Basically what you’re doing is watering in small amounts but many times per day or hour instead of a big water once a day so work out how much water you would give each plant per day & then divide that into the hours of the day & water that amount each hour or every few others or whatever the plant needs…only you know what you’re doing on a daily with your garden
That makes sense. I figured id wait till they need watered daily before I hook up the system. Am I supposed to get runoff every feed or just the last one? I see alot of people feeding 6x a dayBasically what you’re doing is watering in small amounts but many times per day or hour instead of a big water once a day so work out how much water you would give each plant per day & then divide that into the hours of the day & water that amount each hour or every few others or whatever the plant needs…only you know what you’re doing on a daily with your garden
i feed like 12times / day at the moment, you need to understand how crop steering works first, if I had to explain what to do it would be something like this:
Thats a great explanation. I’ve wondered the difference between a bunch of small shots and two shots. If the overnight dryback can be kept the same why have multiple shots every 20 minutes to full saturation
Ill be getting clones this week, just trying to get information before jumping in
no need for a shot every 20 minutes if your media saturation stays at 90%-95% the idea of having multiple shots per day is to get fresh oxygen to the root zone so the plants health is as good as it can be allso the idea is to keep the media saturation high during daytime so the roots have lots of water to intake during the dryback perioid, duing day some water will allways evaporate from the media and if you dont replace that evaporated water your media ec will start to rise fast and the plants wont be too happy, i have 5 shots that will get the media to about 95%saturated and when the media saturation I have lots of small shots trought out the day to keep the media at 90-95% saturation and I'll let the plants to dry back only during the night.
think about it this way, x amount of water holds x amount of oxygen, and when the water heats up it can no longer hold as much oxygen so you will have to replenish the oxygen in the root zone by watering. i think maybe 3 shots everyday would be ok in 70%coco30%perlite media since the media can breathe a bit better keeping the oxygen levels higher than just having coco/rockwool as your media, but then again if the media can breathe better then more water will evaporate resulting in a need to water more often.
I think ill probably just wait till im hand watering daily and then set the timer for a couple feeds a day. Im running straight coco so probably just two then add more as needed. At least until I get the basics down
Do I stretch those 4 feeds out all day or every 20 mins or something. If I do all day it wouldn’t have the same drybacks which might not matter idk
like 2 bigger feeds to get the media moisture to 60% 2h after lights on if youre using straight coco (coco can hold 63% water before you see runoff.) then set those 2 feeds to when your moisture levels are at around 55% stop at 2h before lights off. overnight dryback during most of the plants life cycle is 30-40% some weeks it might me greater. after 40% dryback overnight your coco is around 40% wet, then just repeat: 2 feeds in the am to get your coco to 60% then just maintain.. NOTE: depending on wich week of flower you're in the dryback targets change.
How do you maintain without sensors? Just by picking up the pot im guessing
I rigged something up to water once daily until i can get drip rings and an actual setup. Ill probably order halos then considering my nutrients don’t fully dissolve (megacrop). I also thought about just running the 1/4” hose open ended.
Right now, I run a hydro halo fed by a 0.3 GPM self-priming transfer pump that pulls from a 1- or 2- gal reservoir. I find that flowrate of 0.3 GPM is slow enough to act similar to a 'drip' system but moves just enough water that it's not gunking up. I've also run higher flowrate aquarium pumps as well, but generally found non-self-priming pumps to be a pain in the ass. IMO anything between like 0.5-2.0 GPM is a good flow rate for a single halo with a relatively short run.
@Northdank67 how do you measure the media EC when stacking, do you just test the run off EC ?
