when doing dwc make sure that you water temps are below 72F degrees or else you might get some algae and harmful bacteria, warm water temps usually lead to pythium. read through the grow logs, i've read a few people that have used the BC three part system and had satisfactory results.

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what is pythium? i never heard of it. Is that why my water is stinky after 3 days. how do you keep water cool?

pythium is root rot and a good way to keep your temps cool are by:

1.) Monitoring them (when they start rising too high I usually grab a few frozen two liter bottles and put them up against the side walls of my bucket... usually drops the temp by like 2 degrees over a 8 hour period)

2.) If using HID lighting wrap your bucket up in foil tape, it will reflect quite a bit.

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Make sure your DWC container is completely lightproof as well. That will ensure no extensive algal blooms

I got everything on the shopping list and a few things for outdoor growing and planting clones.

I'm going to clone a bush for around the back of the yard and around the front... privacy. We're going to put the system together tomorrow. We may put up another row of vines to add additional privacy. We're the private type. I really don't want the neighbors being able to see in our windows when we have the drapes half open. I know it will take a lot longer than just buying new plants, but we can't afford the other way. I'm going to be a busy girl.

Try waterfarms or power growers. They are self contained continuous recirculating systems. Basically set it and forget it, (minus changing solutions every 1 or 2 weeks.) They are roughly 12-15" tall and 10" wide. They hold 2.5 gallon of water in the reserve bucket. I have 4 of theese running independanlty. I am pretty new to growing, My current grow is only # 4. But for being a "newbie" it is very easy with theese. My last grow i had 4 plants, got about 9oz total dried/cured nuggz. I was using 125watt compact florescent (600watt equivalent) for a 2 week veg, then switched to 400watt hps for 8 weeks of flowering. I was using Gh 3 part flora nutes. I also added kool bloom in weeks 3-6. Very happy with this setup. I grew way more than i expected or even needed. Now my homies get free medicine too!

I ended up building my own system. I don't want a system that only does one plant at a time, though I can definately see the benefits. My little system will hold six plants comfortably. We may make anorher one to put the males either to collect the pollen or to pollenate the female we put with them in another room in another closet.

I highly recommend a TDS meter along with the pH meter... you can pick one up on ebay for around $20... this will help you keep track of the nutrients your plant is/isn't using so you can make adjustments accordingly. As far as the multi-site tubs go, they're nice when you're running clones or a very uniform strain, but you'll find that each plant has different requirements when grown from seed and they'll all grow at different rates. This can make for an uneven canopy and can ultimately hurt your yield due to reduced light exposure (one plant towering over another). You should be fine with your auto flowering strain... those don't grow to be that large and they stay pretty uniform for the most part, you're just sacrificing quality for simplicity imho... Another thing that I haven't seen mentioned yet is resevoir temps... this is rather important although it is overlooked regularly. Ideally, you don't want your water going over 72 degrees, preferrably in the low to mid 60's. This strongly reduces the chance of certain bacteria growing in your resevoir and killing your plants. When I first made my tubs, my temperatures were in the high 70's- low 80's and I noticed a film developing on my lines as well as the inside of my container... I used Reflectix to insulate and lightproof my tubs and I have no more funk in my res while my temps stay around an ambient 70. I add a 22oz frozen water bottle once a day to my resevoir to bring the temps down to around 64. If you have any other questions, please feel free to ask. I run (3) dual site tubs perpetually at the moment, each tub holds 3 gallons of water and has (2) 5" air disks... but I'll definitely be moving to a 1 container/plant system as soon as this next run finishes.