You have no idea how much easier this thread made my life Very grateful for all the great info contained within. I'll post a picture of my setup once I get it tore down, cleaned, and set back up. It's been through a few cycles and I could not be happier with the results.
Great thread but I can't help but wonder if you had 2 fabric pots of the same size and filled one with 1 or 2 inches of perlite and then put the other fabric pot inside and fill that with your soil, and then you have a container of some sort at the bottom filled with water and this would work in the same way but use far less perlite.
New to SIPs. Up to p12 of this thread. I needed to go out of town and had 3 plants in preflower. 1 is organic water teas only, the other 2 are bottle fed. So dug up 3 old cat litter pans filled with them with vermiculite and a clear plastic cup for a view port. I had someone fill the pans after 3 days. Well as some of you can guess when I came home after 6 days they had blown up. They were at least 30% bigger. Blew my mind. So now I am prepping for the next grow. I am trying to go full on organic. I figured the 3 plants fills in the 2.5x5 tent nicely. With this in mind I can comfortably fit three 20" circles on my floor. So I am thinking cut the bottom off a plastic barrel at about 10" high and is around 20" in diameter, fill it with vermiculite, place an 18gal DIY smartpot on top. so far so good. With This set up the watered 18 gallon pots are going to be too heavy for me to pull in-and-out of the tent to water with teas or any needed special care. Any one else run into this? how did you resolve it.
Spot on @Dreadhed Casters are your friends and way oversize the weight limit. VOE, if you can simplify your sump it will make your life so much easier. You just need a wick. The reason I say this is, eventually you’ll need to clean the sump so make it easy. I ran 35’s in 3’ mortar pans and used 2x 10” pond net pots for a wick and 4” perforated flex drain pipe for support. Move the pots onto new pans and good to go. No perlite to clean up.
Before you dive in to one of the SIP's mentioned here, check out this thread by @skunker~ . This thread is a DIY build of a Next Gen SIP system with the pots on casters and plumbed into a control bucket with a reservoir. auto top off SIP irrigation system with reservoir for multiple pots
i've tried SWICKS and regular SIPs both before doing this and i really like it. so far i am getting bigger yields and the buds are more resinous. there's a marked improvement.
Since you bumped it and I said I'd post pics of my setup a few months back I'll give a quick update here. I'm absolutely loving the new 4x4 fabric bed that's SWICKING water nicely making my life easy and providing nice results. Can't thank the OP of this thread enough for the discussion and all the cool variations others have made in here! I went as simple as possible in my approach. Taken from my indoor grow journal: "Setting up the new living soil no-till bed to self water SWICK style. I might try the Blumats if this does not work well, but it worked too good with my 15 gallon fabric pots that I had to try it again with the new bed. 7x10 Pond Liner from Home Depot - $34 (2) 2x4 from Home Depot - $12 Lava Rock - had laying around from my old SWICK setup"
I love that setup. my concern is what if something goes wrong and you need a repair or adjustment. I am thinking more modular. Sent from my SM-G960U using Tapatalk
We cut a 4x4 piece of 3/4" plywood in half. Got two five foot kiddy swimming pools. Put four casters on each one to be able to roll around. Even after adding our Perlite, water and plants, we can move them around.
Thanks to the information on this thread and elsewhere in the Growing Organically section I just set up my first indoor grow. I have been growing outdoors in a SIP raised bed that I built for over a year, so I already understood their value (vacations, drought, etc.) and knew that I wanted to do something similar indoors. FYI: In post #782 by pastormac he mentions some storage trays he was using that he got at IKEA for $8. I’m happy to say that ten years later they still carry the SAMLA 15 gallon trays (now $11). They are the perfect size for my 20 gallon Grassroots fabric pots. Thanks to all who have contributed to this discussion and sharing their knowledge here. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk