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Originally Posted by GregoryJ
Very new to hydroponics - I made the 11 bottle system and it works well. Tomatoes are growing. I've read that most people use the 15 min on/off timers, but is there an optimum time for soaking the roots and then draining? Maybe flood for 5 minutes and drain for 20? any thoughts are appreciated. Thanks!
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The on time needs to be long enough to completely flood the system. 5min on and 20 off would be just fine as long as it completely floods the system. Most timers have a minimum on/off time of 15-30 min except a digital timer. With a digital timer you may be able to set it for as little as 1min on/off times but it may not have enough on/off cycles for the entire day. Example: if you want to set it for 5 min on and 20 off that would be one on/off cycle for every 25 min. Here in Lake Havasu az. we are getting 15 hours of daylight and with one on/off cycle every 25 min that would mean I would need a timer that had a minimum of 36 on/off cycles just for the daylight hours. Because plants don't feed during the dark hours I would probably only water 3-4 times at night. So I would need a digital timer with at least 40 on/off cycles per day.
The digital timer that I have for my strawberry's only has 14 on/off cycles per day. It said on the box that it had over 100 per week and I don't need to set each day of the week but it only gives me a total of 14 settings unless I am doing something wrong. It is Ok though, because it takes 40 min to completely fill the system so I set it for an on time of 1 to 1 1/2 hours depending on the time of the day because of the heat here. That gives me just enough settings per day with one 1 1/2 hour on time in the midel of the night.