Making Your Own Nutrient Concentrates

Maritimer said:
You have answered my question even though (as usual) I worded it poorly. My lack of veg time is killing my yields. Plants just won't perform to my expectations when they are not given a chance. Your help is actually beginning to show up already downstairs. This bit of the puzzle will please them all the more. :)
Thanks Sky
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My best advice to grow them bigger is to allow the grow media to be mostly depleted of wetness before watering again. Dry media makes roots stretch and search. The byproduct of that is a more robust root system. The byproduct of the robust root system is a bigger plant above ground.
 
I'll be sitting quietly in the back. Looking forward to your Faux Brix!

Is this the right journal?

:passitleft:
 
weenmeoff said:
I'll be sitting quietly in the back. Looking forward to your Faux Brix!

Is this the right journal?

:passitleft:
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Sorry Ween, this is like a "How to make nutes" thread. My journal is the big one in my signature called "Current Journal". I think I did something wrong because Maritimer came here too looking for my journal. If so, please let me know, yeah?
 
Thanks! Subbed over there.

:passitleft:
 
That's awesome! Your programme/skybounds info has helped me step my game up and correct toxicities/deficiencies now i have some of if not the healthies plants i've ever grown!
 

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danielfp said:
This is Daniel, the creator of Hydrobuddy, glad to see you're using my software! I would love to hear if you have any requests for blog posts or tutorials regarding the software or hydroponics in general. I have restarted blogging frequently and look forward to writing at least a couple of posts per week.
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I am very honored to have you on this thread! Your blogs have helped me tremendously in the past 2 years and I often link to your posts in various threads on this and other message boards. I now have a life supply of triacontanol because of your blog on that substance, lol.

I do request that you bring back the "Clear Targets" button on the main page as that was extremely helpful when comparing the various regimen's I've played with. Also, is the in the Substances page, I can no longer left click while dragging to select multiple substance. That made it easier to select a group of sequentially named substances which then makes it easy for me to change from the stuff I use to the Megacrops or GH or other products other growers frequently use. But even if you don't revert the functions, I am still extremely grateful for the free app that enables a stoner such as myself to crunch all of the little numbers on a molecular level w/o actually personally knowing the math needed to perform such a task, lol.

Once again, I am honored you joined!

As a Blog Entry request, I'd LOVE to hear your thoughts about the difference between hydro healthy and high brix. I tried to make the 2 intersect, but failed, and though I learned a lot thru trial and error, I'd still like to know more about both from someone that actually has skills in these fields. Here's a link to the thread where I logged my findings on that topic.

High Brix Hydroponics
 
FWIW, here's what I'm currently using to grow in. 3-c.f. of Peat, 2-c.f. of Perlite, 6 cups Calcium Carbonate to 1 cup of Garden Lime as the buffer (AKA Faux Mix ala skybound) and I also add a cup of soft rock phosphate just to use up what I bought.

I formulate my own micro concentrate with Iron DTPA, and EDTA for the other 3 metals, then boric acid and sodium molybdate and currently I target those to be the same as what's in Megacrop and Greenway CalMag each at 5 grams/Gal.

Fe - 2.2
Mn - 0.9
B - 0.9
Zn - 1.4
Cu - 0.5
Mo - 0.1

Having my micros mixed to 1000:1, my current regimen is as follows. Note, I am really liking Megacrop's 20:1 NO3:NH4.

NO3 - 142.5
NH4 - 7.5
P - 55
K - 210
Ca - 130
Mg - 55
S - 83 (not targeted)
Si - 20

Generally speaking, my garden seems to be responding very well. The green is nice and stable with minimal leaf damage till roughly 80% of the way through bloom. I also notice some growth vigor that I hadn't seen in about a year when I was top feeding potting rockwool croutons. Considering our new reality and the chance there might one day be food shortages, I wonder if veggies will do well in my soil with this nute regimen?
 
A couple questions I have, mainly just out of curiosity since we have all managed to work around the quirks.

- Re the EC/ppm figure of a mix calculated by HB- the EC displayed on screen is generally at least 25% lower than the EC I get from the mix with my meter in actual life.

Sort of like the mix is 25-35% dark matter... ? We’ve all just ignored the discrepancy, but I’m curious where it comes from.


- If I select too many (more than three or four) substances and then try to match my targets using the ‘Input Desired Concentrations’ option- it seems to surpass the program’s abilities. Things get weird. Very strange mixes and lots of ‘high value’ errors, etc. Not sure if there is logic in there somewhere and maybe I have some base parameter set wrong?

That’s ok. To work around it I end up just plugging in two or three substances at a time, to get a rough idea of the mix I want, Then after that I juggle the mix by entering the concentrations by weight, to get the mix the rest of the way. For that it works beautifully, and is really all I need.
Just wanted to check that I’m not missing something. It does sound like HB is still a work in progress, which I hadn’t realized.


Thanks so much for making this program! :adore: Besides making custom mixes actually possible, it has done more than anything else to remove the blindfold and let me see what I’m actually feeding my plants.
 
Weaselcracker said:
A couple questions I have, mainly just out of curiosity since we have all managed to work around the quirks.

- Re the EC/ppm figure of a mix calculated by HB- the EC displayed on screen is generally at least 25% lower than the EC I get from the mix with my meter in actual life.

Sort of like the mix is 25-35% dark matter... ? We’ve all just ignored the discrepancy, but I’m curious where it comes from.


- If I select too many (more than three or four) substances and then try to match my targets using the ‘Input Desired Concentrations’ option- it seems to surpass the program’s abilities. Things get weird. Very strange mixes and lots of ‘high value’ errors, etc. Not sure if there is logic in there somewhere and maybe I have some base parameter set wrong?

That’s ok. To work around it I end up just plugging in two or three substances at a time, to get a rough idea of the mix I want, Then after that I juggle the mix by entering the concentrations by weight, to get the mix the rest of the way. For that it works beautifully, and is really all I need.
Just wanted to check that I’m not missing something. It does sound like HB is still a work in progress, which I hadn’t realized.


Thanks so much for making this program! :adore: Besides making custom mixes actually possible, it has done more than anything else to remove the blindfold and let me see what I’m actually feeding my plants.
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I learned this lesson quickly too, though it was my observation that my meter read roughly 50% greater than the listed EC in the app. I suspect this is due to the app only counting the elemental ppm of the desired elements. So for instance if that CalNite I sent has 17% NO3 and 23.5% of Ca, that only adds up to 40.5% leaving 59.5% unaccounted for.

As you know, I too am thankful to be able to understand what's under the hood of the nutes. I love that I can tell people what their nutes are based on the GA on the labels, then compare notes to see whose regimen is having the best results. Heck, I even theoretically made Megacrop from GH 3 part. The results of course were drastically off, but the fact that GH, or any other balanced line of nutes could be reconfigured to get close to another regimen I thought was pretty cool.
 
Also, prior to learning hydro buddy, I built most of and coded most a complete hydroponics controller that ran 8 relays to control AC powered devices, 3 DHT temp/RH sensors and 8 independent peristaltic dosing pumps, all using Blynk as the front end that enabled me to interact with my garden over the internet. Being such a novice, I grew extremely frustrated when trying to migrate my project from an Arduino Mega to some ESP8266 boards and I put that project on the back burner forever, but I estimate that it's 80% complete and the code ran just fine on the Mega save for the occassional crash. Still, there's great blocks of code that can be jacked and sewn into other projects and sketches, especially the dosing pump code.

Skydroponics Connections Diagram-1.jpg


Edit - Sadly, I never got any of the Atlas Scientific stuff. Another brick wall I hit was that I needed plastic 2 way servo controlled valves that don't exist. This lead me to get into 3D printing and CAD, and I designed several valve types, but sadly the prints don't hold water well.
 
danielfp said:
Please see my reply above to Weaselcracker about understanding EC in general and EC values in HydroBuddy. The program does account for all ions in a salt. So it will account for the molar conductivity of both Ca and nitrate ions in calcium nitrate, although in CalNite you have a Ca, ammonium nitrate double salt, so the program accounts for the Ca, the nitrate and the ammonium in the right concentration, if you provide all the composition information.

Note that the process is significantly more complex than adding ppm values. As I mentioned in my previous reply, the ppm reading of an EC meter has nothing to do with the ppm of the substances dissolved in a hydroponic formulation or the target ppm values. The ppm reading of an EC meter is just to tell you that your solution's conductivity is equivalent to the conductivity of some known standard solution - usually NaCl or KCl solutions - at some that concentration.
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From the perspective of a stoner/grower, all of the old wives tales we relied on for years, the overall consensus of the TDS/PPM our meters read is just a way of comparing apples to oranges to help us growers figure out which line of nutes is the best or produces the best results over time in a repeatable way. Aside from resources provided by yourself and a few other corners of the internet, this content is not widely known or accepted as most folks like things simple and easy to digest. The farthest we collectively went into this was to learn about the different conversion factors and pretty much settled on the 2 most common of 0.5 or 0.7. Your explanation you gave to Weaselcracker will take me years to comprehend as the terms you use are just beyond my vocab, plus I struggle tremendously when trying to grasp molecular math. If not for Hydro Buddy, my simple self would still be using GH 3 part with the extras, or maybe Jack's 321, or Megacrop, but a brand of something made by extremely smart folks like you.

This is why I am so grateful to have HB, because I am now empowered to formulate my own mix from top to bottom and make adjustments as I see fit. I liked what I saw of other people's experience using Megacrop so much that I emulated the whole regimen, but with my salts. After using this for about 2 months, I noticed a P def and a Ca def. I since upped the P, and lowered the K to lessen it competing with the Ca cation and both solutions seemed to have did the trick as my garden is now growing vigorously with the leaves praying as we say. Megacrop users are not this fortunate. they can either give more or less of the same, I can make actual changes, because of you, so once again, THANK YOU!
 
I`m on my 3rd grow mixing my own.Pretty basic mixing.PPM never got above 300 the entire 2nd grow.Second grow I got 5 ounces from 2 plants.
3rd grow,I have 2 fem plants and 6 still seedlings from seeds I found in my second grow ,sex unknown on the seedlings.

May start a journal soon on the 3rd grow.I am using FFO soil once the plants get outta seedling stage.
 
Sorry guys, all my posts/replies from this thread were removed, although I did not link to anything but a scientific article - which was not even mine - about electrical conductivity and haven't advertised anything here at all. Since it seems 420magazine doesn't want me here I'll refrain from posting any further. Those of you who want to have discussions with me know where to find me and can comment there.
 
danielfp said:
Sorry guys, all my posts/replies from this thread were removed, although I did not link to anything but a scientific article - which was not even mine - about electrical conductivity and haven't advertised anything here at all. Since it seems 420magazine doesn't want me here I'll refrain from posting any further. Those of you who want to have discussions with me know where to find me and can comment there.
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I asked the mods that an exception be made for links to your site because you're not selling anything, but they don't want to adopt the practice of picking and choosing when to ignore their rules and regs which is reasonable. But still, it sucks and I'm sad to see you go, but I can message you on your site if need be.
 
For future reference if needed.

Nutrient Cheat Sheet
..........................................................................................(%)...........(%)
Potassium Silicate ...................................(K2O/Si)....K2O=32.....SiO2=52.8
Haifa Prime Calcium Nitrate ................(Ca/NO3)....Ca=23.5.....NO3=16.7, 0.3=NH4
Magnesium Nitrate ..............................(Mg/NO3).....Mg=9.3......NO3=11
Epsom Salt ..................................................(Mg/S).....Mg=9.86....S=13
Potassium Sulfate SOP ............................(K2O/S).....K2O=52......S=18 ... Mg=0.6 ... Cl=0.3
Potassium Nitrate ...............................(K2O/NO3)....K2O=46.......NO3=13.75
Monopotassium Phosphate MKP ....(K2O/P2O5)....K2O=34.......P2O5=52
Monoammonium Phosphate MAP ..(NH4/P2O5)....NH4=12......P2O5=61
 
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