*The K.I.S.S. Method*
- Thread starter Ioni Botani
- Start date
neural_rust
New member
So that's about 1,3-1,4 in EC? sounds about right. Depending on the strain of course..
seems a little on the low side.. you're using the provided scoop?
668 total - 170 = 498.. now assuming you're using the .5 conversion (why i hate ppm because you have to assume).. you're talking that one scoop of maxibloom in a gallon of water only added 1.0ec.. where we've all concluded that 1 scoop of maxibloom is basically 1.6-1.7ec.
that being said, depending on how you're running it. an ec of 1.3 (which is what 668 ppm's would be) is a great ec for DWC in my opinion.
668 total - 170 = 498.. now assuming you're using the .5 conversion (why i hate ppm because you have to assume).. you're talking that one scoop of maxibloom in a gallon of water only added 1.0ec.. where we've all concluded that 1 scoop of maxibloom is basically 1.6-1.7ec.
that being said, depending on how you're running it. an ec of 1.3 (which is what 668 ppm's would be) is a great ec for DWC in my opinion.
DoDad
Member
Yes. I'm using the scoop. I just tested the water again and got 538.
I am planning on using this with DWc.
heres some food for thought on the nutrient formula of maxi vs ideal hydro nutrient formulas.
ive began mixing my own formula with raw salts. maxi is great, its cheap its simple, but not ideal for cannabis and hydro. but in a pinch its simple and gets the job done.. that being said, here's the ideal PPM's of each element:
N 100 - 450
P 10 - 100
K 100 - 650
Mg 10 - 95
Ca 70 - 300
S 20 - 250
Fe 0.5 - 6
Mn 0.3 - 4
B 0.1 - 0.8
Zn 0.1 - 0.5
Cu 0.05 - 0.1
Mo 0.02 - 0.07
and ideal ratios as they relate to one another:
N: P 3 - 8
N:K 0.25 - 1.5
Ca:N 0.8 - 1.2
Mg:N 0.1 - 0.4
P:S 0.6 - 1
meaning basically the n-p-k of maxibloom for example, has a misbalance of P/K as it relates to N and therefore is throwing off the balance of the whole formula. cannabis is forgiving therefore it works, but you arent getting the maximum results you could be getting.
a better ratio would be running these PPM's give or take:
N-P-K-Ca-Mg-S
99-33-99-99-44-55
so a:
3-1-3-3-1.25-1.5 approximately. 3 times as much nitrogen as phosphorus, equal amounts of nitrogen and potassium. equal amounts of calicium and nitrogen. magnesium in the range of 10-40% of the amount of nitrogen. and phosphorus half to equal to the amount of sulfur.
keeping everything in the right balance means you can run a lower EC level and your nutrients will function better, and plants healthier. also calcium controls everything basically, so if you keep your calcium and magnesium ratio so you have half the amount of magnesium to calicum you can run even lower PPM's. the further the ratio widens, the higher ppm's need to be to achieve the same amount of uptake by the plant.. calcium drives the uptake.
and you dont have to change what you're feeding when you switch to flower. you run the balanced formula all through veg and flower. its true that the plant pulls more P and K and less N in flower, but that doesnt mean that you have to change what you're giving the plant. your feed is balanced, and it has all it needs. and most people are changing their reservoirs once a week anyway, it might make a difference if you're running a whole round without changing your reservoirs.. because as the plant pulls one element over the course of weeks its going to cause a misbalance. but changing res once a week especially you wont have any issues.
ive began mixing my own formula with raw salts. maxi is great, its cheap its simple, but not ideal for cannabis and hydro. but in a pinch its simple and gets the job done.. that being said, here's the ideal PPM's of each element:
N 100 - 450
P 10 - 100
K 100 - 650
Mg 10 - 95
Ca 70 - 300
S 20 - 250
Fe 0.5 - 6
Mn 0.3 - 4
B 0.1 - 0.8
Zn 0.1 - 0.5
Cu 0.05 - 0.1
Mo 0.02 - 0.07
and ideal ratios as they relate to one another:
N: P 3 - 8
N:K 0.25 - 1.5
Ca:N 0.8 - 1.2
Mg:N 0.1 - 0.4
P:S 0.6 - 1
meaning basically the n-p-k of maxibloom for example, has a misbalance of P/K as it relates to N and therefore is throwing off the balance of the whole formula. cannabis is forgiving therefore it works, but you arent getting the maximum results you could be getting.
a better ratio would be running these PPM's give or take:
N-P-K-Ca-Mg-S
99-33-99-99-44-55
so a:
3-1-3-3-1.25-1.5 approximately. 3 times as much nitrogen as phosphorus, equal amounts of nitrogen and potassium. equal amounts of calicium and nitrogen. magnesium in the range of 10-40% of the amount of nitrogen. and phosphorus half to equal to the amount of sulfur.
keeping everything in the right balance means you can run a lower EC level and your nutrients will function better, and plants healthier. also calcium controls everything basically, so if you keep your calcium and magnesium ratio so you have half the amount of magnesium to calicum you can run even lower PPM's. the further the ratio widens, the higher ppm's need to be to achieve the same amount of uptake by the plant.. calcium drives the uptake.
and you dont have to change what you're feeding when you switch to flower. you run the balanced formula all through veg and flower. its true that the plant pulls more P and K and less N in flower, but that doesnt mean that you have to change what you're giving the plant. your feed is balanced, and it has all it needs. and most people are changing their reservoirs once a week anyway, it might make a difference if you're running a whole round without changing your reservoirs.. because as the plant pulls one element over the course of weeks its going to cause a misbalance. but changing res once a week especially you wont have any issues.
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DoDad
Member
Thanks sidewing. all that you wrote is way above my pay grade.
Let me explain my situation. I'm using maxi in hempy buckets and it seems to be working fine so far. This is my first attempt at growing cannabis so I don't have anything else to go by. I have 7 plants about a month old and none of them have died at least.
I can't say that about all my plants. I actually started a couple of months ago trying to do DWC. I planted 11 plants and all 11 died in two different runs. I wasn't using maxibloom then but then none of them lasted two weeks anyway.
I'm thinking 3rd time is the charm on DWC, so assuming I can figure out how to solve all the problems that will arise in the first two weeks, I'm germinating seeds today.
I'm trying to grow as many plants as my tent will fit. Not because I want huge yields but I'm thinking if I grow many, surely one will live long enough to produce some head stash.
Is there something simplier that K.I.S.S.? Is they just a K.I.S.?
maxi is pretty much as easy as it gets. one scoop per gallon. if you're using dwc you should be monitoring PH and EC levels as well. ph should be 5.8 and ec around 1.4 is fine.
dwc is not the easiest method of growing. i cant grow DWC without adding microbe tea every week otherwise i'll have root issues. soil is by far the easiest.
why did your past grows fail?
dwc is not the easiest method of growing. i cant grow DWC without adding microbe tea every week otherwise i'll have root issues. soil is by far the easiest.
why did your past grows fail?
S
sourpuss
Quick question cause you know your shit it seems. If a plant picks and chooses nutrients it needs when it needs it and providing a perfect ratio is all thats needed. 1. Why would a plant go tox on a nute when it doesnt want it? ive thought hydro was a means of kinda force feeding a plant regardless of what It wants and needs and is forced to take the good and the bad??? Is this thought process wrong? Plants can be choosey wit nutes in hydro?
2. This ratio you provide is used throughout from beginning to end? Only adjustments r ec?
Thx for any guidance you can provide....
DoDad
Member
Water, Rockwool and Rapid rooters, top feed, I drowned them, then locked them, then they dampened off.
The second batch, I thought it was a good idea to drop the water level on 2 weeks olds, then the rapid rooters dried up rock hard killing roots in the cube about the same time I fed them and burned them up. I did the opposite of drowning them.
Both those were really expensive seeds too. Now, I'm germinating bag seed until I can figure out how to grow this way.
I have some new ideas this time but my situation may not be the best one for DWC anyway. I have a lot of heat in my tent and high humidity just to name issues. I'm trying to grow 4 plants in one 5 gallon bucket. Everything is prime for root rot, wild swings and even greater headaches.
I'm not a good candidate for Bubbleponics which sounded like a good idea at the time, even if I could figure out how to keep them alive for a month.
I have spent over $1000 on all this and all I have are some leaves from trim on month old plants. I have two water pumps, some heavy duty air pumps and the only way I seem to be able to keep anything alive, is Pro mix or Hempy.
Those in Promix-hp did well. They just got transplanted to Hempys and they are looking good. I've been feeding them 1/2 strength Maxi for about a week, then just fed them at full strength the last few days. They are looking good for what little I know. They took the full strength nutes with no burn. I topped them at the 3rd node yesterday.
What has managed to survive (2 autos, 1 free Afghani seed, and my 4 bag seed plants are not that impressive to anyone but me, but at least they are alive, or they were the last time I looked.
no not really force feeding the plant. Raw salts (or chemical ferts if you prefer to label them as such) and organics are used by the plant the same. Difference is, the raw salts are already broken down into a usable form for the plant. Organic matter needs microbes to break it down, then once it is, it's the same chemical build up as the raw salt as far as the plant is concerned there's no difference between organic and synthetic.. It's just one is available immediately and one needs time to be broken down.
Most cases of toxicity will lead to a deficiency of something else because it's throwing the balance/ratio off, essentially blocking or getting in the way of something else.. That's why plants grow better giving them the bare minimum they need to grow, because more is available because the paths are clear.
With raw salts, you can force feed a plant to the point of toxicity because it's readily available even if the plant doesn't want to eat. If somebody put a funnel down your throat and kept pouring food, eventually you'd eat it even if you didn't want it.. And you'd get sick or die. Same thing with the plant. It's harder to do in organics because it takes longer to break down. Also near impossible in soil to fix when it happens.
All you need to do is give the plant a properly balanced diet and it'll eat what it needs. Maybe it prefers a little more n in veg, a little more p in flower. But you don't have to change how much you're giving, give it the same balanced meal and it'll eat what it needs.. unless you're seeing deficiencies. Then you can bump up ec levels slightly.But keep everything balanced when you do so. If the plant doesn't need it, it won't use it. And it won't hurt it unless you reach toxic total ec levels or ppms of a specific element much higher outside of it's ideal target zone/ratio.
When you have a properly balanced nutrient profile you don't need to change it from start to finish. I feed the same ratios from fresh cutting to chop. Only difference is I run slightly lower ec in veg because I'm under a t5 fixture. Less light means they eat less because the leaves are generating less. I flower under a 1k so they eat more because the leaves have more light to convert to energy.
Leaves control everything with cannabis. Keep your leaves green and healthy, that's how you get big buds. It's not the snake oil additives you add. Healthy leaves, healthy roots, and a properly balanced diet.
edit:
you have to remember that cannabis is a weed. it's resilient, and itll survive a lot of different stuff we choose to give it and do to it. but if we're striving for ideal/maximum results, we have to dial things in to what it wants. picture a nutrient serving like a serving of food. you have 5 different things on a plate.. all 5 things are needed to survive, but at certain times you need a little more of 1 type of thing. sometimes you'll have a little left over of one type, sometimes not.. sometimes you didnt get served enough (deficiency). the only way to really monitor things is to have an expensive meter than measures each element. and monitor it on a daily basis.. so you can see how much of each element it actually ate on a day to day basis.. most of us cant do this because its out of our price range, so we start with a balanced meal, and drain/refill res every week to keep things as balanced as possible.. if we had one of the mentioned meters we could keep every element at a perfectly ideal level and the level of growth and yield we'd achieve would be ginormous.
so remember that also when you are trying to stretch your reservoir 2, 3, 4 weeks or even a whole flower cycle on 1 res.. unless you know what the plant ate exactly down to each element.. topping off isnt making it the same as when you started. if you started off (for example) with 100ppm of nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus each (totalling 300ppm).. and the plant ate 50ppm of nitrogen, 20ppm of phosphorus, and 80ppm of potassium.. your 300ppm starting point is now according to your meter (300 - 50 - 20 - 80 = 150ppm.) so you think ok, i started at 300ppm and now im at 150, so i just add 150ppm of my nutrient mix back and im back at 300ppm, cool right? no because you added back an equal amount of N P K.. 50ppm of each nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus.. so now your res is looking like 100ppm nitrogen, 120ppm phosphorus, and 70ppm potassium.. its no longer the balanced 100-100-100 it was that you started with, but on your EC/PPM meter it looks the same.. and each time you do this it gets worse and worse
thats why its best to drain your res weekly and start with a fresh batch. keep things as balanced as possible.. i dont even top off with nutrients anymore, i just top off with water only, and let the ec drop as much as it wants thru the course of the week. it doesnt usually drop that much in a week anyway to make a big difference.
i start my veg ec at 1.2 and my flower ec at 1.6.. then as it drops and i add water back by the end of the week its usually somewhere like 0.8 and 1.1.. which is still fine, drain the res and back to the starting point.
hydro is just the medium.. water based medium. taking the good with the bad type thinking is what one might think when they arent in full control. use the reference guide numbers on my previous post and dial in from there.. it tells the PPM range of each element that you should be striving for, and it tells the ratios of how all the elements need to be balanced together.. gotta do some math until you find the balance.
Most cases of toxicity will lead to a deficiency of something else because it's throwing the balance/ratio off, essentially blocking or getting in the way of something else.. That's why plants grow better giving them the bare minimum they need to grow, because more is available because the paths are clear.
With raw salts, you can force feed a plant to the point of toxicity because it's readily available even if the plant doesn't want to eat. If somebody put a funnel down your throat and kept pouring food, eventually you'd eat it even if you didn't want it.. And you'd get sick or die. Same thing with the plant. It's harder to do in organics because it takes longer to break down. Also near impossible in soil to fix when it happens.
All you need to do is give the plant a properly balanced diet and it'll eat what it needs. Maybe it prefers a little more n in veg, a little more p in flower. But you don't have to change how much you're giving, give it the same balanced meal and it'll eat what it needs.. unless you're seeing deficiencies. Then you can bump up ec levels slightly.But keep everything balanced when you do so. If the plant doesn't need it, it won't use it. And it won't hurt it unless you reach toxic total ec levels or ppms of a specific element much higher outside of it's ideal target zone/ratio.
When you have a properly balanced nutrient profile you don't need to change it from start to finish. I feed the same ratios from fresh cutting to chop. Only difference is I run slightly lower ec in veg because I'm under a t5 fixture. Less light means they eat less because the leaves are generating less. I flower under a 1k so they eat more because the leaves have more light to convert to energy.
Leaves control everything with cannabis. Keep your leaves green and healthy, that's how you get big buds. It's not the snake oil additives you add. Healthy leaves, healthy roots, and a properly balanced diet.
edit:
you have to remember that cannabis is a weed. it's resilient, and itll survive a lot of different stuff we choose to give it and do to it. but if we're striving for ideal/maximum results, we have to dial things in to what it wants. picture a nutrient serving like a serving of food. you have 5 different things on a plate.. all 5 things are needed to survive, but at certain times you need a little more of 1 type of thing. sometimes you'll have a little left over of one type, sometimes not.. sometimes you didnt get served enough (deficiency). the only way to really monitor things is to have an expensive meter than measures each element. and monitor it on a daily basis.. so you can see how much of each element it actually ate on a day to day basis.. most of us cant do this because its out of our price range, so we start with a balanced meal, and drain/refill res every week to keep things as balanced as possible.. if we had one of the mentioned meters we could keep every element at a perfectly ideal level and the level of growth and yield we'd achieve would be ginormous.
so remember that also when you are trying to stretch your reservoir 2, 3, 4 weeks or even a whole flower cycle on 1 res.. unless you know what the plant ate exactly down to each element.. topping off isnt making it the same as when you started. if you started off (for example) with 100ppm of nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus each (totalling 300ppm).. and the plant ate 50ppm of nitrogen, 20ppm of phosphorus, and 80ppm of potassium.. your 300ppm starting point is now according to your meter (300 - 50 - 20 - 80 = 150ppm.) so you think ok, i started at 300ppm and now im at 150, so i just add 150ppm of my nutrient mix back and im back at 300ppm, cool right? no because you added back an equal amount of N P K.. 50ppm of each nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus.. so now your res is looking like 100ppm nitrogen, 120ppm phosphorus, and 70ppm potassium.. its no longer the balanced 100-100-100 it was that you started with, but on your EC/PPM meter it looks the same.. and each time you do this it gets worse and worse
thats why its best to drain your res weekly and start with a fresh batch. keep things as balanced as possible.. i dont even top off with nutrients anymore, i just top off with water only, and let the ec drop as much as it wants thru the course of the week. it doesnt usually drop that much in a week anyway to make a big difference.
i start my veg ec at 1.2 and my flower ec at 1.6.. then as it drops and i add water back by the end of the week its usually somewhere like 0.8 and 1.1.. which is still fine, drain the res and back to the starting point.
hydro is just the medium.. water based medium. taking the good with the bad type thinking is what one might think when they arent in full control. use the reference guide numbers on my previous post and dial in from there.. it tells the PPM range of each element that you should be striving for, and it tells the ratios of how all the elements need to be balanced together.. gotta do some math until you find the balance.
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well one could say you shouldve started with an easier method of growing such as soil to get some general growing knowledge under your belt, then moved to a more advanced method such as hydro/DWC (dwc being a little harder than other hydro methods because the roots are ALWAYS fully submerged).. i know how you feel i invested a couple grand when i switched to DWC and my first 3 rounds were horrible. i yielded something, but nowhere near what it should have been. i consider them failures in the yield department, but tons of learning and experience earned.
DWC conditions are very important.. you have to have water temperatures ideally around mid 60's.. you have to have plenty of oxygen in the water.
one thing that might help you is research 'heisenburg tea'.. its basically a simple microbe tea, you can brew it with earth worm castings and molasses. instead of trying to run sterile, you are using beneficial bacteria in your reservoir to combat bad pathogens. it will allow you to run at higher temperatures and keep root issues at bay. root issues are what killed me my first 3 rounds, and will probably end up doing the same to you.
i personally always put my seed pops into soil first, let them get going in soil, and then i cut clones from them when they are big enough.. even still i keep 1 plant in soil of each strain as backup because hydro can go bad fast, and i dont trust it with my strains.
doesnt matter how many plants you squeeze into a bucket. if one plant has a root issue they all will because they're sharing a reservoir.
i'd get on the heisenberg tea asap.. i brew mine with mycogrow soluble powder (just like half a teaspoon roughly), 4 gallons of RO water, and 2 teaspoons of sucanat.. then brew it for 36-48 hours and dump 1 gallon into my res. and do it every week when you change your res out. but you have to order the mycogrow soluble powder.. so you can use earthworm castings and/or alaska humus instead.. itll accomplish the same thing.
thatll keep your roots and plants healthy in higher heat. i keep my res around 72-75 degrees with the tea and everythings fine.
then just use the maxi and keep your reservoir EC at around 1.0-1.5.. i used maxigrow in veg and first 2 weeks of flower.. then switched to maxibloom for the rest of flower.
in dwc the roots always need to be in the water.. you dont want the stem in the water though. when i first transplant my plants from my aerocloner to dwc buckets, i submerge the bottom inch of the net pot in water so the roots can drink immediately and as the water gradually drops, they grow down with it. once you have roots out of the bottom of your net pot, then you keep the water level like an inch below the net pot and the roots will keep growing down into it.
the tea will help you a lot. dwc its all about root health.
DoDad
Member
What happened to K.I.S.S. again?
I'm not going through all those changes. If not DWC then what do I do with these newly germinated seeds?
Kiss is for the nutrients only. The tea is for root health because your struggling with heat issues which in dwc will kill your grow. If you can't keep heat under control soil is more forgiving. Also easier to learn. If you have a good soil (I like roots organic) you just need to water it and that's it. Once the plant starts to show deficiencies, transplant into a bigger pot. Then you can give a little maxibloom in flower if you want. You chose to jump into the deep end with dwc as your first method of growing. One of the hardest methods of growing. You need to get some fundamental knowledge under your belt first. What I'm telling you could save you months or years of trial and error. It's up to you to run with it though.
DoDad
Member
Ugh, soil? Say it ain't so!
I'll stick with the hempy buckets before I went to soil. I use 1 gallon tree pots.
I was looking at my setup today and thinking i should consider finishing the plants I already have started.
My tent is 3'x2'x'5' and I have 7 plants to fit in there. Right now I can run them all in my 10 gallon tote and still have enough room for a 5 gallon bucket for another grow but that real estate in my tent may be running low soon.
I'm running 4"x4"x14" tree pots in tubs. I water the hell out of them 2 or three times a day and let the water sit in the tub until I drain it. I've been using the runoff to re-water them but when I check the water in the tub after a few hours, the PH has shifted back to 7. I've tried to get that waster to hold stable by adding a massive amount of air but it had no effect.
It's a pretty efficient system for a lazy grower. I can either choose to water today, or not. I could put this on a drip system and just add water to a main rez every 5 days.
One thing I "can" do is make up 5 gallons of Ph'ed water and maxi bloom and that solution will hold stable for a few days out of the tent. In the tent, it doesn't remain stable for any length of time at all. That's a clue that any growing method that needs "solution stability" may not be the method for me.
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DoDad
Member
They do look fine, don't they
Don't I wish on the temps. I basically have these outdoors. I have them in the house but don't run the AC or heater where I live. Today, it will be in the mid 90's and suspect close to that inside my tent.
I reworked some things to make my life easier today after I decided DWC wasn't for me.
There isn't anything simplier than a Hempy bucket and Maxibloom so I decided to commit to both.
First, I took a tote and drilled 8 x 4" holes in it. These tree pots sit in there perfectly and and won't fall over. They drain underneath t but still maintain the res in the bottom of the hempy pot.
The runoff now is setup as a drain to waste. The little bit of runoff out of the hempy buckets is now collected in the 10 gallon tote below. I might be able to go 5-10 days and not have to drain the bottom res.
I put in a drain valve in the tote so it's easy to drain and put all of it on milk crates because it's easier on my back.
One thing I like about this setup now is that I don't loose any headroom in my tent. This tote and the treepots could just as easily sit on the floor as my plants grow.
I also made up 12 gallons of Maxibloom at 663 PPM and have that getting lots of bubbles, sitting beside my tent just waiting my plants next hand feed. It takes about a quart on each gallon pot to get any runoff. Does that sound about right?
My next thing is auto watering and I'll be dripping or flooding, or watering these somehow with only Maxibloom.
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nukklehead
Active member
There isn't anything simplier than a Hempy bucket and Maxibloom so I decided to commit to both.
how did you get to be so smart with 31 posts (tongue in cheek..
)??
Doesnt get any simpler then that... grow on brother
Nuk
how did you get to be so smart with 31 posts (tongue in cheek..
)??Doesnt get any simpler then that... grow on brother
Nuk
DoDad
Member
how did you get to be so smart with 31 posts (tongue in cheek..
Smart pots.
DoDad
Member
I have some PPM questions.
I tested my PPM meter this morning in distilled water. It read 004 PPM. Can I assume that my meter is reasonably accurate and does not need calibration?
Second question: If my meter is correct, should I raise my PPM's to the 800-850 range REGARDLESS of how much Maxibloom I need to add, even 1.5-2 teaspoons per gallon?
I'm running <675 PPM now, and if I'm not feeding the maximum amount of food my plants can eat at a time they can take it, I need to fix that.
i run 1.2-1.4 max ever in bloom 56-62 p.h.
