC units to keep the heat to manageable levels. This system works very well, doesn't cost a fortune to set up and is extremely simple to operate.