What are the best nutrients out there?whats better advanced nutrients or hydro fuel?

What are the best nutrients out there?whats better advanced nutrients or hydro fuel?

  • ?

    Votes: 9 69.2%
  • ?

    Votes: 4 30.8%

  • Total voters
    13

29menace

Well-Known Member
mine buffers constantly @ 6.0 and it doesnt matter how much nutes or add-ons i use it still sets itself at 6.0
 

az2000

Well-Known Member
Oh the pH balanced stuff is for real?
If you're in soil you don't have to be too concerned with the ph of what you pour in. The soil will have more "strength" (buffers) to pull the solution to its ph than the solution will have to pull the soil. If you're overfeeding (high ppms, high buffering capacity) and/or extremely low/high ph solution, that might exhaust the soil's ability to hold its ph over time. But, if you're in the 500-700ppm range, you feed enough to get 20% runoff and the ph of what you pour in is between 5.8 and 7.2, it's not going to matter.

@althor had the correct answer. It doesn't matter much whether you use MiraleGro food, relatively obscure products like Jack's or GrowMore Sea Grow, or cannabis boutique "lineups." Considerations about organic sources of nutrients versus synthetic might be valid. Quality control. Beyond that, the "secret sauce" stuff is a diminishing return on investment.

That's why AN is so disliked. It obscures these fundamentals, creating a three-dimensional product line which appeals to the same consumerism as collecting Matchbox cars. Gotta have them all! Even if you could resist that siren song, and have good results with a subset of Advanced Nutrients bottles, why reward a company for making it so hard to just grow stuff? Why validate that kind of opacity when there are less histrionic brands out there for a fraction of the cost?
 

BROBIE

Well-Known Member
The ph-perfect provides a convenience. Big crime. With amino acids, surfactants,chelated, fulvics, at 70$/gal or so, you can find this at a fraction of their cost? Be fair, please
Plus, with everything chelated, that ph-chart is almost obsolete.
 

29menace

Well-Known Member
at the end of the day it can and does simplify things for alot of growers ,, we all know theres a hell of alot of ppl out there and in here that havnt really gota clue with what there doing so for them i believe buying there stuff would help , you dont even need to buy the whole range of products to have a successful grow.. but i do admit theres a few of there products that i wouldnt be without..

for the noobie , there 2-part sensi grow/bloom is fine on its own so i dont see that as being expensive at all...
yes its not cheap if you buy the whole range but nobody is asking you to,, ive had experience with "all" there products for the sensi grow/bloom and personaly i did prefer it 8years ago when you could set your own ph but im certainly not complaining about not having to.

ive also used dozens of other single and 2 part nutes and nothing whatsoever has ever compaired to Adv Nutes stuff ,, for instance = the first 2 pages of my journal were jack herer's grown with IONIC single part grow/bloom/boost and your telling me there's no difference in your opinion from those pages to pages 4-5 in my journal where i started another grow with adv nutes... you cant say your better off with cheap nutes when the proof is right there infront of you..

i have roots thicker than my pinky finger, stems 2" thick, the plants are absolute monsters and already have more weight on them than my last grow and they still have about a month to go, well 3 wks but whats 7 days... everything is exactly the same as before , all under a single 600w hps.. only thing that i changed was i made my room alot bigger so for me its the nutes and a few of there other products that achieved this...
 

homebrewer

Well-Known Member
at the end of the day it can and does simplify things for alot of growers ,, we all know theres a hell of alot of ppl out there and in here that havnt really gota clue with what there doing so for them i believe buying there stuff would help , you dont even need to buy the whole range of products to have a successful grow.. but i do admit theres a few of there products that i wouldnt be without.....
I don't think there is anything simple about AN and the box of bottles they convince growers they need in order to complete a grow, 'ph perfect or not'.

In regards to the sensi bottles, even the most die-hard AN guys will tell you to add calmag. I don't know if calmag is actually needed or not but the sensi bases for veg and flower still come in 4 different bottles and it's pretty watery.

You're getting it to work but I think the counterpoint is that you're making an unnecessary number of trips to the hydro shop, totting an unnecessary number of bottles to the cash register, all while paying a premium price just to do it all over again next month. It doesn't have to be that difficult.
 

az2000

Well-Known Member
at the end of the day it can and does simplify things for alot of growers ,, we all know theres a hell of alot of ppl out there and in here that havnt really gota clue
How much of a clue does it require to scoop a half-teaspoon of dry fertilizer?

I don't care what anyone uses. I'm sure AN grows well. But, there's a lot of stuff that grows well with much less confusion and opacity. (For me, all I had to do was spend 5 minutes at the Advanced Nutrients web site. Those product pages use a lot of words to convey very little information.).
 

skunkd0c

Well-Known Member
What I think you should be concerned with is that in terms of cost, you're using a stupid amount of plant food.

For example, if I were using your feeding regimen in an 18 gallon hydro reservoir, it would take just over one gallon of base nutrients alone to flower out a 9 week strain. No offense but that's absolutely pathetic.
how many liters would you suggest should be needed for a crop running on a 18 gallon res and at what cost ?
what is the lowest EC you would run mature plants on ?

so far i have used 2 liters of nutes a+b in 60 litter of water (3x 20 liter res) from seed with about 4 weeks left of flowering until finished,
its most likely going to be around 3 liters by the time they finish, although this is a two part food, so i guess that makes its 6 liters A+B in total
this works out to £15-20 with vitalink or £20-25 with canna

peace
 

homebrewer

Well-Known Member
how many liters would you suggest should be needed for a crop running on a 18 gallon res and at what cost ?
what is the lowest EC you would run mature plants on ?

so far i have used 2 liters of nutes a+b in 60 litter of water (3x 20 liter res) from seed with about 4 weeks left of flowering until finished,
its most likely going to be around 3 liters by the time they finish, although this is a two part food, so i guess that makes its 6 liters A+B in total
this works out to £15-20 with vitalink or £20-25 with canna

peace
That depends on the concentration level of your plant food and the ppm/EC that you're running. At 1.0 EC, I used 2.5L for a 9 week flowering cycle with GH at a cost of around $18 I think?

With H&G, I used about 1.7L at a cost of about $16 running the same EC.

With DG, I use 0.8L at a cost of about $10 running the same EC as the others.
 

churchhaze

Well-Known Member
To make 200 gallons of my hard water mix #17, it costs 7 dollars, and a lot of that is for pH down to deal with hard water.. It would be more like 5 dollars for a soft/RO water formula.

That's enough to change an 18 gallon reservoir over 11 times.

I plugged in prices for if you bought 50 pound bags of macros (and small bags of micros)

mix17_200gal.jpg
 

Sagethisplanet

Active Member
There is nothing to learn from a PH pen, It's not rocket science. Mine with Hydroton is stable at 5.6ph wilma setup. Very healthy. No need for pens, no need for ph up or down etc. It's easy.
There is a medium range for ph, I don't know why you would want to raise and lower to often, keep it steady and let it creep a little before water changes.
If I need iron, adjust accordingly etc.....
 

homebrewer

Well-Known Member
To make 200 gallons of my hard water mix #17, it costs 7 dollars, and a lot of that is for pH down to deal with hard water.. It would be more like 5 dollars for a soft/RO water formula.

That's enough to change an 18 gallon reservoir over 11 times.

I plugged in prices for if you bought 50 pound bags of macros (and small bags of micros)
While this is clearly the most economical route, a lot of knowledge is required to build your own plant food, knowledge that maybe 1 out of 100 folks have on these forums.

That point aside, you posted a picture of your stock solutions in the past and if i recall correctly there were 5 bottles? IMO, that's a little bit of a PITA to work with every time you want to mix up a res, no?

And what about a soil/promix/coco formula? Would one be working with another handful of stock solutions? For me, there is something to be said about working with a minimal number of bottles as I tend to mix up my plant food in gallons jugs and water from there.

But in regards to your mixture, why all the potassium? I'm messing with potassium sulfate right now and the additional potassium added to a 9-3-6 formula has made zero difference in these harvested plants. Granted these are promix plants, yours may be hydroponic.
 

churchhaze

Well-Known Member
While this is clearly the most economical route, a lot of knowledge is required to build your own plant food, knowledge that maybe 1 out of 100 folks have on these forums.

That point aside, you posted a picture of your stock solutions in the past and if i recall correctly there were 5 bottles? IMO, that's a little bit of a PITA to work with every time you want to mix up a res, no?

And what about a soil/promix/coco formula? Would one be working with another handful of stock solutions? For me, there is something to be said about working with a minimal number of bottles as I tend to mix up my plant food in gallons jugs and water from there.

But in regards to your mixture, why all the potassium? I'm messing with potassium sulfate right now and the additional potassium added to a 9-3-6 formula has made zero difference in these harvested plants. Granted these are promix plants, yours may be hydroponic.
Honestly, it's mostly guess and check, the same with working with commercial bottles. That's how i started using them in 2009. Just guessed the best ratios. I learned that even with terrible ratios, the plant will still live if it has everything.

The reason I use 5 bottles is because it makes it easier for me to design formulas with granularity. For example, of one my stock solutions is "2M potassium nitrate". Not very user friendly. Since I haven't changed my formula much in a year, I've been thinking of just making a+b stock solutions at a 1:1 ratio. You're right that injecting 5 stock solutions per tote takes twice as long as it should.

For non-calcium fortified, I'd use the same mix #17 depending on whether I had hard water or not. For soil or fortified promix/coco, I'd just use Jacks (and/or organics).

The reason for all the potassium is that's just how it worked out. My water provides a ton of calcium, so mix 17 uses slightly less calcium nitrate, and slightly more potassium nitrate. The other answer... you might find funny... Mix #15 was too high in calcium. You suggested to lower it in 2013 sometime. I did and it was a lot better... lol. Only problem is lowering calcium means lowering nitrogen too, or boosting K.

I guess one thing you're not considering is that you get a lot of extra potassium when adding protekt or potassium hydroxide pH up. People rarely factor that potassium into their NPK. My mix is factoring pH down/pH up as part of the formula.

(edit: I just realized I didn't put in the prices for the micro salts sodium borate and magnanese sulfate.. so they're priced at 100 dollars a kilo.. The rest don't really cost as much as shown above... So the formula actually costs more like 6 dollars for 200 gal.)
 
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skunkd0c

Well-Known Member
That depends on the concentration level of your plant food and the ppm/EC that you're running. At 1.0 EC, I used 2.5L for a 9 week flowering cycle with GH at a cost of around $18 I think?

With H&G, I used about 1.7L at a cost of about $16 running the same EC.

With DG, I use 0.8L at a cost of about $10 running the same EC as the others.
i see it is quite common for folk these days to be running what i would consider a low ec 1.0-1.3
i must give this a try one day, it will not save me much money but it might be slightly less work and i like the sound of that
although at an ec under 2.0 the solution would not be acidic enough so i might require more phosphoric acid additions running at a low EC, if this is the case it would not be less work

i do not change the res from start to finish i top up with nutes and water when needed, i start at around .8 with seedlings and bring it up to 2.0 in increments of .2
so that they will be on ec 2.0 from early flower to finish

peace
 

Sagethisplanet

Active Member
While this is clearly the most economical route, a lot of knowledge is required to build your own plant food, knowledge that maybe 1 out of 100 folks have on these forums.

That point aside, you posted a picture of your stock solutions in the past and if i recall correctly there were 5 bottles? IMO, that's a little bit of a PITA to work with every time you want to mix up a res, no?

And what about a soil/promix/coco formula? Would one be working with another handful of stock solutions? For me, there is something to be said about working with a minimal number of bottles as I tend to mix up my plant food in gallons jugs and water from there.

But in regards to your mixture, why all the potassium? I'm messing with potassium sulfate right now and the additional potassium added to a 9-3-6 formula has made zero difference in these harvested plants. Granted these are promix plants, yours may be hydroponic.
If u mean this person or robot, just had a potassium def in custom coco based medium. That's all. All good now. Still shocked that that dude doesn't have a pH tester! Wild! Gotta inoculate! Peace
 
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