We had a client approach us asking for a fully automated solution for water management. Our suggestion was to use the Bluelab Pro Controller with the Bluelab Peripod M3 for dosing. This would allow him to not only have access to his water information from anywhere via the Edenic app but also allows him to be assured that water management is taken control of.
Challenge
Aquaponics to Hydroponics
The client used to have a aquaponics setup and due to increased cost would like to shift over to a hydroponics system. This meant that many of the extra tanks (fish tanks) as well as extensive filtering was not required anymore. Our solution was to simply bypass the Aquaponics system and use the simp tank as the main nutrient tank. Thankfully both system work on the same principle which meant that we did not need to change much more than that.
In the image below you see all of the Aquaponics tanks + plumbing that became redundant with the new setup. Leaving only the nutrient tank at the bottom right part of the image.
Long Distance To Nutrient Tank
Our second challenge was that the mounting point of the controller with its probes (pH / EC / Temp) was too far from the Nutrient Tank. Our solution to this was to have a small water tank sit close to the probes. However, it's important that the water always represents the true state of the actual water conditions inside the nutrient tank. This means that the water should always be running so that the water in the small measuring tank always represents the most recent state of the water in the nutrient tank. Otherwise the dosing would not be accurate leading to potential over or under dosing conditions. We decided for a gravity fed solution where the water from the distribution tank (which is elevated) would feed the measuring tank which again would have an overflow into the nutrient tank. This way we would always have water running through the measuring tank representing the most recent state of water conditions within the nutrient tank.
Great additional benefit of having the measuring tank was that the probes are now easy accessible. Which makes calibration and cleaning much easier.
Commissioning & Testing
After mounting the controller into place we started preparing the A/B Stock Solution for the client. For that we dissolved Calcium Nitrate in one and a Hydroponics NPK in the other. This avoids Ca-P precipitation. Both of the stock solution need to have high concentrations so that the doing system can keep up with nutrient requirements from the plant.
Preparing A Stock Solution
Preparing a stock solution is not as straight forward as one would think. Its quite tricky to get the right ratio between the two stock solutions. For example the water volume must be exactly the same in both of the solution. But the volume of the dry nutrient solution might differ. But at the end both stock solutions should have exactly the same volume. To achieve this one has to know exactly how much water goes into each tank.
For that we had a flow meter measure the exact amount of water going into the tank. The volume of water that needs to go into the tank must be calculated beforehand and is specific to the nutrients solutions that are being used.
Priming
Once we had our stock solutions in place and dropped our feeding tubes of the Bluelab Pro Controller into the respective solution we were ready to test run the setup thereby first priming the pipes.
Given the clear interface of the Bluelab Pro Controller it is very intuitive working with the controller. Making it easy for anyone without much technical experience to operate the system. Though we also offer continued support via Whatsapp allowing us to deal with questions in a timely and fast manner.
The result is a stable, hands-off fertigation loop with clean data and predictable growth - exactly what this site needed.
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