Right now I have two plants in a 4’x4’x80" tent. They are both 47 days old. You can follow my grow here:
With the 3.5ga buckets that come with the Bubble Boy system, you only want to have a single plant in each bucket. To give you perspective, my GL right now has a root ball that is almost taking up the entire bucket and I am actually considering moving it to a 5ga bucket.
My first grow, some of which you can find here:
…I tried to grow 6 plants in my 4x4 tent. I don’t recommend this for a novice grower like myself. While I learned a lot of lessons I just had too many things going on at once to really understand the process like I am starting to understand it with fewer plants.
If you read through both of those you will have a really good idea of what/how I handled a lot of the things you are asking about, but for the sake of saving you time I’m happy to answer those questions here.
I committed to changing the water once per week. With my schedule doing complete water changes every Sunday morning was perfect. During veg I topped off midweek on Wednesdays and adjusted PH then - other than that I didn’t pay much attention to them other than staring at them fondly over my morning coffee the other days of the week.
When I got to flower - which is what you’ll see described in the second thread I posted - the level of attention I had to give them increased tenfold. Once you have big plants on top of those buckets, you have to think about the best way to change the water. Simply swapping the bucket with a new one isn’t always an option once you get full grown plants - and if you do a SCROG there is almost no way to do it without some kind of pulley system to raise the entire lid, plant and screen up at once… so the simplest, easiest solution is to invest in a siphon pump so you can just siphon water in and out of your buckets.