The last few years has been one heck of a learning curve. I have been at it for almost 5 years now and about 45 grows. I have to say that the salesman at the hydro store are some of the most limiting factors for a lot of folks. The challenge is the way the marketing and sales reps work. Just about every single guy working at the hydro store gets hooked up with free product if they want it. That being said it is pretty simple I give you free product and you promote my products. It was all cool at first, I wanted to get away from
Botanicare because I felt it was expensive and I thought there was better stuff out there. I went with another product line and I had great results. Now came the PK boosters. I think that was a whole year of this and that. About the same time it was switching to Coco because I thought I was a great grower. Well coco kicked my ass because I treated it like soil and it does not work well if it gets dried out.
Realizing I needed to change along came hydro. I use an ebb and flow set up that is fully automated. The largest problem I found was with nutrients. Switching to hydro meant I was going to be going thru a lot more nutrients so right away I felt like liquid nutrients where an absolute waste because at the end of every week about 30 gallons goes down the drain. So I stated off with
Athena Pro Line. It works and works well at first, but the stuff starts to pick up water out of the air and it throws the balance off because their core is calcium nitrate and their grow and bloom have products in the mix that are hydroscopic. So as time goes on each time you mix up a new batch of nutrients the NPK ratios are off because the grow and bloom pick up water out of the air. This single issue probably took me a year to get to the bottom of it and hours and hours of research.
Athena and HGV are very similar. They are very high in Calcium and Calcium does not play well with some other Macro Nutrients. So I would always see nutrient problems specifically around the switch to flower. I found I could somewhat combat this with Calcium and Magnesium. I was in the hydro store one day and I stumbled across grow more no N cal mag. Great product and at 10 mils per gallon the problems either went away or where no much of a concern. Well time and costs continued to rise so I wanted to revisit the nutrients and I came across
@BillFarthing and balling on a budget. Probably one of the most helpful threads I have ran across on the site. Bill is pretty well versed in nutrients and has many homemade recipes for the crap everyone runs to the hydro store to purchase. I am presently running a modified version of balling on a budget that Bill posted on another site. It works, it about as cheap as you can go. It simple works.
So right now the limiting factor is me. I have full environmental control, great lighting and CO2 enrichment. So really it comes down to the person calling the shots at this point. Most everyone thinks that is magic in the bottles and that is just not the case. Get yourself a good quality 2 or 3 part and focus on the environment and things you can control outside of the nutrients. Never overlook PH is is a limiting factory with hydro and one of the easiest to correct, but you have to put the time in.
While there are a few products that do help most are snake oil. Take
@Aqua Man, he is sold on Massive by Green Planet. I can tell you it works and increases mass but I believe at a price of terps and oils. Another one that works is fulvic acid. But again go thru Balling on a budget it is all there for the taking. Kelp is also another great product. As well as Monosilic acid. Apart from these and maybe some hammerhead that is all it really takes to grow in Coco or hydro.
One thing that happened to me at the hydro store about 6 months ago is the icing on the cake for this post. Part of balling on a budget is the base nutrients. Jacks 321 is what Bill mostly pushes and I use it. I was at the hydro store talking to the manager and one of the works came in and somehow I mentioned Jacks and the guy said this. What that shit you can buy at Walmart. That is a joke. Well the joke is on him because the basic components in Jacks is the bases of nearly all nutrient lines. But some will argue and I understand that. I will finish with this, JR Peters mother company of Jacks has been in the nutrient business for 70 plus years.