What kind of doser do you use?
Was thinking of getting the bluelab for my rdwc since the price looks good on it
1 Like
I am designing one. Been about 2 years now.
It has peristaltic pumps with 0.5ml accuracy or 1%, whichever is larger. 7 inch touchscreen, 1 year of data on the device, PH measured to 0.001, TDS measured to 1, monitors RH%, air temp, tank nute temp, modular so you can get as little or as much as you need, and a relay box to operate up to 8 5A mains devices (relays are rated at 10A but inductive loads like lights are rated differently)
It can keep your PH regulated to a range of +_ 0.0125 and I am finding the extra stability is very liked by the plants.
If you look, you will see that 5.9 is at the top of the graph, 5.8 is at the bottom, and the graph covers days.
Years ago when I bought my Intellidose, I found the difference in yield between having one and not (due to limited access to the plants) paid for itself twice over in the first cycle. When it died I thought “I could make one of those, it can’t be too hard” and now here I am two years later…
I still have many months of work on the coding side of it though so it will not be available any time soon. It has the function it needs, I want to make it easier to use and allow the user to make setpoints through the interface and other features.
I used to have the intellidose, which can connect to a PC so you can see graphs of your readings, and I found that good. I have not tried the bluelab one. TBH any doser is a shedload better than no doser.
1 Like
If you want could you make the PH range wider as some nutrients get absorbed closer to 6 and some closer to 5.5?
Of course. There is a setting for how wide you want the PH and TDS swings to be. You can have them vary between 5.825 and 5.85 at one end or as wide as you like at the other end, if you want you could have it swing from PH1 to PH13 between doses.
More usefully, you could even have a different PH for particular times of the day. In the morning you may want a high PH to stock up on calcium, then a lower one later on to get different nutrients.
I want it to eventually have the equivalent of a basic programming language so the user can program any sort of timing or trigger for anything the device controls based on either a timer or anything it can sense. Like drag and drop boxes to form flow charts sort of programming, or selecting drop down options for a logic chain, really basic stuff but which would enable the user to do anything they wanted within reason.
Then you could have settings where the PH is set to 5.5 between 6AM and midday, 5.9 between midday and 6pm then allow it to settle back down to 5.5 at night. Or have the nutrient strength based on air temperature, the hotter it gets, the weaker the nutrient solution.
Current dosers just adjust the PH and EC to the number you set them, and whilst they are good at that, we growers know we need them to do more.
4 Likes