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Hydroponic Water Treatment · Hydroponics Daily

• 0:00
  Hello, and welcome back to Hydroponics Daily, your go-to podcast for everything soilless cultivation.
• 0:07
  Today we're talking about water treatment, three different methods of water
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  treatments, which you should definitely use, which you should use if you're
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  a scientist in a lab, and which you should definitely avoid,
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  but which people often think you need for hydroponics.
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  Speaking of hydroponics, it's time for my regular segment now,
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  what does the general public think hydroponics is?
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  Today we've got Benjamin from Beaumont Lays in Leicester. What is hydroponics?
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  Hydroponics is the watering of plants that is done autonomously maybe.
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  That's not too bad an answer there from Benjamin. Yeah it's got many of the
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  aspects of hydroponics there.
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  Automation, water, fertigation perhaps, but not soilless cultivation.
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  Anyway, today we're talking about water treatment. And I said there's three
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  different methods we're going to go into.
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  And the first one, well, let's talk about why it matters.
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  In hydroponics, plants rely 100% on what you give them in the fertigation solution. There's no soil.
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  So water isn't just the carrier, it's part of the nutrient environment and impurities,
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  salts and imbalances in the pH can have a massive effect and it can cause toxic
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  effects, instability and interfere with nutrient uptake.
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  So the purer the base water the more precision you have.
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  So the most common method that people use if they're going to treat their water
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  and remove anything is reverse osmosis and often known as RO water.
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  And RO water is produced by forcing tap water through a semi-permeable membrane.
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  And it removes dissolved minerals like calcium, magnesium, and sodium.
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  Now, you'll note that two of those are essential nutrients, the calcium and the magnesium.
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  So you're actually removing two important nutrients, but it's the sodium that's really important.
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  And it's also removing things like heavy metals, chlorines, and chloramines.
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  Chloramines? Chloramines?
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  And that's really why you want to use RO water, the removal of sodium,
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  the removal of chlorine and chloramines, the removal of heavy metals,
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  and the removal of organic contaminants, especially pesticides.
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  Any pesticides that will be in the water, which they are, then that would be great.
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  There are lots of herbicides, especially molluscicides, that the water completely
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  just can't get out of the water. And that's why often they get banned.
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  It's not because they're poisoning the environment. it's simply
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  because they can't be removed from tap water so with ro
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  reverse osmosis you can remove 95 to
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  90 percent of the dissolved solids from there it's in
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  hydroponics ro water is considered the gold standard for maximizing
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  control of nutrient balance ph behavior safe
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  use on sensitive and rare crops and especially good in
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  areas with hard or high sodium tap water
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  and i think we said previously
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  the chlorine levels in north america can be a lot higher than they are here
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  in the uk and the hardness can be a lot higher and the ph can be a lot higher
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  so you can have ph of you know plus eight in some areas and then even you know
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  you hear reports of some towns that are completely.
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  Abandoned or unzoned because
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  they just can't treat the the water
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  because there's so much pollution in the water and so yeah crazy
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  situations where you might want to use ro water what's the
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  main drawback of ro reverse osmosis water it's well
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  to get one liter of product you have
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  to waste two to four liters so it takes two to four liters of tap water to produce
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  at least one liter of ro water and the other disadvantage is that it strips
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  calcium and magnesium out so you might have to supplement with more cal mag
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  so if you're say you're using liquid gold and gold leaf if normally you're not using CalMag,
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  you might have to add a CalMag if you're using RO water.
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  The other disadvantage, so if you're on a water meter, then losing four litres
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  for every litre you produce is another disadvantage.
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  You're going to have to pay for that. It's not just an issue of it going down the drain.
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  Now, there's one major issue that many people get confused with,
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  and it's often they see RO machines and they confuse them with water softening
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  machines. They look similar. They've got similar cartridges.
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  You must never use softened water in hydroponics.
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  Softened sounds good, doesn't it? like you think of it as
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  hard water as having calcium so it must have the calcium removed and
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  it does but softened water is
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  treated with iron exchange resin in those containers
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  that you think is an ro water and that removes calcium
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  and magnesium which are essential nutrients but it
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  replaces with them sodium or sometimes potassium but
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  normally sodium and that's great for plumbing it prevents
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  lime scale but it's terrible for plants
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  because as i've talked about in the past sodium is toxic to plants it's the
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  arsenic to plants even though arsenic is still poisonous to plants but it's
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  you know you get my meaning it's a highly toxic to plants you have some salt
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  on your chips your french fries it's not going to be an issue but if they're
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  a plant it's the quickest way to kill them is to give them sodium so it's toxic to roots,
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  interferes with nutrients uptake it it could
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  be your struggle to get the plants to absorb water
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  and even once it's treated it'll
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  still contain chlorine and chloramines and you
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  can still have massive ph issues so even if
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  it feels soft it can stunt growth and reduce your yields never use softened
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  water always avoid it if you're growing plants even if you're growing houseplants
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  or soil plants if your if your water is plumbed into a softener then try and
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  get bypass it somehow for feeding your plants.
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  Now lastly what we're going to talk about is distilled water.
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  Now you've heard of distilled water, it's a bit more old school than RO water.
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  Distilled water is created by boiling water and capturing the steam then condensing it.
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  So just like RO water it removes minerals, organics, chlorine,
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  chloramines, pathogens, pesticides.
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  It's ultra pure but it's often used in lab settings not in hydroponics.
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  I mean it will be great for seedlings and tissue culture especially especially
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  because it would be sterile.
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  But it's ultra consistent. There's no residues. It doesn't go off like RO water.
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  So like RO water, you have to replace the cartridges every so often,
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  but distilled water is distilled water.
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  It doesn't change in consistency.
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  There'll be no chlorine or toxic ions, but the drawback is it's time consuming,
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  expensive, energy intensive, and so it's just not required. RO water is better.
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  The only time you'll need it if you were doing a really precise experiment looking
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  at for nutrient deficiencies and you wanted to remove all traces of any any
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  nutrient or element so a distilled water it's nice to have but it's certainly
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  not essential if you're looking for a,
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  if you haven't got massive issues with hardness heavy metals or organic pollutants
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  then you could just use a dechlorinator so something like dr hydro dechlorinator
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  or if you're growing with liquid gold in the UK or gold leaf in the US,
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  you don't need to worry about dechlorination because.
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  It's inbuilt into the technology in the bottle.
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  So you can still use it with RO water.
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  Probably best to use a CalMag as well because you're removing quite a lot of
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  calcium and magnesium by using RO water.
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  So as I said at the start, water is more than a medium. It's the foundation of your system.
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  Hydroponics starts with hydro and for good reason because water is important.
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  Understanding what's in your water and choosing the right purification
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  method gives you control over everything that follows don't
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  be the idiot that installs a water
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  softening system to make things 10
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  times worse and then has to go on to reddit and say what's wrong with my plants
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  make sure you're using ro water or certainly dechlorinated water as a bare minimum
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  so if you've got any issues got any suggestions then drop me a message or visit
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  utreema which is latin for wasabi.com
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  co.uk and if you found this useful if
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  you know anyone who's using softened water in hydroponics
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  then share this episode with them just click the share button on your podcast
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  provider of choice and if you've had this episode shared with you then you owe
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  the person who shared it with you a very cold drink get down the pub that's
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  enough for today thank you very much for listening that's been hydroponics daily.