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CO2 Enrichment - supercharge your grow · Hydroponics Daily

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  Hi, welcome back to Hydroponics Daily. Today we're talking about CO2 enrichment.
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  So, plants will photosynthesise more the more CO2 you give them.
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  At the moment, the background levels of ambient CO2 in the atmosphere is 426
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  parts per million. It used to be a lot lower.
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  With human activity, this has risen and is rising still, but it's still not
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  at the level that's optimum for plants.
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  Normally, when you're in a greenhouse or in a grow room
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  you're raising that level to a thousand
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  parts per million so this is something you don't do when you're a
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  beginner grower it's only something you do once you really want
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  to push yield to its maximum and where
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  you know it's going to be best used there's
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  no point doing this if you've not got everything else in your
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  grow room or your greenhouse dialed in and a perfect because
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  there'll be something else that's limited in growth you need
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  to really have optimum lighting conditions optimum temperatures and
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  things like this and but when you do it it
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  will super boost growth and the other reason you might do it is that it when
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  you increase the co2 levels in the grow room it improve increases the plant's
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  tolerance to heat stress so in the summer lots of people put co2 into their
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  grow rooms to reduce heat stress when there's a very bad heat wave.
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  Now we go to a thousand ppm that's used to say triple and probably say double
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  now and you can do that via a number of different methods.
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  You can use canisters, burners, fermenters, or bicarb.
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  In large-scale greenhouses, they use burners.
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  And it's thought that they go to 1,000 ppm because after that,
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  you start to get toxic effects of the nitrogen oxides in the combustion, in the flue gas.
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  Easy for me to say, flue gas.
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  And then also return on investment starts to decrease. so 1,000 being the optimum economically.
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  Obviously, that'll depend on the price of gas and the price of your crop.
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  Canisters is just pure CO2 that's released using a regulator.
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  There are a couple of disadvantages of canisters is that they can freeze up.
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  The regulators can freeze up if you're running a lot of CO2 through them.
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  They're very heavy to move around, and they're expensive for the amount of CO2
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  that you've got compared to burners.
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  The major disadvantage of burners is obviously the fire risk,
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  and if you're in a grow room an indoor domestic situation,
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  I wouldn't advise using a burner unless you really know what you're doing they
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  can get knocked over and you always think well I'm not going to knock it over
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  but you know we always think we're not going to make mistakes until we do and
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  so that's a big issue they can release moisture into the increase the humidity.
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  And they increase the temperature as well so if you're you've ridden the CO2
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  to mitigate the effects of heat stress this one's going to add heat to the system
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  so probably not the best situation there.
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  Fermenters, that's where you get carbohydrates, sugars, and add them to like
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  a yeast or a fungus, and then that releases CO2.
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  And there's a lot of those sort of ready-packed systems on the market.
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  You can buy them from grow shops.
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  They're not my favourite. They tend to be a bit smelly, a lot of them as well.
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  Some of them have pumps to push oxygen into the system to create the CO2.
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  Others don't have a pump.
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  Another option is to use bicarb, so sodium bicarbonate, and add citric acid
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  to it and that releases co2 and you can now get controlled systems to to to
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  to monitor the amount of co2 that's being released or to do it in a controlled environment.
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  It's it's it's probably the best option if you're if you're a small scale grower
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  and you can you can buy co2 meters now fairly cheap online and or from your grow shop and,
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  you can use that to sort of gauge how much bicarbonate
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  citric to add so being your own regulator almost
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  like a manual regulator if you use potassium bicarbonate
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  and citric acid then the produce of that you know
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  potassium citrates you could use as a
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  fertilizer so rather than just dumping the
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  sludge that you get at the end you actually get two
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  products from it co2 and potassium but and potassium citrate
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  which we you know a useful fertilizer really
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  at the end of the day especially for hydroponic crops you could
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  also have a little cat or a guinea pig in
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  your grow room and feed it some food and that'll release some co2
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  you could be in the grow room yourself and release co2 just like king charles
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  he talks to his plants talk to my plants now i'm giving them co2 so that's another
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  option i know i've got a three-legged one-eyed cat used to chill out in my grow
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  room when I have my grow room at home. I don't have a grow room at home anymore.
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  But yeah, you used to release a bit of CO2.
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  So there's a number of methods. As I say, you want to get to 1000 ppm, that's your ideal.
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  And you'll super boost your growth if everything else is dialed in your grow
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  room. And that's been Hydroponics Daily for today.