So i'm pulling 5gal from the dehu, the girls are springing up and the pots are drying through pretty quick, with roots pushing through the pot base before getting themselves air pruned. We're getting through water pretty good now.
With room humidity at around 55% i'm thinking the plants at this stage might benefit from stepping up to two floods per day. I've been flooding at lights on 8am every day this week, and just now this evening I manually flooded for a trial of a 'supper feed'.
I'll check on them in the AM ahead of their breakfast and probably repeat this manually again tomorrow night before programming this second flood into the timer. I feel I should be up to two floods per day at this stage anyways.
Question: when draining back into the res after a flood, can this be treated with any degree of accuracy like runoff? In other words, if the drain EC reads lower then what I flooded in, then the feed needs to be increased? Or does it not work this way with E&F? Can't seem to find a straight answer on this but it seems feasible to me.
I've gone with 1.3EC the past 48hrs since res change and it has come back the same after flooding, which by the above logic means the feed is right on point. Whilst not impossible, I do find that hard to believe, what with all the other shit i've had so far.
this entirely depends on how you are gonna go about "reservoir management"
if you are gonna be doing "add backs" then you dont really need to worry about the ec in that way
"Add Backs"
during the top offs of your res...........with h20 you will take an ec reading after top off.....since you are running ec it makes it easy.......fraction the reading by your 100% meaning what ever your ec starts out to what ever it is now
1.0ec in
.5ec at top off
you would add back 50% nutrient solution to your tank.....bringing it back to 1.0
if that makes sense
I have never gone by the bumping up and down readings
I usually push my girls under just to the point of being underfed....and then bumping up slightly and staying there......
and keeping the res exactly there at every top off
by keeping the salts as low as possible I lessen the risk of salt buildup
which I have never encountered
and keeping the ec steady along with the h20
in the larger industrial scale of hydroponic growing where operations are extremely automated
they have injection tanks
a simple way to build that at home is to have a double tank
one tank that feeds the plants and another that feeds the 1st
you set the solution strength in the entire system
and set up an automated ph injection system
a float valve in the first tank
so as the solution depletes from the res a float vale dips and as it does the tank adds back from your solution tank
the ph monitor will inject until it reaches your set ph
as for waterings and times
I usually run 3 times a day from seed
the only thing that changes is the duration of the flood
as the plant grows it takes in more h2o and depletes it faster from the media which in turn causes longer soak times i max at 15 min floods