How much does your plant weight? (full plant) Creating a chart for weight watering

[Regrowth]

i agree with the points the others have made.
there's certainly easier ways to know how much a plant is drinking or automate watering (SIP, SWICK, drip lines...)

IMO without tracking media type, rh and temps,
and different combinations of those, the data wouldn't be very applicable but don't let that deter you.

i vaguely remember a member here tinkering with a setup that weighed runoff from solo cups and used that to know when to stop watering. they weren't around for long and I'm not sure how far they got with their experiment.

GrowTek's Humboldt Hella Jelly Journal 2021

Hi everyone! I am going to be doing a little experimenting with this grow. I am going to be growing Humboldt Seed Co. Hella Jelly. It is a 70/30 sativa/indica. I have a small (30 X 30 X 72) tent, and want to maximize my yield and keep the humidity in check, so I am going to be growing 4...

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[013]

If you follow Emilya's guide it does it all… fill 2 containers with exact same soil mix but keep 1 container dry and unwatered… weigh it and that’s your baseline.

But rather than get technical with sensors or scales we follow Ems guide to say a bag of dry soil is as light as feather and use that baseline for lift the pot method. Common sense approach add to that- small plants need small amount of water, bigger plants can use more water faster but wait there’s more… in veg we water sparingly but in flower we water frequently.

For most soil types there’s no compelling reason to water every day, yet some with living organic soil or custom mixes do it and can get away with it… but it’s not the norm for most soil growers.

We want to teach people how to read the plant and we talk about soil moisture but moisture is always going to vary from 1 tent or flower room to the next. For example I use… rice hulls, pumice and biochar in large quantities, not to mention kelp, Leonardite, humic acid and other goop, yet I’m willing to bet my soil transpires water faster than yours because of the extra aeration in mine. Plus I top dress all the time so my soil weight gradually keeps piling up. Realistically your soil and mine can not be compared…

Same thing for strains, your white widow is a different genetic phenotype from my white widow.. yours could be squat indica while mine is tall sativa leaner, multiple phenotypes exist within each strain so no 2 white widow plants are identical and same for other 25,000 known strain crosses

Folks who grow in coco do water differently, they feed or fertigate (fertilize + irrigate) with nutrient water every day. In one manner of thinking there no such thing as too wet in coco, plus coco should never be allowed dry out. As you know hydro plants sit in water 24 X 7..

Mixing it up here but rather than give water every few days and track the amounts or weigh the soil… what if you give the plant all the water it needs and let the plant decide how much it wants to drink??

We are doing that with SIPs and SWICKS, all we do is fill the reservoir and the plant drinks freely. Bear in mind for this self watering voodoo magic to work 40% extra aeration should be added to the soil mix. Yep more aeration bends the rules….

point is watering is different based on your media type… you need to learn watering several plants by hand, from bean to harvest, for your media type before automating anything. A timer & pump have zero intelligence.. how you gonna program them if you can’t do it?

Anyways I feel your pain, watering is an issue that will make or break your grow.

Hope something here helps, hang in there!

 

[Canachris]

Ya know after sleeping on this I've come up with the perfect solution. back in the day produce was sold by the pound (not prepackaged like today) but they had a scale that hung from the ceiling, if you had one of those you could attach it to the container and have the container suspend from the floor. after letting the container dry check the weight then water it and see how much heavier it got. HA you just got scaled

 

[rokkie]

I will try this weekend to do some sketches, the feedback till now is great and the ideas are flowing. I'll publish them so you can share your feedback.
Hanging would require a structure that would be costly, my idea is to try to build it around for the same cost of a crop (one bucket) counting everything you would have lost if you loose the plant, so it would be accessible and justified to take the time and money for it. I will try to make it so it's DIY the problem will be finding a scale that can communicate with an esp32.