Grow Mediums nutrient options with autopots....

[Hinson]

I have made one run with Autopots and I am ready to prepare round two... i had a problem and one plant got burned...
with a preference to organics... I am torn.
I am now thinking about just running water through the rez and feeding nutes through the top. has anyone done that?

just thinking

 

[lunarman]

so you used synthetic nutes in the res water the first grow and you had nute burn?

 

[Hinson]

yes it was Advanced nutrients Micro/Grow/ Bloom...

i called them actually, nice folks very helpful. He told me that would happen with that type of contained system, the "salts" would concentrate... He recommended their Organic nutes like Iguana Juice... but sounds like it is just going to junk up the tubes and valves.... of course i bought a gallon of the stuff at high dollar...the things we do for our girls ...

so, maybe changing the water Like some people say every week or so, as i recall, the water got pretty funky, in my mind i was thinking the stinky stuff was acting like a good compost, now i know better. I had one monster plant , was close to 5 feet tall Auto, buds everywhere, it ran much longer than the other 3 plants and just kept getting worse and when i figured out what was happening it was too late, my virgin sacrifice to the Autopot gods, haha ... next time will be better.

Pops mentioned to me that he keeps an extra harness of tubing so he can service/ clean while still letting the system work.

as i though about it though perhaps i would just run water from the rez and feed from the top of the soil every couple of days. in my thinking the feeding would cause the float to float until the plants drink it down, thus not drowning them, then they can chase it with fresh water again through the Auto system, and the tubing and valves stay clean. I may give it a try.

 

[bushmasterar15]

Were you using the nutes at full strength?

 

[PolySizeCircuit]

You usually have to use less nutes with bottomfeeding since you don't get runoff. The excess salts travel up to the top layer eventually though. I usually stay within 400-600ppm which is 1/4-1/2 dose of AN nutes.

 

[Hinson]

no... cut in half according to their calculator...

but never cleaned out the rez over the full run, even though it stank like bad shit... in retrospect if i had purged out and cleaned all the rez and lines every week or so it would have had a happy ending... the shorter run plants, Black cream, turned out great. had a runt ... big devil XL auto, nick named it the little bastard, only grew maybe 6 inches tall, some burn on the leaves...

well I was just curious if anyone had used the autopots like that... water from the rez and feed the top of the pot soil. this weekend i will set up for my new grow... getting excited.

 

[KonopCh]

I only clean everything after the grow.

You can top feed, but then is your reservoir useless. So it's basically not autopot anymore.