sup Big Mike. I'm a super newb to them but hopefully can be of help somehow. If I can't then hopefully
@Nesta028 and those more experienced with them will chime in. Super baked atm and drinkin some fresh covfefe so apologize in advance for making no sense at all. Here is what I don't know
They come from Austria and the company has been around over 50 years. Unfortunately it doesn't take long before you feel a bit "Appled" though with how most of what you need seems to only be able to be obtained through them aka Sustainable Village and is also not cheap ->
HERE
Although Amazon has some of the products(I paid like $90 for the 12 carrot pkg) only their SVs website has everything. The 3 things I bought from SV took over a 6-8 biz days to arrive. The Blumats off amazon were probably here 47 minutes after I pressed buy.
Below you can see what I bought. This is likely more than you need. The connectors will allow me to turn off the water and then just take the 5gal buckets and go clean and/or refill them.
Each carrot with the tropf blumat package I bought comes with the ability to "drip" out the 3mm tube but that is it. That would be fine imo for a pot up to 2 maaaybe 3 gal but no more. You run the risk of having to move the dripper around(which you don't want to do) to saturate more than 1 area. That is where the distributor drippers come in. They are like a daisy chain of dripper locations for the carrots.
My "idea" for 7gal pots was 2 carrots and 3 drippers each for 6 drip spots, is likely extrme overkill and dumb but I have the extra ones to work with. When you see how they work you realize that you actually need to find a way to have a dripper pretty close to a carrot. The way you could do that is daisy chain 3 drippers around the plant in a circle and end up with the 3rd once back to about 4-6 inches from the carrot. You need to do this so that there is a dripper close enough to the carrot so that the carrot will properly dispense drips when you want it to. If you have a carrot on one side and 1 dripper on the other it will inefficiently water both sides of the plant since only one side receives anything.
1 x 5 gallon res would have water and it would go to 1 carrot with 3 drip locations. Then I was going to have another carrot and it is from the res that has feed/nutes. Whelp it hasn't taken me long to learn that doesn't fly. 3mm tubes are very small/thin and if you are going to force molasses or seaweed or one of who knows what else through those tubes but ask it to sit there for hours or days and thennnn drip? naww my tubes had bougies made of straight molasses+? after 1 gallon of my res dropping(a few days). So that brings up the point that if you plan to use something other than just water with the blumats, I'd make sure it isn't going to clog them like mine. By the time you "dial in" the blumats which supposedly should take 1-3 days if not more, you likely would already have tubes filled with shit you feel you need to clean. Finding the mainline tubing is one of the trickiest imo so I highly advising going with the black tubing I found. It is very flexible and 100ft was $20.
As for short or long carrots that is simply a choice of the general depth at which you want the carrot to monitor the moisture content of the soil. The 9" larger ones are going to allow the carrot to "sense" the moisture depletion at a further down level. For your monster pots I would think it is no brainer and get the larger ones. The carrot is made of ceramic and is a good "judge" of moisture so to speak. You soak them for like 30-60 min and then you fill the carrot up entirely with water and be sure to remove any bubbles. Then you water your plant thoroughly and fill your res with "the average" amount of fluid you would have on a given basis and hike the res up at least 3ft above the top of soil. You place the carrots in the soil and then turn them on and let them drip. Then you turn them click by click until there is a verrry slow hanging drip and then dial it back at least 1-2 more clicks because the soil is wet now and you don't want it to be dripping. You want the soil to dry over the next couple days and then you want it to start dripping. This is why it takes some time to dial them in. You hook them up and see them dripping you may forget about them and end up overwatering.
check
HERE for a pic oh how I had mine set up the 1st time.
Told ya I was baked lol sorry my bad. Let me know if have a question or if any of this made sense. Of the videos I've found, this is the best one
HERE
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no idea it was like that. After all that, the rewards of less hands on should feel amazing
