EC measures the how well your nutrient solution conducts electricity... Distilled water or water w/ no particles in it does not conduct electricity at all, but the more other stuff (nutrients, calcium, whatever else is in ur tapwater) that are in the water the more electricity it will conduct... So, by measuring EC we know how much fertilizer is in the solution that we are feeding plants...
EC measures the how well your nutrient solution conducts electricity... Distilled water or water w/ no particles in it does not conduct electricity at all, but the more other stuff (nutrients, calcium, whatever else is in ur tapwater) that are in the water the more electricity it will conduct... So, by measuring EC we know how much fertilizer is in the solution that we are feeding plants...
PPM is similar to EC as it's actually measuring the same thing, it stands for parts per million and will tell you how many ppm you have of total dissolved solids (stuff) in your solution... PPM is not quite as accurate as EC according to the growers bible b/c it actually takes EC and then converts to ppm... Hope this makes some sense to you??
In order to grow in hydro i suggest to get a meter, i didn't go cheap, I got a milwaukee that does ph, ppm, and ec and it cost around 185usd on ebay.. By having a meter you can know when you need to add water to lower ec or add nutes to raise ec... IMO and many others this is a very good tool to have... If you've been having great results without i would say it could only make u better because you'll know when ur plants need more nutes before they tell you...
If you have anymore questions about the ppm/ec hit me back, or maybe someone can explain way better than that...
you know what i'm saying? us/m? or something because ppm is normally in the thousands while EC I typically hear refered to as smaller numbers 1-20 am i completely wrong or what? and the meters i've read online about all measure in ms/cm
us stands for micro siemens, which is a decimal point then 6 zeros.... ms is milli siemens which is a dec point then 3 zeros... my meter measures in us or microsiemens... there are 3 diff ppm scales but the one i use (bc i use advanced nutients and thts wht they use) it equals out to: ec x 700 = ppm... for instance tonight my ec was 2.18 my ppm was around 1490-1530... (700 x 2.18=1526)...
hi all, new to the forums not to the grow. am new to hydro though. anyways i have a question on this, i have an EC meter that measures in microsiemens but im not getting any kinda 1.0 or 2.0, my tap after sitting our for 2 days measures at 177 uS. so either im mixing something up or were talking about 2 diff uS lol meter is calibrated checked it today, and with a 1440 uS soulution. any ideas where im going wrong on converting this to ppm or whatever 1.- number it might be?
You are just mixing up micro and milli units. 1.0 millisiemens is 1000 microsiemens. So your water at 177uS is .017 mS.
well he said his meter read uS but his EC was 2.18, it dont seem logical my tap water would be clean enough to call an EC .017 so trying to figure out how to go from 177 uS to a conversion im familiar with
EC is measured in mS, not uS. My meter reads in uS, as I'm sure most others do as well. It is just more accurate measuring in uS, than mS. Your tap water has an EC of .0177.
kk thx for the assist, thought .017 would be to low and i must be making a mistake but guess not lol.
No problem. It is confusing at first but you'll get it. .017 is low and that is a good thing for tap water. The less dissolved nastiness in it, the better.
