A Step Forward : Moving from AllHydroponics to ScienceinHydroponics.com

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Through the past few weeks I have been meditating about the current limitations of the blogger platform and how it makes my writing and customization options smaller and the look of my blog less professional. Due to the fact that I intend to start writing more and expanding this blog it becomes evident that I will need a much more powerful blog hosting platform and blogger seems to be  limiting instead of helping my efforts in this regards. For this reason I have taken the decision to move my blog from its current blogspot home to a new self-hosted domain which I will use from now on to post new articles and releases of hydrobuddy.

This new website – scienceinhydroponics.com – will be the new home of my blogging effort in the area of hydroponic crop production and research. I will stop posting new articles on blogger and the old blogger website will start redirecting to the new wordpress based blog today. The idea of this new blog is to allow me to customize my website as much as I want and to be able to exploit the full potential of my web presence through the use of a self-hosted domain. In the future I hope that this move forward will make my content more professional and my efforts more worth-while. Future versions of hydrobuddy will now be released and maintained on the new wordpress blog and the previous blogger implementation will not be maintained anymore.

Of course if you have linked to my old blog the pages will not be deleted but they will cause automatic redirection towards my new domain. However the RSS feed will stop being updated so feel free to subscribe through my new blog’s RSS feed (links available on the top right corner of the blog). There are also now several buttons you can use in the bottom of each page to share the contents of the posts on facebook, twitter, etc and a Printer friendly function that will allow you to easily print my blog’s contents without any of the menus, etc. I hope that you will greatly enjoy this new blog which is a milestone achievement for me and the start of a new era for me as a much more professional blogger :o)

Feel free to leave any comments or suggestions ! :o)

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11 Comments

  • Mathias
    September 21, 2010 @ 12:56 pm

    Hi,

    i have enjoyed reading most of you blog entries last evening and have a few remarks and questions for you, if you dont mind.

    First, you can get pretty cheap chelated trace element mixes in powder form from aquarium suppliers, which should make the process of makig your own nutrient solution alot easier. See here for some links to suppliers: http://theaquariumwiki.com/PMDD

    Then, and this may be intentional by your side so i want to give this hopefully beneficial criticism in case it isnt, i think there is a difference in depth of your articles, based on the subject. Your chemistry related articles are pretty deep, technical stuff only scratches the surface. Of course, every bit of information given by your side is appreciated, but maybe you want to look into this to give your blog a more well rounded feeling.

    Lastly, my question: What do you think of areoponics, especially the low cost types, ie. low pressure aquarium pumps instead of high pressurized systems. Is their use somewhat beneficial or does one encounter more problems then benefits, compare to usual hydroponic sytems?

    Regards,

    Mathias

    • admin
      September 21, 2010 @ 6:35 pm

      Hello Mathias,

      Thank you very much for your comment :o) Regarding the source of cheap micronutrients, those used for aquariums should do the job although in the long run it might be cheaper for you to buy and mix up your own micronutrients. Certainly it will be quite costly at first but about 200 USD of micronutrient salts will last you for your whole life time growing small crops. Take into account that some micronutrients, like Molybdenum or Copper, are only used in concentrations of less than 0.1 mg per liter reason why a small quantity will go a long long way.

      Regarding the depth of my posts you are absolutely right. It seems that I write more about what I like the most and – being a chemist – I like those posts dealing with chemistry much more than the other ones dealing with more technical aspects of hydroponics growth. Of course this is not necessarily a good think and I will do an effort to provide further depth into the technical posts I write from now on. Your criticism is indeed very constructive and I thank you for sharing your opinions about my blog with me :o).

      About cheap aeroponic setups I would have to say that – for most part – they are just overcomplicated systems that do not achieve the main benefits of high-pressure aeroponic systems. Many people refer to these cheap low pressure systems as soakaponics because what they do is merely soak up the roots in nutrients without generating the “super-fine” mist that high-pressure systems achieve. I would say that instead of going with a cheap low pressure aeroponic system it might be better to use an NFT or an ebb & blow technique depending on the plants, the weather and the actual media available. However it is true that cheap low pressure aeroponic systems can be sometimes more economical than the above mentioned techniques. I remember a friend who had a commercial lettuce crop in Argentina who decided to use cheap aeroponics with inverted V shaped stacks of lettuce due to the fact that NFT was much more expensive due to the cost of the plastic gutters. In any case a precise evaluation of the actual costs and benefits involved must be weight, as in the above case for some people low pressure aeroponic systems might be the best possible solution.

      I hope this answers your questions :o) Thank you very much again for your comment,

      Best Regards,

      Daniel

  • Mike Smith
    September 21, 2010 @ 6:08 pm

    He covers everything here except how to cook the food when it is done.. :) Seriously from germinating seeds to growing without electricity or meters, to making your own nutrients! Daniel this blog is amazing.. I literally check it 2 or 3 times a day looking for new entries. I am very excited about the new website too, frankly I hate the blog layout.

    Suggestions
    1. User forum if able
    2. A compost topic for recycling discarded biological stuff and using all of it to grow even more food or make other use Botanical items.

    • admin
      September 21, 2010 @ 6:28 pm

      Hello Mike,

      Thanks a lot for your comment :o) I am glad you appreciate the blog and its contents ! To tell you the truth I am also not that crazy about the layout in blogger and I hope that I can make it a lot better in this new site. I will also look into the forum and compost topic as well, definitely those two options are interesting and should provide the website with an even bigger audience. Thank you very much again for your comment Mike :o)

      Best Regards,

      Daniel

  • September 29, 2010 @ 10:03 pm

    Thanks Daniel for the program. I am running it on a Virtual Box with Windows XP as guest and Linux (Arch) as host. Works pretty well.
    Love your articles. It is much the same as I have been saying for years, especially about the vitamins. I have dabbled a bit with hydroponics and did my own calculations and it seems to have worked pretty well, but this is a great tool. I have been looking for something like this for quite a while and I really appreciate your efforts and general good attitude.
    I had a question that I haven’t really gotten a good answer to and maybe you have some insight:
    Is there an optimum temperature for the substrate water as opposed to ambient temperature?
    I think that as temp rises the ionic compounds are left easily dissloved but dissolution of gases is curtailed? The converse being as temp goes down, less soluable solids want to precipitate but gas dissolution goes up?
    So, if I have this right, what are the problems faced in a really hot arid region (like N. Sudan) for the production of crops in these types of regions. (Also thing of very high ET rates as well). Thanks a lot,

    Jim

    • admin
      September 29, 2010 @ 11:43 pm

      Hello Jim,

      Thank you very much for your comment :o) I am glad that you are using the program and find it useful ! Definitely it should run without problems on a virtual box since it is as close as you get to a native windows environment. I hope that the tool will be very useful for you in the calculation of hydroponic nutrient solutions :o) Regarding your question about temperature it is actually quite tricky since the optimum temperature of the nutrient solution depends on the nature of the actual system being used. Systems that have higher aeration can tolerate hotter nutrient solutions (since oxygen absorption can be compensated through the air-space available) while systems that do not have high aeration generally need cooler solutions. I would say that a solution should in no case reach above 25ºC and temperatures between 20 and 23ºC would be considered optimal. In a place where you have very high evaporation rates and a very arid environment you can go two ways, grow plants in a system that needs lower temperature but with very large water reservoirs (like floating raft systems) or you can use systems that have very high aeration and control air instead of reservoir temperature. Definitely around warmer temperatures you do lose oxygen as its solubility decreases but at lower temperatures salts do not precipitate, the most insoluble ions in hydroponics would be able to stay in solution up to very low temperatures and precipitation would only happen if pH and other factors collaborated. I hope this helps :o) Thanks again for the comment !

      Best Regards,

      Daniel

  • September 29, 2010 @ 10:30 pm

    Wups, sorry for double posting…forgot to say that I agree with Mike Smith about the blog format. Maybe a solution would be to have a regular web page format and link to the blog. I have that on my site and that satisfies.
    There are a lot of free hosting companies out there and since you’ve already written the text, it wouldn’t be hard to tranfer. Let me know if you need any help with this, I do it for a living.

    Jim

    • admin
      September 29, 2010 @ 11:45 pm

      Hello Jim,

      Thank you for your comment :o) Don’t worry about the double posting !

      I actually didn’t like the old blogger blog format but I do like wordpress very much. Part of my decision to move onto this domain was to have my own self-hosted solution in which I could have full control so I have no interest in moving back to a free hosted solution or changing my website’s format. Perhaps if you know any pretty wordpress themes that would match my site’s topic I would consider them for a change (I am not that crazy about this theme !). However thank you very much for your offer and again for your comment,

      Best Regards,

      Daniel

  • Navi Chou
    December 1, 2010 @ 6:40 am

    Other people have left more productive comments so I thought you might like a simple, less intellectual comment:

    This new site is awesome and your work is amazing. YOU, GOOD SIR, ARE A GOD AMONGST MEN.

  • jignesh desai
    December 31, 2010 @ 1:30 pm

    Respected sir

    I am new in hydroponics. I want to start with very small scale. I want to prepare nutritionation in small scale then how I use your calc.

  • TB
    February 4, 2012 @ 12:22 pm

    So, is this blog dead? I run a high pressure aero setup (I built myself, and yes it’s the real deal with accumulator and sub 1 second mist cycles).

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