The cost of reproducing the label of a commercial hydroponic fertilizer with raw salts at a small scale
Creating your own hydroponic nutrients can dramatically change the amount of money you spend in fertilizers per crop cycle. Commercial pre-blended hydroponics nutrients carry significantly high margins, so making your…
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Five things to consider when trying to copy commercial hydroponic nutrients
There are hundreds of different formulated hydroponic fertilizers out there and most of them are very expensive. Due to these very high costs, growers will often want to copy a…
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Why most of the time a “deficiency” in hydroponics is not solved by just “adding more of it”
I am routinely approached by hydroponic growers who believe that a “deficiency” in their hydroponic crop needs to be fixed by adding something to their nutrient solution. The logic is…
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Getting all the data to evaluate a problem in a hydroponic crop
Problems are an inevitable part of being a hydroponics grower. Even experienced growers will sometimes face issues when moving between environments or plant species as things change and new challenges…
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Five common misconceptions around nutrient management in hydroponics
After many years of experience as a consultant in the hydroponic industry and interacting with dozens of different customers growing different plants with different systems, there are some common misconceptions…
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Five tips to successfully manage your nutrient solution in a recirculating hydroponic setup
Although a significant portion of hydroponic growers use run-to-waste setups – where the nutrient solution is ran through plants and then lost – the industry is now moving towards the…
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About the default fertilizer database in HydroBuddy
Hydrobuddy is an open source calculator that seeks to help growers create their own hydroponic nutrient solutions. In order to do this, the program includes a database with a list…
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A new conductivity model in HydroBuddy
On my previous post you can read about how I ran experiments to develop a conductivity model using empirical data in order to improve our ability to predict EC values…
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Building a model to predict EC in hydroponic nutrient solutions
Electrical conductivity (EC) is one of the most useful parameters in the practical preparation of hydroponic nutrient solutions. This is because knowing the expected conductivity of a nutrient solution can…
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Monitoring the quality of fertilizer stock solutions
Hydroponic concentrated nutrient fertilizer manufacturers are not held to any routine quality standards by regulatory authorities in most countries. Although fertilizers need to be properly registered and their intended minimum…
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