How much do you feed your seedlings in comparison to your background ec?

**spoonofinsanity** · 07-09-11, 03:52 PM

Just got a ec3 ph pen same as the budget ones from greens just £13 cheaper and posted. Pressed buy now at 3 oclock yesterday on my door this afternoon great service and even better price. A mate has sold me an essentials ec pen for £25 so i'm gonna do a comparison when he drops it off.

I calibrated the pen and tested some tap water thats been standing for 2 days and got a background ec of 0.65 i new i had hard water but thats high isn't it.

So most people seem to feed seedlings at 0.6-0.9 should i assume thats maybe a 0.3 rise over the background is that about right?
So should i feed the seedlings at 0.9 ec?

**spoonofinsanity** · 08-09-11, 02:20 PM

Ok so i have just done a side by side test with the ec3 and the essentials meter both were calibrated using 2.76 ec calibration fluid the essentials isn't that accurate but came up as 2.7 when dipped which pretty close. The ec3 i calibrated to 2.72 because it was to bloody fiddly to get any closer and i kept overshooting.
Any put both pens in the same sample of tap water essential read 0.4 ec and the EC3 was trying to tell me 6.5-7 i don't trust this meter at all now and am contemplating sending it back i know its a budget system but its rubbish.
Calibrate it dip it in water dry it off and test in the calibration fluid again and it had dropped to 2.61 ec put it back in the water again and it thinks the water is ec 0.8 not impressed and i was so happy yesterday.
Send it back? I need another accurate ec pen to see which one is giving the right sort of reading because both are so different i'm not sure now.

**Droid** · 08-09-11, 04:22 PM

iv always used essentials and its never failed me..

**spoonofinsanity** · 08-09-11, 06:17 PM

The essentials was basically spot on when calibrated so its the other meter thats wrong i think a 0.4 background ec sounds much more feasable than 0.65-0.8 that would be some seriously flavoursome water! Although once upon a time my kitchen tap did run milk and you had to wait for it to settle to be clear.
I have spoken to the seller and they are conferring with the manufacturer about warranty or replacement as it has a 3 year guarantee.
thanks

**spoonofinsanity** · 11-09-11, 08:53 PM

Right its all gone tits up again i'm still no closer to working out the increase over background ec you should feed a seedling basically cos i don't know what my background ec is. The sample i originally tested was a 5 day old glass of water i recovered from my room. I decided to check the ec on fresh tap water and some water in my can i had been leaving to air for a few hours. Both tested at 0.1mS the ec3 read all sorts of readings between 600 micro siemens up to 800 so between 0.6 and 0.8 mS.
I know i have hard water and a serious chlorine content in fresh tap water i can smell the chlorine when running the tap!
Is 0.1 background a sensible figure for hard water i thought 0.6 was more like it for a hard water area?
So which meter is giving me dodgy readings both give a reasonable level of accuracy when i dip in 2.76 mS calibration fluid essentials gives 2.7 and it only have a one decimal place accuracy and when i calibrated the ec3 i had it to 2.73 which is pretty damn close.
Help please???
does the water board release a figure for the ec of its tap water so i can get a general idea what i should be looking at or other wise i'm gonna have to shell out for a brand new truncheon just so i can get some peice of mind!

**monkeyboy** · 02-01-12, 04:00 PM

does the water board release a figure for the ec of its tap water so i can get a general idea what i should be looking at or other wise i'm gonna have to shell out for a brand new truncheon just so i can get some peice of mind!

You should be able to get that info from them, although they may not report it as EC, they may list all the differing minerals and salts etc so it might not help you. Either way id advise investing in a decent pH/EC pen, you're asking for trouble with the cheap ones. The decent ones come with replaceable pH electrodes too, so if you have a disaster and stand on it you can just replace the probe and not the whole thing. The only down side is they aint cheap!

**Anonymiss** · 02-01-12, 04:11 PM

A man with one watch will know exactly what time it is.
A man with two watches is never quite sure.

It just seemed apropriate somehow.

**JMedi420** · 10-01-12, 10:20 PM

How far along are you?

**Murdock** · 10-01-12, 10:28 PM

i just start off with an ec of 0.4 then let the plants tell me with their reading what they like or should i say what they want, for example if i set it at 0.4 and next day its sitting at 0.2 then i,ll raise it to 0.5 but if i set it at 0.4 and next day its 0.5 then i,ll dilute down to 0.3 , if your working with aero then you want to keep the ec quite low if you can, don,t try and push them to there limit all the time or you,ll just come across problems, try and keep a set reading for at least a few days don,t move it up too fast

i used a aerflo for a couple of year and it never liked a high ec, 1.4 was max i think

**spoonofinsanity** · 11-01-12, 09:58 AM

Cheers pieman i have to start mine a lot higher than that due to my watersbackground ec being 0.5-0.6 so usually start at 0.8 now and work my way up thanks for the input