Has anybody put overflow lines on their hydro grow buckets?
Here’s the deal. My plants were beautiful. No problems up to this point. I performed a scheduled res changeout. 12 hours they looked great. 24 hours later they looked great. Went away for the weekend and when I came home they were droopy as shit. I mean bad. I almost cried. 4 months of love and care down the tubes.
I looked at the water level and it was into the net pots. Res level was abnormally low.
I found roots obstructing the outlets so the nute feed was overfilling the buckets.
Theory: When I did the res change this allowed the roots to relax and stretch down and then start blocking the outlets.
I also vegged too long waiting on a straggler to catch up. So, a couple of them got too large.
So, I thought about placing an overflow line on each grow bucket about 2 to 3 inches below the net pots. This will prevent the water level from ever getting to high. I’d also place a water level alarm in the overflow vessel to alert me on an issue.
I use AirCubes, the roots grow through the fabric liners into the 5 gallon plastic pots and when the water is out the roots in the plastic pots die off, keeping the roots in the fabric pots alive and well. Not sure how you would set this up with your system or even if it would work, but just thought I would share.
Yes ebb and flow, I have two 9 pot systems with 60 gallon reservoirs on each. One for veg and one for bloom, that way I cut my time frame almost in half. In veg I only have to fill up the res every 2 or 3 weeks, in bloom after stretch it’s about every 5 days.
I also have an aquarium chiller on mine to keep the res water temp at 67.
One other tip I have seen but not tried was adding a paint strainer to hold the roots from getting into the flow lines. I cannot remember who said it on this site.