Blumat auto watering

[Artful Codger]

I've given up for the time being on regular Bluemats. It's not that they idea doesn't work, it's that there is no room for error. And the number one error is letting the res. run dry.
What happens is it don't take very long at all for the trompf carrot to go fully open if there is no water being added. I don't use the drippers, either.
When the carrot goes fully open, the water will shoot far away, if it even stays in the pot, and you will easily easily overflow the pot and everything else by the time the carrot ever shuts off.
This experience is in less than 3.5 gallons of coco coir. NO input on soil or any other bluemat systems.

I agree they're fiddly, especially starting out. Just three ideas, should you ever want to try Blumats again. The first is that I would never run them if I didn't have my pots in a tray big enough to hold the contents of my res. The second is that if I run dry, I don't refill the res until I've hand-watered to saturation, and given the carrots a few hours to acclimate. Finally, Sustainable Village's "Pre-setting the Blumat Sensors" video took a lot of the guesswork out of setup for me. My early runaways were usually due to my own impatience setting the dials.

Hope that helps if you ever try them again.

 

[King's Indican]

im using 5g air pots filled with lightmix and worm humus. my plants always look very happy in veg. but when flower kicks in I start to see some deficiencies calmag, P def, purple stems etc. I recently start thinking it may be overwatering. I never have droopy plants or runoff but my pots feel heavy all the time. Since I don't have the tensiometer I can't tell the mbar values. But if someone can tell me something like "if you water 1 liter to the 20 L lightmix (5% water content) it makes approximately 100 mbar" kind of thing I can figure out my mbar levels.
My question is how wet does 100mbar soil feel like? or in other words when the pot is very heavy is it like 30-40 mbar?