How do you drain your runoff?

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Jimdamick said:
I say your wrong.
The root sytem/medium will become saturated with nutes if you feed every watering.
They hold onto the salts/nutes & that's a big reason for a fucked up PH/PPM in whatever your gowing in.
I'm telling ya, every 3rd watering feed them, thta's adequate, but to each their own
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Please refer to post #125 of this thread.
 
I'm not surprised that it's possible to get away with a feed then water, if you look at your ec after 24hrs it's went up 4/8 points depending, if you only added water it might not be exactly but it'll be close enough if you're not ocd?
Just to be clear I don't agree but I'm not surprised it works.
 
Jimdamick said:
I say your wrong.
The root sytem/medium will become saturated with nutes if you feed every watering.
They hold onto the salts/nutes & that's a big reason for a fucked up PH/PPM in whatever your gowing in.
I'm telling ya, every 3rd watering feed them, thta's adequate, but to each their own
Click to expand...

If you grow like you spell, that explains a lot. It’s a shame trump lost because all you lonely old men have crossed into the actual grow forum now with awful information.
 
Jimdamick said:
I say your wrong.
The root sytem/medium will become saturated with nutes if you feed every watering.
They hold onto the salts/nutes & that's a big reason for a fucked up PH/PPM in whatever your gowing in.
I'm telling ya, every 3rd watering feed them, thta's adequate, but to each their own
Click to expand...
In coco the cation exchange sites will quickly be displaced by potassium and sodium if you just feed them water (because coco has a much higher affinity for K and Na).

You need to maintain a buffered CEC (occupied with Mg and Ca) with a consistent concentration of nutrients.

Coco responds pretty much immediately to any changes you make, it's nothing like soil in that it's capacity is for the ions of simple salts (not the complex organic molecules in soil) to rapidly exhange rivals what you could ever dream of with soil. That is it's capacity to bind to, AND also it's capacity to displace ions rapidly (which an only water feeding would do).

I've reached out to several coco manufacturers in the past to get some clarification and this is what they've told me (Canna at least provided me a lengthy explanation, but I'm struggling to find it in my e-mails right now).

Also just watering them would completely throw off the measured EC of runoff and medium slurry pH, which I check after every feeding because in mediums like coco that respond so quickly to change these values are VERY helpful to know.

I'm sorry if I'm coming across as a dick or argumentative, I'm not trying to be but I have grown in coco for a few years, at least 5 grows and lets just say that I have learned much from my failures. It's a wonderful medium in how quickly it responds and how much you can pinpoint and control the concentration of the environment of ions around the rootzone but it's also a bitch when it comes to it's ion retaining capacity (specifically cation exchange) and the nature of this mediums rapid change to salt (nutrient) concentrations.
 
Syyndrome said:
$40 last week at Walmart. I'm in Canada too
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Yeah crappy tire had I think the exact same model on for also $40, my buddy bought one just because. I missed out on that sale so like I said hopefully there will be something black friday, but fuck i'm poor lol. I grow my medicine cuz I'm disabled, can't work and can't afford to buy it. It seems at every grow I'm buying a few hundred dollars more of shit when I was hoping to only need to replace medium, fertilizer and lights (HID bulbs).

Also here are my ladies yesterday day 17 of flower. They def. are a mess, and they badly need a defoliation, but I am waiting until they finish stretch so like on Day 21 I think I'm going to be going at them hard with some scissors. But the flowers are looking very nice I am pleased so far. Oh and as I'm sure you can see that removal from anywhere aint happening until harvest day.
 

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reddevil6 said:
All my pots drain into a 40 litre tub which I remove from the tent and empty every 2 or 3 days. It's a bit of a pain sometimes the next step for me is to get a pump that can pump water to a very low level an pump it outside or to a drain. The plants look droopy in that pic they always do that when sleeping and from about a hour before lights turn off.
Click to expand...


Why not just get a condensate pump? Cheap and easy. Run the tubing outside
 
ShopVac makes a Pump Series. We flood our plants when we feed them.. like 1/2 to 3/4 of a gallon of runoff per plant. We dont have to feed all 78 at once, but maybe 15-28 of them a day anyways. We do have Bontanicare trays, and when the water collects at the end, we set the Shop Vac pump hose in the tray. It pumps the water out to a sink. I think I paid like $125 for this pumpvac. Very handy. There is never more than 2 inches of water in the tank as it pumps it out as it sucks it up. I was skeptical about the pump, but it's rated to pump out at 60 ft vertical, and it pumps it out as fast as you can suck it up.


IMG_4933.jpeg
 
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Jimdamick said:
I say your wrong.
The root sytem/medium will become saturated with nutes if you feed every watering.
They hold onto the salts/nutes & that's a big reason for a fucked up PH/PPM in whatever your gowing in.
I'm telling ya, every 3rd watering feed them, thta's adequate, but to each their own
Click to expand...

Worst advice ever.
0/10. Do not recommend. This is not how you coco DTW at all.
If you follow this advice, your plants will suffer.
 
guitarguy10 said:
I'm not growing in soil, I'm growing on coco coir.

Flushing is a hoax, it does nothing more then deprive your plant of vital nutrients in arguably the most important phase of it's growth (buds fattening up).
Click to expand...
You got any pics of the current setup? Might help for some ideas to catch the run off. Otherwise seems like it might be easier to just get some extra treys and swap them when full.

Coco tends to have a bigger problem with salt buildup compared to other hydroponic mediums. Sometimes giving water instead of a feed is not a bad idea, such as if one were to overfeed on accident. I wouldn't give it an actual flush and by flush I mean run a high volume of water through it. That I would never recommend. I do know people that do that in soil and have very successful grows. To me it just seems like they're creating more work for themselves. I usually call those type Fox Farmers. Whatever works for them I guess.

In most cases I think a lot of these hydro flushers may want to try using a more dilute feed. Obviously proper Ph is also very important but there is something a lot of growers overlook including myself at one time. Those damn piece of shit cheap Ph meters. They are not even worth using and should be illegal to sell. However the General Hydroponics PH Test Indicator solution is cheap and accurate. It does not give as much precision but it will easily get you in the proper range. I've tested several cheap and expensive meters side by side and pissed hundreds on Ph shit. I used to use the expensive meters but the probes are expensive and don't last forever, even when properly stored.
 
radrolley said:
You got any pics of the current setup? Might help for some ideas to catch the run off. Otherwise seems like it might be easier to just get some extra treys and swap them when full.

Coco tends to have a bigger problem with salt buildup compared to other hydroponic mediums. Sometimes giving water instead of a feed is not a bad idea, such as if one were to overfeed on accident. I wouldn't give it an actual flush and by flush I mean run a high volume of water through it. That I would never recommend. I do know people that do that in soil and have very successful grows. To me it just seems like they're creating more work for themselves. I usually call those type Fox Farmers. Whatever works for them I guess.

In most cases I think a lot of these hydro flushers may want to try using a more dilute feed. Obviously proper Ph is also very important but there is something a lot of growers overlook including myself at one time. Those damn piece of shit cheap Ph meters. They are not even worth using and should be illegal to sell. However the General Hydroponics PH Test Indicator solution is cheap and accurate. It does not give as much precision but it will easily get you in the proper range. I've tested several cheap and expensive meters side by side and pissed hundreds on Ph shit. I used to use the expensive meters but the probes are expensive and don't last forever, even when properly stored.
Click to expand...

There's not much to show of the bottom of my tent, there are 2 plants from clone and 3 from seed each in an 8" pot which is sitting in a saucer. This was not how I planned it, I have an 18" like 30L barrel planter that I will be using for my next grow (which also will be my first time with promix hp), they are in such small pots because of space and I once had this silly idea of trying to do a SOG with just 6 plants lol.

I didn't anticipate how quickly the clones would respond to 12/12 vs. the ones from seed so it has been a bit of a balancing act propping the 3 from seed on some books and more aggressively LST the clones into the screen. I have these pot elevators that I plan to use with the 18" pot (but I don't have enough for the current setup). I will probably just go with the easy answer of shop-vac, because I have 0 vertical space to spare. The tent is only 5' tall.

I agree that if you overfeed or something that needs to be rectified. It has just been my experience that plants respond better to gradual changes in EC and pH of your nutrient solution. Rather then making a large change in one feeding, I would rather spread it out to 2 or 3 feedings. I have no scientific basis for this belief, it has just seemed like my plants respond better if I increase/decrease the pH or EC over more then one feeding.

I have a bluelabs ph meter, imo it was a waste of $100. Those cheapy ones are kinda crap, and there's nothing wrong with the bluelabs, it's just not worth $100 for the amount of care my lazy ass is supposed to put into it. pH paper is good to have around too, not for accurate measurement by any stretch, but it helps you to confirm the accuracy of your pH meter and it's quick. I try and keep a pretty close eye on my pH but to be honest this AN Sensi Bloom ('pH perfect') is working out pretty much as advertised (unbelieveable I know) and the pH of the solution without any ph up or down adjustment is about 5.9-6.0 with tap water (pretty hard like 290ppm caco3) with the pH of runoff never being more then like 0.2-0.3 units off of the 5.9-6.0 they were fed (which is good!).
 
Jimdamick said:
I say your wrong.
The root sytem/medium will become saturated with nutes if you feed every watering.
They hold onto the salts/nutes & that's a big reason for a fucked up PH/PPM in whatever your gowing in.
I'm telling ya, every 3rd watering feed them, thta's adequate, but to each their own
Click to expand...


WHAT? BS Jim!

I water a metered amount everyday. That includes feeding my synthetic runs daily, same way.
The plants then need the same amount the next day to carry them over to the next,,,and so on.

If your getting build ups and the related problems..

YOUR OVER USING THE NUTRIENTS PER FEED! In effect, your over feeding them.....(How does hydro work then?)


The only people that should employ "run off", are people growing in Coco!
Coco benefits from run off (sadly, as any run off is actually WASTE! and waste makes no sense in any business.
 
Dr. Who said:
WHAT? BS Jim!

I water a metered amount everyday. That includes feeding my synthetic runs daily, same way.
The plants then need the same amount the next day to carry them over to the next,,,and so on.

If your getting build ups and the related problems..

YOUR OVER USING THE NUTRIENTS PER FEED! In effect, your over feeding them.....(How does hydro work then?)


The only people that should employ "run off", are people growing in Coco!
Coco benefits from run off (sadly, as any run off is actually WASTE! and waste makes no sense in any business.
Click to expand...
Hey Doc, it's been a long time since we conversed.
All I'm trying too say is that feeding every single watering is not really needed in my opinion.
I ran my plants @ 700 ppm when I used coco and only fed them every 3rd watering and they did fine.
I'm cheap though and wanted to save nutes/eliminate salt buildup (I never needed to flush)
Anyway too each their own, right?
You take care & stay safe
Peace out my friend :)
 
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