getting ready for next cycle. gonna try the grobucket sips. i made a 7 gal reservoir sitting on the control bucket that controls the water level in all 6 buckets. pretty much hands free for a week....will keep track of that.
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hope i did this right....
This is your concept, is that right? It looks like it should work as you intend, from my limited POV looking at pics of your setup. So long as your control bucket, etc., is 'on the level' good things should happen. What float switch did you go with? Does it have multiposition settings? Planter buckets may equalize quite slowly, esp. when you first wet the finished system, but that's normal so real patience is helpful! Raising the storage reservoir a few inches can help trigger flow a little sooner/quicker if that seems an issue later on. What's the smallest I.D. chokepoint measurement, do you know?
No pumps, no electricity, and no daily refills. Check, check, and check! (Pic below doesn't show raised reservoir). What's your matrix gonna be? Fertigated? Do you think that with a large reservoir that sits, say, 14-21 days without refill, in 80deg 24/7, that dissolved oxygen levels could become an issue if not attended to? I know you don't plan to wait that long, but I'm putting one on my roof to support outdoor 35-gallon SIPs that have 10-gallons of indiv. capacity. I have a 50-gal drum for feeder reservoir, and want to push the envelope a bit.
Many moons ago I grew outdoors at scale in wilderness so deep I only went back once, to harvest. It was a whole thing, as you'd imagine. I'm not trying to replicate that extreme scenario, but I am purposefully experimenting with the minimum-possible grower involvement in the hope of developing something that busy professionals, who otherwise could not grow their own, might deploy and still grow proper outdoor trees. I was thinking about a combo like Jack's hydro-nutes and Promix to take pH issues off the table, leaving me with dissolved oxygen as a possible next hurdle. Anyway, thanks for sharing. Following with interest!