Good but cheap nutes?

[FalseFlash]

I thought there could of been a leak too, but there is no sign of any.

[Stan]

Is your 55 gallon tank in the ground? I would also check the tank. Again IMO their is no way 14 tomato plants can be drinking 40 gallons of water per day. I had very large tomatoes as you can see from the picture below and a small reservoir that fed them.

[FalseFlash]

Yep, tank is in the ground. Pulled it out a couple days ago and no leak.

Let me explain it in more detail.

The tank can be filled in the evening the day before and I go out in the morning and see not much changed, if there was a leak I would have noticed a big change in water level. So I leave it for the day, check it around 7PM and see that all the water is just about gone (sometimes I wait until the next morning but that's always turns out bad because the pump is sucking air).

We just recently got out of a big heatwave too, was 105-110 for a good week. Now were 85-90 (82 as of 11AM) during the day, but has been in the 60's at night now.

Could that be the cause?

[Stan]

Not sure if it could've been the heat since your reservoir in in the ground. I can tell you the last 3 weeks I had high temps with heat index of 102 and I did notice I had to add extra water to my reservoir more than usual but not a drastic amount. My reservoir is above ground. I usually keep a floating thermometer in my reservoir just to keep tabs on the temps. Reservoir temps were going up to 85 degrees on some of those days. I started to put 2 frozen gallon containers in the reservoir in the am and pm just to keep the temps down which also slowed the water from disappearing. I also put 1 of those reflective shields you see people put inside the car to prevent the sun from heating up the car and it worked pretty good. The last 3 -4 days have been in the upper 70's lower 80's and everything is back to normal with water consumption.

[Rio_Grande]

On the nutes topic, and I think you have a leak somewhere too lol, I am small time at the moment running 20 gal tanks. Not knowing if this was gonna be for me I wanted to go cheap and ended up with a good product in my limited experience. If you go on ebay the shop urban hydroponics out of Cincinnati Ohio sells small bags of their nutrient. I spoke to the guy and he uses masterblend calcium and Epsom salts in the lettuce one I use. He also has others made with masterblend as a base.

I don't know the guy other than buying his product but for lettuce it seems to work.

I am going to try the tomato blend this fall.