How Does Watering Work in a Cannabis Grow?
Now that we've covered water recipes, how does watering actually work in an indoor grow? Are there growers hand watering or is it automated?
When growing outdoors, you can just spray water onto the root ball. In an indoor hydro facility like we have, we like automation. I don't want someone going around hand watering plants, I find that just ridiculous, because there are systems for that. That's why I love hydros, from the automation perspective.
First we have giant 200 gallon reservoirs that are constantly mixing their nutrient recipe around. From there, there are pumps and timer feeders. There's a timer that kicks on every so often that knows it has to feed out water every X minutes for X amount of seconds.
What it will do is turn the pumps on, suck the water of the reservoir, and then it goes down through our PVC lines into our Octo-Bubblers that regulate the pressure, and it pushes out into a little tube. There are two tubes that go to each plant. One is a fail safe, so if one tube gets clogged up, there's still the other one that will continue to feed the plant.
That tube drips the nutrients and water mixture (the recipe) down through the plants and that gets absorbed into the roots. There are PVC catches on the bottom that flush the water out, and we dispose of it. That's called feed the waste.
Then we “batch out" about once a week, where we re-fill the reservoir and remix the nutrients. You have to be constantly watching the pH level of your water and everything else as well. So that's that's how you would set up a feeding system.
Why don't we recycle the water in a closed loop system?
When you recycle water, if you want to maintain the best nutrients you have to constantly keep redosing and analyzing the nutrients that have been lost from the feeding. When the water comes back in, the nutrients have been leached out by the plants, which is what you want. You want your plants absorbing the nutrients.
But in a closed loop system, what's happening is your reservoir has less and less nutrients in it as the plants eat. If you leave it for a week or so before you make a new batch to replenish your reservoir, your plants won't receive enough nutrients.
The further along the feeding goes, the less nutrients they're actually receiving. You would have to constantly be measuring and redosing your nutrients every feeding, which would be ridiculous. You would have to be doing that at least once or twice a day just to make sure they're getting maximum nutrients for further growth.
The amount of labor that it takes to do that is not worth it. It's easier to let the water go, and just put more water in the reservoir and batch out every week.
When we’re done with the water, it just goes through some filters and then it gets dumped down a drain. There's nothing bad in the water because the industry is regulated. We can't use anything that has heavy metals or toxic chemicals in it. We’re limited in the nutrients, the pesticides and everything that we're allowed to use.
Everything that we use is all organic and safe to flush. The water can go right out of our cannabis grow all the same as if we were watering a bunch of cabbages.
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Cheers!
.: Adam
CEO