There is a composting foam starter medium. it crumbles with a pinch of the fingers. Another alternative would be rockwool, it is fiberous and tearable. I use small pinches of it to start a seed, then move it to a 3″ netpot in a solo cup until it’s ready for the window.

20C should be fine.

you should removes all nutrients and rinse your system. fill it with clean water, Maybe buy a bottle for your next one…and spring water has good minerals for plants. just let it run with water, mycorhiaze fungus/bacteria, and some root development nutrition, like General Hydroponics BioRoot.. it is organic, cheap, and plants love it, and [...]

what are you using to test your pH? what and how much nutrition/additives are you adding? stop adding vinegar clean it out, make a covered reservoir, you got some shmutz in there, think of this as baby food. Would you feed that mess to your baby? I dunno about metals, the metals could be dissolving [...]

One could design some sort of wicking system, but I wonder how effective they would really be, and you still face the problem of needing to aireate your water.

a note from the image…
if you do not fully cover and shroud the net pots, the roots will not grow properly and may even die. Get those covered up and such.

I completely drain and rinse the reservoirs each refill (about once a week or so).

I would say 4 gallons for a single tower is way excessive. You may be able to be more accurate, but it’s really just overkill. What I do is use small reservoirs and mix the water for all of them in one container, then fill all the small units with it. It maintains accuracy, while [...]

I scrapped the onion idea for now, a challenge for later, perhaps. Ill be doing Ghost Chiles, Habaneros and Jalapenos in ones tower, and Strawberries, and tomatoes in the other…Two more towers to come for this installation. Ya, I finally drilled out the Bases of the bottles and fitted them together, and removed the valves [...]

I want to add check valves right where the airline meets the airlift T. I am just lazy and havnt gotten them yet. I will be adding LED lighting strip inside the skylight frame there, for aesthetics and what not, the CFL there is just for the seedlings.

Things to Do:
add check valves to the input from the airline to the T-Valve
add proper airline manifold to pump
add 2 more towers
add proper suspension system …using Shoestrings o.O

I am interested in trading heirloom variety seeds within the USA….hollar!

I was gonna just try slightly opening a valve on a manifold once i get one, but I’m interested in this pressure release system you described. If could be better and only release pressure when required, rather than just being an air leak It could be cool if it could be made into a [...]

Aquarium Manifolds look like these: http://www.aquasythe.com/images/SSairmanefolds1.jpg I basically made on by using a T-Valve and adding a flow valve to each outlet. Viola! Ghetto Manifold, as I call it. I suppose you could use 3 Tvalves and a flow valve on each line to equalize the air pressure accross all lines…..or just spring for the [...]

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It’s using a t-valve at the pump with a flow valve attached to each line to control air to each tower. It is connected to the airlift with a t-valve. All tubing is the normal airline style, some is black, some is clear. The flow valves are throttling it almost to the point of stressing [...]