Best Nutrients, Rooting Hormones, and Cloning Machines for Aeroponic Cloning of Plants

How an aeroponic cloner works

Cloning with aeroponics means the stem is held in open air and wetted on a timer. Nothing else touches it.

A cutting goes into a collar — a foam or neoprene disc that grips the stem and plugs the hole in the lid. Below the lid, the bare stem hangs in an enclosed chamber. A pump in the reservoir feeds a manifold of small jets, and those jets throw a fine spray across the stems on a cycle. Roots emerge from the cut end and from the nodes, and because nothing is holding water against them, they sit in more oxygen than roots in any substrate ever get.

That oxygen is why an aeroponic cloner roots a cutting in seven to ten days where a plug can take two to three weeks. It is also why the same machine kills a batch faster than any other method when something goes wrong. A plug holds water for a day. A bare stem in a chamber with a dead pump is dry within hours, and a cutting with no roots has nothing to draw on.

The cloning collar matters more than its price suggests. It has to grip without crushing, seal the lid against humidity loss, and release the rooted cutting without tearing the new root mass. Collars are machine-specific — the hole diameter in an EZ-Clone lid is not the hole diameter in a TurboKlone lid — so replacement collars are bought for the machine, not generically.

How many sites you need

This is the decision people get wrong, and it is the one that is expensive to reverse.

A cloner's site count is how many cuttings it holds. The instinct is to take headroom, and with a cloner that instinct is backwards. A machine running at a quarter capacity roots worse than a smaller machine running full. Every empty site is a jet wetting nothing and a hole in the lid venting the humidity the occupied sites need. The chamber is a shared environment, and an empty one does not hold it.

Work from the batch you actually cut, not the batch you might cut one day. Count the mothers you keep, the cuttings you take from each, and the strike rate you expect, then add about a quarter for the ones you cull. Forty finished plants at an eighty percent strike means fifty cuttings, which is a 70-site machine run comfortably or a 48 run full — not the 144.

If you are cloning for a tent

Twenty-four to thirty-five sites covers a home grow or a single tent, and these are the machines that fit on a shelf. A TurboKlone Turbo Mini T24 or an EZ-Clone 32 Low Pro sits in a cupboard and still gives you a real misting system rather than a tray.

If you are cloning for a room

Thirty-five to seventy sites is one flowering room's worth of replacements on a rolling cycle. This is where most serious home and small commercial growers land, and where the TurboKlone T48 and the 70-site Psycloner Pro live.

If you are cloning for a facility

Ninety-six sites and up is batch propagation, where cuttings are taken on a schedule and a whole machine is filled, rooted and emptied at once. At this scale the clean-down between batches is as much of the job as the cloning, which is why the lid design and the reservoir shape start to matter.

Every machine currently listed

Ten cloning machines for plants, from 24 sites to 144, plus one piece of kit that is not a cloner at all.

There is no single best aeroponic cloner, and the table below is here to let you compare rather than to crown one. Three brands cover the range. TurboKlone runs a fan across the chamber alongside the spray, which raises dissolved oxygen and pulls pump heat out of the reservoir. EZ-Clone builds low-profile UV-stable HDPE units with labelled sites, which matters when one machine holds several strains. The Psycloner line from DL Wholesale covers the widest spread of sizes and includes the one deep water unit here.

The Clone Shipper is in the category because it belongs to the same workflow, not because it roots anything. It is a module for getting rooted cuttings somewhere else intact, which is a real problem once you are selling or moving clones between sites.

Aeroponic, deep water or tray

The bubble cloner vs aero cloner argument is really an argument about how much attention the room gets.

All three are plant cloning in the same sense — a cutting, a wound, and conditions that persuade it to root. A deep water cloner suspends the cut end in aerated water with an air stone instead of a pump and jets. It is cheaper, has fewer parts, and roots more slowly. Its failure mode is temperature: standing water warms, warm water holds less oxygen, and the stem ends sit in it until something anaerobic takes hold.

A tray of plugs or cubes under a dome has no power and nothing to fail: the most forgiving method and the slowest, and its failure is the opposite of the cloner's — not drying out but staying wet, with the stem rotting inside a plug nobody let drain. There is a separate guide to choosing cloning cubes if that is your direction.

The honest version is that an aeroponic cloning machine trades a dependency for speed and uniformity. It needs power, it needs the pump to keep running, and it needs someone to look at it. If the room gets checked daily, that trade is overwhelmingly worth it. If the room gets checked when somebody remembers, a tray and a dome will lose you fewer cuttings over a year.

Choosing a cloning gel or solution

Three different jobs get sold under one heading, and picking the wrong one is why people end up using two products that do the same thing.

Everything in cloning gels and solutions does one of three things, and a full protocol usually uses one from each group rather than three from one.

1. The hormone that goes on the cut

This is the only item that supplies auxin at the wound, and it is applied once, to the cut end, before the cutting goes into the collar. The choice is form, not brand loyalty.

Gel clings to the cut and seals it, which is what you want in an aeroponic cloner because the stem is about to be pushed through a collar and then hit with spray.

Three of the gels listed publish their hormone strength, which makes them directly comparable — and most do not, which is why the figure is worth looking for.

A higher number is not automatically the better gel. Auxin drives root initiation up to a point and then works against you — too much on a soft green cutting produces a swollen callus at the base and no roots. Match the strength to the wood: softwood and tender cuttings sit at the lower end of that range, firmer and woodier stock takes the higher one. The reason to prefer a gel that publishes its figure at all is that you can repeat a result and adjust it, which you cannot do with a bottle that only says "rooting compound".

The house brand is the one at the top of that table. Ventana Plant Science is GrowersHouse's own line, and its cloning gel runs 0.5% IBA with vitamin B-1 at 0.001% and no colouring dye, in four sizes from a 4 oz bottle to a gallon. The gallon is the one that matters to a propagation room, because gel is the consumable that gets thrown away every session.

Liquid dip concentrate is mixed to strength and used as a quick dip. Dip N Grow works out cheaper per cutting at volume, which is why propagation rooms use it, but it has two constraints a gel does not: the diluted solution is for immediate use and the label puts a short working life on it, and the label restricts it to ornamentals. Read it before standardising a room on it.

Whichever form you pick, decant what you need into a separate cup and discard what is left. Dipping into the bottle contaminates it for every later batch, and a contaminated bottle of rooting gel will take a whole season of cuttings down with it.

2. The solution that goes in the water

A clone solution is a dilute, balanced liquid for the reservoir of a hydroponic cloning system. Nutrients for clones run at a fraction of veg strength — a cutting is living on stored sugars and whatever it absorbs through the stem, and feeding it like a rooted plant stalls it rather than speeding it up. That is the commonest mistake in a cloner reservoir, and it looks like nothing at all: the cuttings sit there looking healthy and not rooting.

Clonex Clone Solution and Olivia's Cloning Solution are the two long-standing choices. Either goes in at the label rate and gets replaced when the reservoir is changed, not topped up indefinitely.

3. The mist that goes on the leaves

A foliar mist keeps the leaf surface from transpiring faster than a rootless cutting can replace. Clonex Mist is the one here, and the only real decision is ready-to-use against concentrate: the concentrate costs less per application once you are spraying trays rather than a handful of cuttings.

What is listed, by job

The last four rows sit in this collection but belong to the next section — they are stimulators rather than cloning products, and the one below them is formulated for soil and coco rather than a misting chamber.

Choosing a root stimulator

A root stimulator is not a rooting hormone, and in a cloner some of them do nothing at all.

The root stimulators range covers four different chemistries, and the right question is not which is strongest but which one can work in the system you are running.

Botanical and biostimulant

Kelp, humic and fulvic acids, amino acids and vitamins. These are the ones that work in a cloner, because they are simply dissolved in the water and nothing has to colonise anything for them to act. CANNA Rhizotonic at 0-0-0.6, Botanicare Rhizo Blast on kelp, Radix at 1-0-0 on humic and fulvic acid, GH RapidStart on amino acids, BioBizz Root-Juice, Heavy 16 Roots and CYCO Ryzofuel.

Radix is the other house-brand product here and the only one in the range aimed squarely at propagation rather than at a grown plant. The nitrogen is deliberately almost absent at 1-0-0, because a cutting is not being fed; the working chemistry is humic and fulvic acid. Humic acid holds water and chelates minerals around the developing root, and fulvic acid is the smaller molecule that carries them into the tissue. It runs in rockwool, coco, peat, soil and water without changing anything else in the protocol, which is why it slots into an existing propagation routine rather than replacing part of it.

Microbial

Live bacteria, fungi, or both. The distinction that matters in propagation is bacteria against mycorrhizae. Bacterial products such as Botanicare Hydroguard live in the water and compete with the organisms that cause rot, so they belong in a cloner reservoir. Mycorrhizal fungi colonise root tissue inside a medium; a bare stem in a mist chamber gives them nothing to attach to, so Elite 91 Myco Jordan and the mycorrhizal content of Voodoo Plus earn their keep at transplant, not in the cloner. Elite 91 Roots and BioSafe TerraGrow sit in the same group.

Reservoir hygiene

A recirculating misting system builds biofilm and mineral scale on jets and in the reservoir, and a blocked jet costs you a row of cuttings. Cultured Solutions UC Roots is the one in this range aimed at that, and it publishes a propagation rate of 15 mL per gallon of fresh water at the start of the run, with a heavier rate for cleaning a system with no plants in it.

General plant tonics

Broad additives that help a root zone without being aimed at propagation: Primordial Sea Green, Rootamentary, Emerald Harvest Root Wizard, Emerald Goddess, GH Floralicious Plus and Roots Excelurator Gold. The collection also lists two base inputs, Nova PeKacid 0-60-20 and HGV Dry Grow, which are fertiliser rather than stimulator.

How to narrow it

Three questions settle it. Is the product going into a misting chamber or into a medium? A chamber rules out mycorrhizae and anything thick enough to block a jet. Is it doing a job something else already does? A clone solution and a botanical stimulator overlap heavily, and running both at label rate is how people overfeed a cutting without noticing. And does it have a published propagation rate? A product that only gives a veg-stage rate is being guessed at when you use it on cuttings.

Running it without losing a batch

Four things decide the strike rate, and three of them are environmental.

Reservoir temperature is first and it is not close. Aim for the high 60s°F. Above the mid 70s the water holds less dissolved oxygen, pathogens move faster than the cuttings can root, and you get the slimy brown stem bases that growers blame on the solution. Pump heat alone will push a small reservoir up several degrees in a closed cupboard, which is the argument for the machines that move air through the chamber.

Humidity second. A fresh cutting has no roots and loses water through its leaves faster than it can replace it, so the first few days need the air near saturation. That is what the dome is for. Once white root tips appear, the dome comes off in stages — leaving it on hardens nothing and invites mildew.

Light third, and gently. Cuttings want low light, not darkness and not a flowering fixture. A dedicated propagation bar or a T5 well back from the canopy is enough. Too much light drives transpiration the cutting cannot support.

Then cleanliness. Between batches the reservoir, lid, manifold and jets all get stripped and cleaned. Jets block, and a blocked jet is a row of cuttings getting nothing while the ones either side look perfect. Collars either get sterilised or replaced — TurboKlone Elite Stem Collars come in packs for exactly this reason. Spare EZ-Clone sprayers are worth keeping for the same reason.

pH comes last, which surprises people. Somewhere around 5.5 to 6.0 is fine and the cuttings are not fussy at this stage. A grower chasing a pH decimal in a reservoir sitting at 78°F is solving the wrong problem.

FAQs

The questions that come up most often about aeroponic cloning systems.

How long does an aeroponic cloner take to root a cutting?

Seven to ten days for most species under good conditions, against two to three weeks in a plug. Slow-rooting varieties take longer in any method. If nothing has appeared by day fourteen, the reservoir temperature is the first thing to check.

Does the pump run continuously?

Most aeroponic cloners run the pump continuously, and the ones built around a cycle timer say so. The failure that costs you a batch is not over-misting, it is the pump stopping, so continuous running is the safer default unless the manufacturer specifies otherwise.

What is the best rooting hormone for clones?

Gel is easier to control than liquid for a cloner, because it stays on the cut rather than running off as the stem goes through the collar. Beyond that the differences between the established products are small relative to temperature and humidity. Pick one, use it at the stated rate, and keep it uncontaminated.

Is an aeroponics cloning machine the same as a hydroponic cloning machine?

Aeroponics is a branch of hydroponics, so in the broad sense every aeroponic cloner is a hydroponic cloning machine. Listings use the terms loosely: a hydroponic cloning machine can turn out to be a deep water unit with an air stone, while an aeroponics cloning machine always means stem-in-air with jets. If a cloning machine for plants does not say which it is, look for the pump and the spray manifold.

Can I use the same machine for seedlings?

No. A seed needs a medium to germinate in and a seedling needs something to anchor into. A clone machine is for cuttings that already have a stem. Seeds go into plugs or cubes in a tray.

The bottom line

Two decisions, taken in sequence: how many cuttings, then how much attention the room gets.

The site count follows from your own batch arithmetic, and going above it costs you strike rate rather than giving you flexibility. The method follows from how often someone is actually in the room. An aeroponic cloning machine is the fastest and most uniform way to root a cutting and it will punish a weekend of inattention; a deep water unit is cheaper and slower; a tray of plugs under a dome is the one that forgives you.

After that the environment does the work. Keep the reservoir in the high 60s°F, keep the humidity up until roots show, keep the light low and the jets clean, and feed far less than instinct suggests. Growers who get this right stop thinking about strike rates, because they stop varying. If you want help matching a machine and a protocol to a specific room, get in touch and we will work through the numbers with you.