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I would like to move forward and install an automated watering system for my home plants that grow in growing tent. Today I’m watering x3 times in a week, each watering is for 4 liters of fertilized water.

So it’s quite a lot of work for me to prepare the bucket each time, so that is my reason to move to an automated system.

Currently, it is wintertime in my country, so to prepare for such a system, I’ve bought:

  1. An aquarium heater to keep the reservoir water in 20-27c degress
  2. Air bubbler to keep the water oxygened and make the solution mixed all time.
  3. Smart sensors for measuring temp, TDS, PH
  4. Pump and water pipes.

Growing setup:

  1. Plant: let’s keep it private - one plant in 90x90x160 tent.
  2. Light: x4 COB CREE CXB3590 - 200W in total.
  3. Growing medium - Coco perlite mixture.

I remained with the big question, if keeping fertilized water is allowed and if yes, on which parameters should I pay attention?

The reservoir should be enough for one week of watering.

Rohit Gupta
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Wuid24
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  • This question cannot be answered unless we have more details, can you tell us what you are growing, add a picture of the light set up and more details of how you are growing the plants (hydroponics, aeroponics....) – kevinskio Jan 27 '19 at 12:44
  • I’ve edit the question and added the required information, can it be posted ? – Wuid24 Jan 28 '19 at 12:21
  • I don't think there is enough information to answer the question but there may be a gardener here who can... – kevinskio Jan 28 '19 at 14:29
  • Just be sure that the mixture is being mixed. You could hook up a rotor to a battery with a timer. – Rob Jan 28 '19 at 23:20
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    Impressive ! I water and fertilize more than that and am lazy so just do it by hand. It does give me a few seconds to look at the condition of each plant. – blacksmith37 Nov 22 '20 at 17:16

2 Answers2

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I have seen nutrient solution stored at final use dilution. It tends to grow algae, but that is not a problem. This should work.

The air bubbler is not needed as mixing is not needed, and has a problem. There is a chance of the warm solution eventually growing Legionaires disease bacteria, and the aerosols produced by the bubbler can be breathed in to give disease.

Polypipe Wrangler
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It looks like you have a soiless grow system. I know that my premade nutrients when I tried this long ago were in bottles A & B because if you mixed them neat some of the minerals precipitated out. But here you're talking about nutrients in a much larger volume of water and I don't think it's an issue because it's the same as growing in an aquaponic solution.

You need some way of measuring plant growth though to see if your watering schedule is adequate. I presume that you're reusing the water as run to waste would be wasteful.

Graham Chiu
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  • I’m also using Dutch pro A+B nutrients and some others like cal-mag but always mixed them in the water. Didn’t understand your last sentence, but I don’t reuse the water in any way, the second aim is to minimize the excess water that are coming out when I’m pouring all the 4 liter solution at once. – Wuid24 Jan 29 '19 at 18:15
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    Run to waste means to use the water once, and then discard. Otherwise the other method is called recirculating. – Graham Chiu Jan 30 '19 at 08:30