Sheryl, it's not a useless post at all! It's always helpful to hear someone else's experience with plants.
I can't really attest to the "more" water regarding the Hindu Rope ... as soon as I bring any plant home it gets removed from the container and all soil washed off to be repotted into my own potting medium. Commercial nurseries seem to use very heavy soils that retain a lot of water (probably because of transporting them all over North America). They then unload them at the garden centers to be under the care of folks who sometimes don't know a thing about live plants. At one of our local big box garden centers in particular, the employees water them and water them until they are so saturated that the roots rot. I'm in an area of the country that has high humidity most of the year so I water twice a week during summer and sporadically-to not at all during the months of Dec. Jan. and Feb.
I had a really large beautiful H. carnosa compacta, the Hindu Rope Hoya. I still have it, or rather what's left of it! It's almost totally gone now ... not even worth trying to save. We've had extremely cold winters the past two years and it was hit hard by freezing temperatures. I lost a few large Hoya's and many, many other plants because I couldn't give them enough protection from the cold.
This is what it looked like for a few years.
