the advice on the bottle seems misleading to me ,i end up using it at about 1/2 the recommended conc. even when my plants are really firing ,when i start the system with clone i'm on about 1/4 strenght.

er just bloom i think ,although i know some people use a bit of both when you first cut the light cycle

i never let my tank go below 1/2 way ,i have a high background which obviously get more conc. the less h2o is in the tank...generally i use a ph adjusted weak feed.

does your mate have a cf/ec meter ? it makes things a lot easier,i couldnt have used aqua without it because of cannas high dosing instructions.

tell your mate good luck

cf

Hello there BushDoctoR. I haven't had much time posting here. I usually hang my hat at another site. I do have quite a bit of NFT experience though. There is a rule of thumb when it comes to deciding what to add back to your resevoir. If you are using tap water (which usually has high amounts of salts already in it) you only add back tap water. If you add back nutrients it would be real easy to overdose on one element or another. If you are using RO water, then you add back nutrient to your system in the appropriate amounts to bring your EC/PPM and solution back to the correct level. Of course as a coco coir grower you understand how important PH is and understand that any water whether it is RO or tap needs to be PH'd.

if my cf drops as the tank empties the only thing this indicates to me is that the plant is using nutes faster than water??? if this is the case i think the plant needs nutes in the water i will be topping up with .

if the cf remains the same as the tank empties then i assume the plant is drinking and 'eating' at the same rate and i'm happy with this ,in reality coz i have a background that is not being 'eaten' i will expect the cf to creep up a bit .

if my cf is around 15 (ec1.5) once the tank is half full i will top up with ph'd water and add some nutes coz i know if i just top up with ph'd water my cf will be around 11 and with a background of 7 it means i dont have a lot of nutes in my tank just mostly the free muck that comes with my tap water

i think the companies that sell us their overpriced nutrients deliberately dont include concise topping up instructions (like nutriculture used to)simply to encourage us to keep on pouring good nutes down the drain.
ifwe were told properly how to maintain our solutions over a number of top-ups we could all save a lot of money

peace

cf

i agree with this as well G-Whizz ,and if ur using RO water you can stick to this when you top up

if however you have a background reading of any significant amount i reckon that you should allow the reading to rise a small amount each time you top up due to the increasing level of unwanted dissolved solids poured in each time contained within the top up water itself.this is not my idea, merely stuff i read when setting up my first nft grow.molyneauxs book sets it all out,he also gives figures for the chem make up of nute solutions ,i guess if you use his nute formula then you can use his methods for working out the exact rise in the concentrations but even with different nutes the principal is the same.

reading the rest of that thread about growing different phenos in the same system reminds me of the time i grew a skunk and a northern lights in the same nft channel .
the root systems were so completely different in their rate of growth the skunk grew a mat under the NL and pushed it up out of the film and it died.

cf