phxazcraig
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- Jan 26, 2022
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I've been running a DTW system for 4 plants in coco coir, and things have gone so well the biggest issue is my plants being too tall.
To get there, I've been running a lot of fertigations, currently up to 7x daily, with one of those in the middle of the night and the rest under lighting. I've been fighting a rise in runoff EC throughout the flowering stage, and that has resulted at times in tremendous amounts of runoff.
Until I just swapped out my 14 gallon reservoir for a 30 gallon, I was just carting off 4 gallons of runoff per day, with perhaps 6 gallons of input. With my new reservoir, the same watering cycle (30 seconds) put out WAY more water than before, because the reservoir is a little taller, and when the res is full, the water flow coming out of the pump is much higher. So when I got up in the morning and saw that the night's 30 second watering had resulted in about 4 gallons of runoff just from that, something snapped in me and decided this was just too much waste.
So I took that runoff bucket and dumped it back into the reservoir, after seeing that it was only about 200 EC higher than the input. And I dumped in some RO water as well. Overall I'm trying to dilute things down a bit to get input EC under 1000.
It just seemed like if I flushed a bunch of water through that the runoff was probably about like the input enough to reuse some of it.
So I'm wondering if anyone else does a modified DTW where they perhaps recycle a certain percent of it, after measuring the runoff in any way available. I would love to know which nutes are being absorbed and which are building up doing something like this, but I figure that's just what hydro growers deal with.
So - in general, if things are healthy-looking and runoff EC is within 300 points of input, would it be risky or acceptable to routinely take 50% of the runoff, mix it with same amount of RO water and dump it back into the reservoir? I've only got 4-5 weeks left in flower before flushing and harvest, so I don't know I have too long for bad stuff to build up.
To get there, I've been running a lot of fertigations, currently up to 7x daily, with one of those in the middle of the night and the rest under lighting. I've been fighting a rise in runoff EC throughout the flowering stage, and that has resulted at times in tremendous amounts of runoff.
Until I just swapped out my 14 gallon reservoir for a 30 gallon, I was just carting off 4 gallons of runoff per day, with perhaps 6 gallons of input. With my new reservoir, the same watering cycle (30 seconds) put out WAY more water than before, because the reservoir is a little taller, and when the res is full, the water flow coming out of the pump is much higher. So when I got up in the morning and saw that the night's 30 second watering had resulted in about 4 gallons of runoff just from that, something snapped in me and decided this was just too much waste.
So I took that runoff bucket and dumped it back into the reservoir, after seeing that it was only about 200 EC higher than the input. And I dumped in some RO water as well. Overall I'm trying to dilute things down a bit to get input EC under 1000.
It just seemed like if I flushed a bunch of water through that the runoff was probably about like the input enough to reuse some of it.
So I'm wondering if anyone else does a modified DTW where they perhaps recycle a certain percent of it, after measuring the runoff in any way available. I would love to know which nutes are being absorbed and which are building up doing something like this, but I figure that's just what hydro growers deal with.
So - in general, if things are healthy-looking and runoff EC is within 300 points of input, would it be risky or acceptable to routinely take 50% of the runoff, mix it with same amount of RO water and dump it back into the reservoir? I've only got 4-5 weeks left in flower before flushing and harvest, so I don't know I have too long for bad stuff to build up.