Chow mix 50/50

[Green Giant]

Hey farmers, Fist time mixing chow, I can assume the 50/50 is just that 50% Coco and 50% Hydroton? Just seems like too much Hydroton. Using a 50L bag of Coco to a 50L bag of Hydroton. Is that right?

 

[bobby]

Yes, that's the correct assumption, 50/50. You simply need to master your feed schedule because it is a lot of hydroton which doesn't hold as much water.

As for sizes of bags, that is right, but double check with your hydro store employee.

 

[SweetTooth]

I just finished a run with 50/50 and if you ask me it should be more hydroton and less coco. more like 75% hydroton and 25% coco

 

[dankworth]

I just finished a run with 50/50 and if you ask me it should be more hydroton and less coco. more like 75% hydroton and 25% coco

I like 75% hydroton a lot. I irrigate every 30-40 mins.

 

[bobby]

I like 75% hydroton a lot. I irrigate every 30-40 mins.

That's pretty wild..Does the coco simply provide a better buffer? Or does it increase your yield overall? If you water every 30-40 minutes, it seems like you could easily do 100% hydroton or even aeroponics for that matter. Why do you even add the coco?

 

[dankworth]

I go into why in my post history, lots of reasons.

 

[carBon.14]

yet to try chow mix. it sounds pretty good, but i find hydroton annoying.

 

[Chrondondalae]

i was mixing 2 bags of hydroton to 1 bag of canna. i like gold label special mix 80/20 way better!!!

 

[nebulius]

giving it a shot right now. i like that you can keep a smaller plant in a bigger pot and don't have to worry about the bottom of the pot staying too wet.

 

[nebulius]

I like 75% hydroton a lot. I irrigate every 30-40 mins.

are you doing DTW?

i'm trying 50% mix now with a mom and am going to try 50% mix with all the clones i'm about to take but worried my use of nutes will get expensive. I can't imagine 75% with DTW.:eek: lol

 

[dankworth]

are you doing DTW?

i'm trying 50% mix now with a mom and am going to try 50% mix with all the clones i'm about to take but worried my use of nutes will get expensive. I can't imagine 75% with DTW.:eek: lol

Keep in mind that when I do 20% runoff, the plant uses 80%. If you recirc, you have to have more than 20% of what the plant consumes left as the buffer.

I only use 25% more solution than the plant uses. I have run ebb and flow, rdwc, drip system, and a wacky hybrid system, all recirc. I used more nute solution per week per light doing recirc than doing dtw.

Like soil plants getting runoff. You only lose solution to growing plants. Plants grow faster, use more solution. Just get that 20% runoff. As long as you are not pouring a bunch of nutes through the plant, you will not burn through nutes.

Besides, I make my food from salts and spend less than $100 per 1k per year in nutes and additives. I talk about how in the links.

I burn through 25 gallons a day of nutes in the flowering room. 35 gallons left over at the end of the week. If you ran a recirc gig and the plants burned through 140 gallons of nute solution, I guarantee you would have to have more than 35 gallons left over in the res to dump out at the end of the week. Hence dtw having less waste than recirc.

 

[nebulius]

Thanks for breaking that down Dank. I guess it really doesn't add up to that much more waste and if the benefit is a better root mass well, then a little more waste isn't bad at all.

I am about to buy some tropf blumats maxi's......I wonder if it will work properly with the chow mix, having all that hydroton in it?

Anyone use blumats with chow?

 

[dankworth]

Fuck a blumat! You need like 3/4 with 1/4" outlets. 1/4" tubing will not clog. Blumats will if you have anything fun in the res, or anything goes wrong. You want a 100% reliable drip manifold like this. Then govern it with an art-dne cycle timer that is plugged into the 24 hour timer with the red slider bar and the 15 min captive trippers. Those are $6 at harbor freight. Different brand name, same timer.
Blumats are interesting theoretically. Drip manifolds like this one, though, are impossible to fuck up. Blumats will cause plant or crop loss way before a drip manifold.
I have a suspicion Blumats may not work as well with chow, but really have no idea.
Oh yeah and Blumats are gravity fed so must have elevated res.

 

[RollinEndough]

Power goes out for a few hours and you feed every half hour, how solid is your drip system then? DwD just hit 3+ with blumats and straight coco. Stop hating on what you don't know about unless you're trying to make us laugh.

 

[dankworth]

Power goes out for a few hours and you feed every half hour, how solid is your drip system then? DwD just hit 3+ with blumats and straight coco. Stop hating on what you don't know about unless you're trying to make us laugh.

My system would survive a several hour power outage just fine. Would do several days if it had to, but there would likely be consequences if that happened late in the game.

Blumats are cool, do lots of things well, but do not do what I want. Like be able to run organics(teas and stuff) through the same irrigation manifold. And some other things.

Blumats when tuned keep coco at that optimal saturation rate that generates awesome results.

I have moved towards bucket systems for many reasons.
Like 100% reliability because of topdrip,
High growth rates because of dwc feeding.
So far impervious to rot(I have been running Cap's bennies, I am sure that plays a large part in the rot resistance).
Low veg times;)

Keep in mind this was halfassed together and that there are much better, cleaner, more efficient ways to construct this irrigation manifold/bucket system.

I think I will run this same system for a bit, moving towards 7 gal frames and 55 gallon barrels like Bossman, but still dtw w/20% runoff, still able to use teas and other cool organic things in the same irrigation manifold, and still not having a system that rots, even with 77 degree irrigation temps and 78+ tub temps.

One of the things I looked for when I was doing my due diligence for blumats over a year ago was examples of large rooms being run all by blumat.

I am sure they are great fun when dialed.

 

[RollinEndough]

What I don't understand is the reasoning behind 20% or any runoff at all. I complete and flush out crops and never see water come out of the Smart Pots. If you don't overfeed you can't overfeed.

Anyway, keep it up, I'm sure you'll be doing another fat bud strut before too long and have our jaws hangin'.

 

[dankworth]

What I don't understand is the reasoning behind 20% or any runoff at all. I complete and flush out crops and never see water come out of the Smart Pots. If you don't overfeed you can't overfeed.

Anyway, keep it up, I'm sure you'll be doing another fat bud strut before too long and have our jaws hangin'.

Given the dwc(should more appropriately be referred to as swc in this version) portion of the feeding, it is essential to get runoff. I would get runoff anyways, because I am not confident in my ability to successfully manage a 0% runoff situation. If I was delivering 5% less than they consumed(did that for a bit inadvertently) then the swc fluid body would get used up shortly, and there would be root death in that region. Then the elevated performance characteristics due to the hydrophilic roots would go away, and we would be left with only topdrip-level performance.

Also I have a goal of a largely self-maintaining system that one could manage with 1xweekly res changes. Other than harvest, pruning, transplant, foliar, etc. The extra runoff provides a buffer of safety in that regard.

Then there is the fact that I was tuning my salt formula with this gig, and needed runoff to wash away the ratios that I fed the day before(slowly turning over the nutes in the swc portion to keep them fresher) because I was fucking with P, iron, and boron values.

Also runoff lets me wash away teas I also use, so I do not have an abundance of leftover stuff from EWC and guano and stuff.

Then there is the desire for runoff to carry o2 to the swc portion in case an airstone failed for some reason.

BTW in my hater buckets MORE AIR=BETTER. Anyone builds one of these, do not forget JK's comments about his buckets that they sound like they are giving birth sometimes.
Seriously, more air=higher performance. My cpvc floating airstones are stupid, but I was broke and had a home depot credit card. Want to run JK's self-cleaning airlines. Would like to run his tanks but would not fit in my space.

But I digress. Runoff is an essential part of my system to operate correctly. Still uses way less fluid volume per week than any recirculating nute delivery method(25% more than the plants use in my case).

Another thing is that I spend less than $100 per 1k light per year in nute and additive cost, so an extra 25% more nute use ain't shit to me. And I get to use the runoff to irrigate veggies in a legit garden somewhere else, which is pretty fun.

One of the reasons I want to work with fewer plants, and larger bucket systems, and more dwc-ish fluid bodies instead of swc, is so it will be practical to have a 1/2" valve per plant site so I can govern irrigation to each specimen for fine-tuning. I want to see how much I can reduce my runoff while still being practical, so I can leave for a week at a time(2 weeks will be doable during certain periods when I have my shit together).