Is there a chemical engineer in the house?

I’m looking to make my own nutrients from scratch. I have a recipe and would like a few clarifications since I’ve not taken chemistry seriously when I was in school.
I had to grow weed and and now im interested. :joy:
Jokes apart, I need your help! :pray:t3:
Even if your aren’t a pro, if you know a thing or two, kindly help.
:green_heart::herb:

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If you want to read through someone else’s work trying the same thing, I’d recommend this thread:

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I can help. Just let me know your questions and I’ll do my best to answer.

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Glad you dropped by…:blush:
Ok, so below is what I have. It’s a recipe I’ve taken from the net.



The 1st image is the recipe and the second is a bit of explanation.
So from what I understand is that the mole of each compound needs to be found out and then it needs to be multiplied with the corresponding value.
E.g mole of KOH is 56.11 and to find its qty in gms/litre, we multiply 56.11 x 5/32 thus arriving at 8.76gm/litre.
So this way I can figure out pretty much everything up until stock 5, the micros.
I’d like to find out what kind of chelates of each micro is being used and it’s calculation in mM (micro mole?)
The author I belive is Iranian and has sourced the micros from Khazra Nano Chelated Complete Micro Fertilizer and uses it as is…easy for him/her…:smirk:
So, this is where I’m at…so close, yet so far…:joy:

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Not here to help exactly but what benefit does listing things in moles instead of grams help anyone exactly? Now you have to do a bunch of math for seemingly no reason?? :thinking:

I feel like whoever made the recipe, knows what grams you need, but continues to post in moles, for reasons…

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I didn’t make this up…but with a little math I’m able to decode this. It isn’t difficult.
It’s the micros that worries me…

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That’s way too complicated, and @HolyAngel is right, moles just makes everything harder.

Further, I can see they are using magnesium nitrate, which in my experience will only work in veg formulas and otherwise always makes too much nitrogen for flowering.

They also use ammonium nitrate, which is not only difficult to source due to explosion risk, but makes it even more nitrogen heavy!

They do not use Epsom at all, which should be your primary source of magnesium.

For the micros, make your life easy and just buy the plant prod chelated micros. Otherwise you will have to buy a lot more individual nutrients just to make it.

Here’s what I recommend to keep it simple:

Cannabis likes calcium, so calcium nitrate should supply almost all of your nitrogen and calcium. You can get all of your magnesium from epsom.

So that covers 2 cations. For the last cation, potassium, it comes from 3 sources. Potassium nitrate, phosphate and sulfate. You can use these in different ratios to adjust how much nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur you want.

Example:
Calcium nitrate - 2.5g/gal
Epsom - 2.5 g/gal

Potassium + micros total = 2.5g/gal:
Plant prod micros - 0.2g/gal
Potassium phosphate - 1g/gal
Potassium sulfate - 0.3g/gal
Potassium nitrate - 1g/gal

Try working around this as a basic formula and make small adjustment from there.

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One more thing is for silica, with coco, I would use basalt. Just mix some directly into your coco or use Royal gold tupur.

Agsil 16h is extremely alkaline and annoying to work with. I also worry about breathing the dust. Mine also solidified into a hard block. It just sucks.

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Thanks a lot for this. Seem very simple tbh and easy. The potassium phosphate sounds very generic. Is it mono or di?
Its the micros that worries me. I don’t think I can get my hand on any of plant prod products as I don’t live in US or Canada. Would you by chance have a recipe to replicate their ratios?

Weekly and water it down?

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Balanced equations for chemical reactions are always given in Moles to best represent the reactants and the products. This is for scientific accuracy – mass is only used in lower level chemistry, once you take advanced chem all you deal with are moles.

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Thanks brother. Now it makes more sense…:green_heart:

Using moles/ mEq is def more complicated than using just ppm but it is useful for formulating nutrient solutions because it takes into account the specific charge an ion has. That way you can try to balance the cations/anions so that your plant wont uptake too much of something specific and lower or raise the pH of the media too much based on whatever charge it is.

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Yeah monopotassium phosphate or “mkp”.

Basalt should break down slowly over your grow so I think just mixing it at the beginning is fine. Or you can use other silica containing rock dusts, but basalt is one that I know contains a good amount of silica.

If you need to mix your own micros, I would recommend using iron DPTA as your iron form. It has better stability over a wider ph range.

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If you have chemical reactions in your nutrient solution, you did something wrong.

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Technically hydrolysis is a chemical reaction :stuck_out_tongue:

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:joy: I won’t disagree with that.

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Would this be the mixing order as well? I believe jacks and masterblend add cano3 in the end.

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You can mix everything together besides the calcium salts (they don’t mix well in concentrated solutions with phosphates, precipitation of calcium phosphate will happen making things unavail for uptake)

I used to mix everything 1 by one but now I put micros, potassium sulfate, grow clean, mag sulfate all in one container to mix and then the calcium nitrate and calcium chloride in a separate one.

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Where did that come from? :face_with_monocle:
Can you pls share what ur mixing and the ratios? :pray:t3:

The calcium nitrate can’t be mixed in concentrated form with sulfates or phosphates, or you will get precipitation of solids. You can mix calcium nitrate and potassium nitrate in some concentrations. Or you can mix the potassium nitrate with the other potassium amendments. Keep the epsom with the potassium amendments or on its own.

Follow a fertilizer compatibility chart if you have any questions

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