Receive Free Shipping On All Systems + Orders
Hydroponic systems have given the cannabis industry a new and innovative means of growing healthy, high-quality crops. Instead of using costly soil, hydroponic systems like the HydraMax from Hydra Unlimited utilize a water and nutrient solution to deliver essential nutrients and oxygen to the plant roots.
Finding the appropriate hydroponic water level for your cannabis crops can present something of a challenge. The exact volume and water level in your hydroponics system can play a major role in the ultimate quality of your crop yield. When determining which water level would work best for your crop, you should look at a few different factors. In most cases, the water level of your hydroponic system should be below your main stem, and just touching the roots. (roughly .5"-1" below the bottom of the planting deck).
This then can get adjusted as the roots begin to grow. The most important aspect of this in the beginning is to make sure your stem IS NOT SUBMERGED! Below, we've help illustrate this in our how-to video when using our media-less snap-in netpot, Root Halo.
Depending on the number of rows (and buckets/plant sites) in your growing operation, you may need to adjust the water level to ensure that each root has sufficient access to the water and nutrient mixture. You should also make sure that your water depth allows for a constant flow and aeration of your water. Stagnant water can allow algae and fungi to develop, which can harm your plants.
The water level of your hydroponic system helps maintain several different variables that affect your cannabis plant's growth. How deep or how shallow your water is can alter the nutrient uptake of your plants' roots. If the water is too shallow, your roots may not be able to draw in enough nutrients to grow. However, if your water level is too deep, your plants' stems could become oversaturated and potentially develop harmful conditions and disease.
When working with your hydroponic system, you have a few different options for measuring your water level. Water-level sensors for hydroponics are a great tool for keeping track of how high or low your water level has gotten. With the HydraMax hydroponic system from Hydra Unlimited, you can use the built-in levels within the hydroponic bucket to maintain your system. This set-level system uses a float valve to keep track of how much the water level has dropped. Once the water level drops too much, the valve is able to be paired with a water reservoir system to automatically fill the water back to the necessary levels.
Maintaining the correct water level in your hydroponic system is important for ensuring the overall quality of your crops. Fortunately, this is not as difficult as it may seem. If you follow these four tips, you can make sure that your system's water level never deviates from your ideal range.
Evaporation can be a major source of water loss for your hydroponic system. To prevent or minimize evaporation, you can keep your water reservoir covered when you are not using it. You might also keep your water reservoir away from windows or other sources of sunlight, which can cause evaporation. Using a media-less netpot system, like our Root Halo system, also helps lock in moisture which further reduces evaporation.
Keeping your equipment clean is another important aspect of maintaining the perfect water level for roots in hydroponics. Dirty or smudged pumps and filters can result in imprecise water levels, making it harder to measure how many gallons of water your system maintains. Your water pump, water chillers, growing buckets, aeration devices and other components should all be clean and free of accumulated grit. This also helps reduce the spread of diseases in your grow. Make sure to implement proper cleaning protocols each and every time you grow.
In addition to affecting the water quality, the temperature of your water will also affect your system's water level. Water that gets too hot can evaporate more quickly and sink to levels that are below the ideal range. Though ideal temperatures vary depending on the specifics of your system and crop, you generally want to keep your water temperature between 65 and 68 degrees Fahrenheit, and overall under 72 degrees Fahrenheit. Buying a thermometer and water chiller for your system can help you measure and maintain your water temperature. Check out our blog on the Importance of Water Temperatures to learn more!
A water-level indicator can be a useful tool for keeping track of your system's water levels over a period of time. With a good water-level indicator, you can closely measure the gallons per unit in each row of cannabis crops. If you're a professional or commercial grower, introducing water fertigation and irrigation automation to your deep water culture system can be extremely advantageous. Our partner's over at Nuravine have incredible technology that pairs perfectly with our HydraMax recirculating deep water culture systems.
Though you can use a useful tool like HydraMax's float valve to measure water levels in your hydroponic reservoir automatically, you should also keep the option of measuring the water levels directly yourself, just in case your automatic leveling malfunctions. Plus, you want to be able to get accurate water-level measurements at a moment's notice in case you need to make adjustments to things like the water temperature, the water quality, the pH level, and so on.
With the right tools at hand for maintaining the best water levels, a hydroponic system can offer you the best-quality cannabis crop yields for your particular operation. Whether you are a new grower or an established veteran, hydroponics represents the future of the cannabis-growing industry and agricultural hydroponics. But given the importance of factors like water level, pH level, and temperature, you must get the best system to produce the best crops.
Hydra Unlimited's innovative HydraMax system uses state-of-the-art deep water culture hydroponics to produce the healthiest and highest-quality cannabis crops. Without needing to use bulky and inefficient soil or traditional grow media, you can easily manage your cannabis harvest with Hydra Unlimited. So if you would like to tap into the power of hydroponics to take your agricultural grows or cannabis operation to the next level, get in touch with Hydra Unlimited to get started with your customized hydroponic growing system.
