Blumat auto watering

[stoned40yrs]

People use the curly 8mm line because it comes in the kits. It's a pita with pots & short 3mm lines but probably wouldn't be as bad in beds where the curl can be laid flat.

Irrigation systems & hardware are also a whole new world for most of us. Internet shopping doesn't help, either, because we can't touch it & we've never seen it working in person, either. So we start from scratch, build on experience until we get something that works for us.

Ya well if you are on this forum reading this thread then there is no reason to buy kits with stiff 8mm lines and fitting you don't need. It's not cheaper to buy a kit. You'll end up with a better system by going to sustainablevillage and buying sensors for $6.90 each, adapters (barbs) 3mm to 1/4"-65 cents and enough 3mm line to hook them up to some cheap 1/2" black hydro line. 3' of 3mm for every sensor. 1 or 2 through hull 1/2" adapters for gravity feed res or some more 1/2 fittings for a pressure reducer. Nobody that can read this thread should get stuck with that worthless 8mm line and all them fittings that come in kits.

 

[Eighths-n-Aces]

Ya well if you are on this forum reading this thread then there is no reason to buy kits with stiff 8mm lines and fitting you don't need. It's not cheaper to buy a kit. You'll end up with a better system by going to sustainablevillage and buying sensors for $6.90 each, adapters (barbs) 3mm to 1/4"-65 cents and enough 3mm line to hook them up to some cheap 1/2" black hydro line. 3' of 3mm for every sensor. 1 or 2 through hull 1/2" adapters for gravity feed res or some more 1/2 fittings for a pressure reducer. Nobody that can read this thread should get stuck with that worthless 8mm line and all them fittings that come in kits.

the 8mm line works great with the pressure regulator, i've got it running both indoors and out and haven't had any problems with it at all aside from the initial set up. i don't trust the 8 mm silicone blumat line even though it's ultra flexible and the 1/2" that you get at the hydro store doesn't work with the barbs i was using. the pressure was blowing lines out of the manifold, but i was using the barbs from kent systems. they work great with a res system but suck ass with a pressure regulator. i gotta take a look at what sustainable village's barbed fitting look like

 

[Jhhnn]

Ya well if you are on this forum reading this thread then there is no reason to buy kits with stiff 8mm lines and fitting you don't need. It's not cheaper to buy a kit. You'll end up with a better system by going to sustainablevillage and buying sensors for $6.90 each, adapters (barbs) 3mm to 1/4"-65 cents and enough 3mm line to hook them up to some cheap 1/2" black hydro line. 3' of 3mm for every sensor. 1 or 2 through hull 1/2" adapters for gravity feed res or some more 1/2 fittings for a pressure reducer. Nobody that can read this thread should get stuck with that worthless 8mm line and all them fittings that come in kits.

Very strong opinion. I'll agree that the 8mm line is a pita but it can be managed with some work & investment in more 3mm line & barbs. Putting it in the oven on warm does great things for its workability. You're a little off base wrt pricing. At $6.90 each, 12 carrots alone are $82.80 while the 12 carrot kit is $79.00 w/ free shipping-

http://www.amazon.com/Tropf-Blumat-...=B008PXHY3A&ascsubtag=55fdb73e4bed11.70129027

I didn't drive to Boulder to get it, either.

The kit is bare bones, just a place to start, which is obviously their marketing strategy. Once I found out how great blumats work I was willing to put in some ingenuity & some money to use them better in my space. I'm sure there are situations where your methods work better, but there are many roads to the same destination.

 

[Organabis]

Will you have less problems using a 1/2" feed line? Do they make T connectors for 1/2" to the 3 cm drip lines? Kits usually come out cheaper.

 

[heady blunts]

8ths---

why dont you like the red silicone 8mm line?

for those of you struggling with the black 8mm line but wanting to use it try putting it in a big pot of boiling water for a minute before running it and it'll be super easy to work with.

hot air guns work too but take a bit more finesse.

 

[Eighths-n-Aces]

8ths---

why dont you like the red silicone 8mm line?

for those of you struggling with the black 8mm line but wanting to use it try putting it in a big pot of boiling water for a minute before running it and it'll be super easy to work with.

hot air guns work too but take a bit more finesse.

this is gonna be a long answer heady so please bear with me....

i guess the main reason i don't like it is the price heady. i've had no problems at all running the regular 8mm line wherever i've needed it when i use the barbed fittings from blumat, and it doesn't sag like the super flexible silicone stuff. IMHO with the low pressure systems the sags and waves=high spots and the high spots are exactly where all the little bubbles are trapped. those little trapped bubbles collect until they form a bubble big enough to fuck things up ..... it's just a matter of time and having a spot in the line where it can happen.

i started out with the blumats running the elevated res systems and they work great with both the standard 8mm and the 1/2''. which gets used where just depends on the total length of the run in my systems. the 1/2" stuff is much easier to get for most of us and IME seems to have zero problems with air bubbles. another reason i like it is because if i need another 3mm line coming off it all it takes is putting another barb through it instead of cutting and adding more fittings

in general the elevated res systems just fuckin' rock! i think how you set them up doesn't matter too much, make it simple or make it a science project (i've done both) as long as the blumats have the pressure they need to function they will do everything you need them to do. i was 100% sold on this product and didn't think i'd change a thing within a couple weeks of setting them up .......

and then sunnydog posted that he was running a pressure regulator and that the blumats were running even better than on the elevated res system. i had to try those and of course just to keep it simple i'd do it indoors my system was already set up to catch any drip, overflow, or random fuck up so for me it wasn't much extra work

here's a pic of what the higher pressures from the regulator can do to 3mm silicone line



i saw that one day when i was moving plants around and decided i didn't want to fuck around with 8mm silicone stuff that might do the same thing and burst.

i know the pressure is probably what did that, but i have read that other people had issues with 3mm silicone line tearing and decided to stay away from the 8mm silicone altogether

told ya it was going to be a long answer

i plan on installing blumats in part of my outdoor veggie garden next spring and i'll probably use some 8mm silicone just to see for myself what it does, but i don't want to do that type of research/trial and error indoors. i'll post what i find out next year.

i know the endless water angle that the pressure regulator brings up scares the shit out of most people here. too many of us have cleaned up too many messes not to be a little worried about a few thousand gallons getting away from use . IME the pressure regulated systems CAN work indoors and they can solve some problems that can't be dealt with with the elevated res systems. there's absolutely no reason to go buy a pressure regulator if you have a functional elevated system, but if the elevated system won't work for you the pressure regulator might. in some cases it's cheaper and easier to set up

 

[heady blunts]

wow great reply thank you 8ths!

i have the pressure reducer kicking around but my partner owns the house and is afraid of a big flood.

i have been getting failures but i was chalking it up to not enough head pressure and misplaced emitters. perhaps i should replace the red line and see if that helps...

 

[Jhhnn]

I may go to the chicken waterer pressure regulator I linked earlier. It's 15 psi vs 35 psi for the blumat unit which is designed to supply a lot of water to a lot of drippers over long distances which I don't have. I figure to use a needle valve, an inlet gauge & an outlet gauge. That way I can throttle potential flow to not much more than the drippers need. If I pop a line or get a runaway it'll be some while before it turns into a disaster.

Not that it'd be a real horror story because the whole thing is in my cellar workshop but it could be mighty inconvenient.

In my space using two stage cooling I can't move the light so I move the plants down away from the light as they grow. With gravity feed, the relative change in pressure is large so I have to readjust when I do that. I figure that with a pressure system the change will be a small % of total pressure so maybe that won't be necessary.

 

[CHEFfy]

Dripworks.com has 10psi inline hose thread regulators for long runs of drip tape. Seems like that would be a good match... High volume, low pressure.

 

[Lapides]

Call me old fashioned, but I still use all original Blumat gear that I ordered direct from austria about 6 years ago.

I run 8kW, elevated rez with float valve, ftw.

 

[Eighths-n-Aces]

Call me old fashioned, but I still use all original Blumat gear that I ordered direct from austria about 6 years ago.

I run 8kW, elevated rez with float valve, ftw.

there's nothing wrong with being old fashioned Lap. if your system works why would you change it? my elevated res systems are still online and will stay that way because they do what they were set up to do and are trouble free.

there is one piece of equipment that i found that is pretty f-ing cool and fits your grow style really well that you might want to check out......



i saw one of these drip tapes running a veggie bed that was around 50 square feet and thought i should see what they were about. a bed that big controlled by one blumat got my attention real fast and stuck in my head so i had to grab a couple. the one in the pic is a 10' running a 4x4 bed and i have a 6' running a 65 gallon smart pot and both work great. i like them better than the slave drippers

both run on the pressure system because i was having problems getting things dialed in on the elevated system, but i admit that i really didn't spend much time fighting with it .... i'm almost 100% sure they could work if somebody took the time

 

[oti$]

Will you have less problems using a 1/2" feed line? Do they make T connectors for 1/2" to the 3 cm drip lines? Kits usually come out cheaper.

Lowes& el depot have air house called flexilla(bright green) the all the blumat fitting plug right into.com it's very flexible and easy to work with

 

[stoned-trout]

I was a sucker and bought 2 kits...way back before we knew better...still haven't set them up....yeehaw

 

[Eighths-n-Aces]

wow great reply thank you 8ths!

i have the pressure reducer kicking around but my partner owns the house and is afraid of a big flood.

i have been getting failures but i was chalking it up to not enough head pressure and misplaced emitters. perhaps i should replace the red line and see if that helps...

your partner is no fool! any sane person would be worried about their house being trashed.

you could be right about the head pressure being the problem, but your blumats worked great for you before and you don't seem like the type that would just install something without doing the math first. my bet is that it's something minor


i don't think it so much what color or material the line is as much as it is the size and how bubbles react once they are in the line. do you have a drain on the end of the line? if so open it once every couple days and see if you get a big air slug or several small ones. if you get air slugs you found your problem ..... i've found that those disappear when you get the high spots out of the line where all the micro bubbles stick and eventually form big enough bubbles to lock everything up. IME the bigger 1/2" line is more forgiving when air gets in the system but it's not a must and waiting on kent systems to get your stuff in the mail is frustrating.


IF you can talk your partner into going with the pressure regulator i'd still wait and do the change between cycles. a pond liner is a good place to start prepping for potential disasters and an empty room is going to make that a whole lot easier

 

[Lapides]

Yeah man, that drip tape caught my eye a few weeks ago. I got sidetracked fighting a fungal infection in my veg, but I am definitely going to look into those again.

Any particular brand you would recommend?

 

[Eighths-n-Aces]

i got them from sustainable village.


i've never looked anywhere else.

cool folks at the village IMO

 

[dr-dank]

Had my first big cleanup. Somehow the 3mm tubing I used to plug off a T came off leaving an open 3mm t to spray. I had not been moving things around, but don't believe pressure related either as using the elevated res and no sign of a blowout; the plug was just gone. Still cannot figure out what happened...

The resulting squirt cleared the edge of my drip trays. By the time I realized the 5G res was all but empty. The lower 2g res was in need of a fill and likely held about .25 gallons...

I'm glad I was not harsh on the dog, as it peeing was my first assumption. This because when I first checked the lower drain I found it, and the area just below the table dry. When I realized the spot was too big for pee I checked the upper res to find it empty.

I thought I had things covered with the catch being larger than the rez. Clearly this fail mode was not accounted for. I have so little room I want/need to run the feed line outside the trays, and given an open 3mm line squirt can cover 9 inches or so, even if routed in the trays a leak could still clear the edge of the tray.

I think for me the early warning leak detector is best safeguard as its an attended site.

Regards

 

[Organabis]

What does this pressure reducer do? Why is it so expensive, is it important to use if you want to avoid runs?

 

[Eighths-n-Aces]

What does this pressure reducer do? Why is it so expensive, is it important to use if you want to avoid runs?

it reduces the line pressure from your house down to 1 bar/ 14.5 psi so the blumats can do their thing

it's expensive because it's plug-n-play. the same thing can be done cheaper but there's a little work involved ..... and chicken nipples is going to come up in your browser history

no it's not important to use. there are plenty of safer options

 

[Jhhnn]

it reduces the line pressure from your house down to 1 bar/ 14.5 psi so the blumats can do their thing

it's expensive because it's plug-n-play. the same thing can be done cheaper but there's a little work involved ..... and chicken nipples is going to come up in your browser history

no it's not important to use. there are plenty of safer options

I was somehow under the impression that the blumat regulator delivered 35 psi. Damned if I can find a reference so I'm probably mistaken.

Per the literature it has the capacity to handle up to 500 drippers which turns into a lot of flow if an 8mm line pops off. That's a function of the design, of the size of the internal passages in the device.

I'll never run more than 18 drippers, our 3 person household Colorado maximum plant count for personal growing. Poking around for a way to extend the time to disaster led to... chicken nipples & what's apparently a much lower flow regulator.

I've also been leery of using the blumat regulator because of its 87 psi inlet pressure rating. Denver Water keeps the static pressure in our old neighborhood at 85-90 psi because of small mains & small supply lines to homes. Until a few years ago our line from the meter into the house was 1880's vintage lead pipe with an ID of 1/2". Don't even try to shower & run a lawn sprinkler at the same time.