The Clone King 25 is an affordably priced aeroponic cloner. Since I just purchased one I want to do a review of the Clone King aeroponic cloner. I will be running some clones in it to see how well it works and if it is worth the money.
You may be thinking about building a homemade cloner and I have built several myself. But although they worked they had their problems. If you look at a clone machine it seems like a pretty easy DIY project. Mine always leaked which is a problem for me.
I live in a 2nd floor apartment so water leaks of any kind from my grow are a definite problem. What it really comes down to is finding the right container. Totes really dont work well in my opinion because they leak.
Then there is the question of how many sprayers and how far they should be from your cuttings. Finally you need to design a top and cut out all those holes.
So when I looked at the price of a Clone King 25 I realized I would not be saving that much money by doing it myself. Starting from scratch if I had to buy a tote, hole saw, pump, pvc and fittings, sprayers, net pots and inserts things would add up. I still may not end up with a cloner as good as one I could buy.
So when I saw the Clone King 25 for just under $70 I jumped on it. I wanted to see if it would perform better than my homemade cloners. Also this unit had a lot of positive 5 star reviews which did not hurt.
If you are interested in making a lot of clones there is the Clone King 36 site cloner which comes with a larger pump and spray manifold and a bigger reservoir.
Clone King 25 Aeroponic Cloner Review – Unboxing
Contents
So the Clone King 25 comes with everything you need except cloning material. It is light weight but feels sturdy. This clone machine measures about 14″ square and about 12″ high.
Assembly is very easy. Clone King 25The most time consuming part is putting the inserts into the net pots. All one needs to do other than that is attach the pump to the suction cup base and center it inside the clone bucket.
The one piece preassembled manifold simply slides into the pump outlet and there is a cut off corner on the lid where the cord comes out. The pump seems solid and well built.
They recommend filling to just below the sprayers. Dont get them under water or they wont work properly. It takes about 2 1/2 gallons to fill it.
The cloner is very quiet and all I could hear was the gentle sound of some water dripping. Also, and very important to me was there were no leaks anywhere, not even around where the net pots sit on the lid.
When I lifted the lid there was spray everywhere and I have to say the pattern was much better than what my homemade cloners produced. I was surprised about this because I figured the sprayers and manifold couldn’t be that much different from my diy cloners.
You get 5 extra net pots and inserts for a total of 30 and some extra spray heads too. I had some net pots of my own and the inserts fit them just fine. However, I did find they were a bit wider and did not drop down fully in the holes but I think they would work fine as spares anyway.
There is a Clone King 36 being offered as well as this model and my understanding is it does not use net pots. Instead the inserts fit into the holes themselves. This allows room for more holes to be drilled and as far as I can tell everything else is identical to the 25 site cloner.
Would I Recommend The Clone King 25 Aeroponic Cloner?
The answer is definitely yes. I feel the Clone King 25 delivers good value for the money. I can not see how EZ Cloner or others get off charging that much more for basically the same thing. And a dome? Not needed and can actually hurt your takes. I also saw one that even had a fan on the side. Puleese! Who designs things like that? Not likely growers, just people adding gimmicks so they can charge you more.
I will be updating with a video showing the actual cloning process so bookmark us and stay tuned.
Update: Firing Up The Clone King Day 1
I just fired up my new aeroponic cloner with some of my harder to root strains. Black Banana Cookies always seems to take longer than most strains to root. Tropicanna Cookies always wilts even if it is put in water immediately and as soon as it goes into rockwool or root riots it droops. Same thing happened here but within a few hours the plants perked right up. That does not happen with traditional cloning methods.
So I removed the net pot bottoms easily with a pair of old Fiskers and found it was much easier to get the inserts inside the collars this way.
Some of these cuttings were fairly woody and all have multiple nodes without trimmed leaves. I want to really give this cloner a run for the money. I am hoping I will be able to root larger clones with it.
As a precaution I dipped the cuttings in a half quart of water with a tablespoon of 3% hydrogen peroxide in it. Then I poured this mix into the cloner to help keep things sterile. Peroxide needs to be added more frequently than bleach but it does provide more oxygen besides sterilizing things.
I am using tap water in the cloner. My tap water is very clean at only 30 ppm but if yours has a lot of minerals in it you may want to consider using RO water.
Here is another cloner you can check out.
https://420dotcom.com/hydroponic-cloning-system-supercloner-50-plant-cloning-machine.html
