My take on Blumats is that there is a time and a place for them for sure. I used them this season in my outdoor soil grow with a really good success and a few issues and concerns:
- They take a bit of initial effort to set up and you have to make sure you saturate the soil correctly before placing the carrots in as the carrots will use that moisture level as a reference to continue feeding, it’s not too hard but it’s an extra effort
- Once you do dial them in they are really great for living soil setups
- I still hand watered in teas and other feedings without issue
- You can have leaks and issues here and there, this only happened to me once in the summer due to a drip line buried in the soil and being bitten or cut somehow by what I can only guess would’ve been an insect or some bug in the soil
- Being that my grow was on my roof and the drainage is not an issue it wasn’t a big deal but this could’ve been a lot worse had it been indoors
- The lines running on the top of the soil can get a bit buried if you are top dressing and by rain, so it’s a bit of extra work to make sure they stay above all that stuff… I found this a little annoying but I also didn’t have to drag water up to my roof every day so it was still a win
- I set my system up directly to my hose outside with a pressure reducer and a filter to filter out the chloramine in my tap water, this worked PERFECTLY and meant I did not have to deal with a reservoir!! This is the MOST EFFICIENT way to utilize this system IMO because if you run a reservoir and it empties before you fill it and you get air in your lines you may need to reset which would be annoying and a lot of work
I would definitely recommend this system for outdoor soil grows where you can hook it up to a garden hose, it works really well in that situation. If you want to see the results you can check out my grow thread here:
Here is what I purchased to hook it up to my garden hose. A filter that fits on the end of the hose and a pressure reducer that fits onto the end of the filter.
Here you can see how it’s set up… A really easy (mostly) plug and play watering solution!
