I had an incident last night.
To measure the runoff i had detached the backflow. When i attached it back it was leaking a bit unnoticed. The water accumulated on the ground, only a little, but enough to trigger my leak detection, which then shutdown the whole system. Luckily before going to sleep i wanted to look at the dashboard again and noticed the system is offline. I had to go in during lights out, fixed it, however the night irrigation job (lower spray times at night) somehow didnt started as expected. I then disabled the night job, enabling the day job to also run at night. When i left the irrigation was running however this morning i noticed the irrigation had not ran over night. That must have been 7 hours or so without watering. That is even worse due to the active ventilation i have into my root chamber.
I thought about why the night job was not starting and then realized, it could be that the night job didnt worked correctly since i set it up like a month ago, resulting in a heavy dryback every night. Not sure, however it is possible at this point. Timely it would fit when my bigger problems began.
The plants looked a bit hurt, also root tips a bit dryed back. If it would happend during light time im sure they would be dead. Ill take that as a warning.
However, as i progressed i came to the conclusion i need DTW and runoff analysis to solve my problems "nutrient stength" and "spray times". There is just no other way as every aero system and strain is different. There will be no one coming to tell me my spray times and EC.
So, i made the DTW permanent and put one set of sensors in the waste bucket. I see the runoff values in realtime now and can make decisions. The volume of the runoff allows me to prevent underwatering.
Regarding the plants, since they were dry i let the sprayer running for a long time what flushed the root zone.
Current values:
PH-IN: 6.04
PH-OUT: 6.05
EC-IN: 1.195
EC-OUT: 1.339
Plants right now look a little bit better.
So yeah, welcome to DTW i guess, i am kind of happy with it
![Smile :-) :-)](/styles/smilies/icon_smile.gif)