in this video i'm going to be doing a hydroponics
experiment i've been wanting to do for a very long time
my name is Shaun also known as ChilliChump and I love all things to do with chilis I
love growing them I love experimenting with them I love coming up with new hot sauces and other
spicy recipes and sharing all of that with you guys so if you enjoy any of that make sure you
are subscribed down below this experiment is something i've been thinking about for a very
long time but it's not something I could really put into practice until I moved to the new place
what i'm going to be doing is combining a few different hydroponic methods
a little bit of dutch buckets a little bit of ebb and flood and a little bit of drip irrigation and
i'm going to be experimenting with this to try and optimize the way I grow
uh the other hydroponics systems that i've built in the past they've done a great job but
they aren't practical for the way that I grow and i'm hoping that with what i'm going to be trying
it's going to change that and we're going to have something that's new innovative and just
very useful these are the three buckets we're going to be using just standard containers again
that's part of my plan I want to reuse what I already have I have hydroton in here already
but that's not all that's going to be in here this one here i'm going to leave is hydroton
and hydroton is just expanded clay pebbles so i'm going to leave that just as pure hydroton
then i'm going to be doing one of these buckets with hydroton mixed in with some vermiculite
which has water retention properties and then we're going to also be doing this other bucket
with some perlite so I don't know why that's in there so perlite is not really known as
water retaining but it will create more surface area for the water to stick to
the basic concept is i'm going to be using drippers that are going to then drip water through
here these are my standard drippers that i'm using throughout my entire system they're basically
four liter per hour drippers so not a lot of water and that's the challenge typically with
ebon flood systems you flood these things very quickly they absorb a lot of water the roots can
get to it the hydroton keeps some of that water available and the plants can use that for the next
few hours until you flood it again with a drip system it's going to work a little differently
the addition of perlite and vermiculite i'd prefer not to use that because cleaning out hydroton
these clay pebbles it's not the easiest thing in the world but it's a lot easier than cleaning out
hydroton as well as being mixed in with something like perlite or vermiculite but if the plants are
going to respond better by having those mixed in then that's maybe a route we have to go down
so
let's talk through the rest of the system quickly before we go and plant the plants into these pots
this here is just a standard plant tray that I use i've drilled a hole at the end and we have
that for overflow down there is a 30 litre drum that i'm using to keep the hydroponic nutrients in
that pump is the pump that I was using in my last home and the reason i'm using that it's
a bit overkill it's a bit big but the reason i'm using it is because it puts out 30 or 25 to 30 psi
and that's what I need for the drip irrigation you can't run drippers on high pressure pumps
and those tend to be the cheaper pumps that you can get we'll have this as an overflow so we can
kind of reduce the pressure so we don't have too much pressure or too much flow going through to
the drippers and don't work the pump too hard so that's just to adjust to allow water to come back
into the reservoir what that'll also do is aerate the water a little bit and mix up the nutrients
keep the water from being stagnant and that'll be switched on by a cool little gadget that I got
from Ubibot you'll probably remember Ubibot from a video I did recently showing you some cool iot
devices to monitor temperature and all that sort of thing it's really cool I told them about my
little project that i'm doing here and I asked them if they had anything to help me out and they
definitely came through the first one is like I mentioned the plug this is just a smart plug
what's nice with this is it integrates with their entire Ubibot platform so i'm quite
keen to see how that works out but it's just a smart plug and i'll be using that to set the
pump up so that it's running regularly probably on like a three hour or four hour interval
but we'll decide on that later they sent me some other cool stuff and i'm pretty happy
about this so they sent me another one of these devices it's a similar device to what I had
in the last Ubibot video and you'll recognize it because I think it's pretty much the same frame
there you go it's the gs2 model and what's really cool about this is I can use an ec probe as well
as a ph probe and if you've ever done hydroponics you'll know how cool that is being able to
monitor this remotely that's very very cool and basically the ph probe it's testing the alkalinity
or the acidity of the water making sure you're at the right levels it'll give you alerts if you hit
thresholds things like that and it's all part of the same interface as the Ubibot interface that I
showed in the previous video and i'm keen to check that out this video i'm not going to go into too
much detail about how this all works because I got to figure out for myself one of the worst
things about hydroponics is having to keep track of your ec and your ph of your nutrients making
sure that you have enough nutrients in there knowing when to change it out things like that
the weather can make a big difference how quickly the plants are growing how quickly they transpire
how much water is in there yeah there's a lot that can uh affect just how it works i'll probably
get into more techie detail on these items on my second channel which is more of a techie channel
this video is more about the experiment that i'm doing and these things are just going to help me
do it in a more effective way I think one other thing they sent me because I did say in the last
video where I was talking about Ubibot and the system is the device the one that I have
actually still have this running in my greenhouse it's up there on the side of the greenhouse and
it's still sending uh sending data back and forth so I can actually keep an eye on things
this is a well it has a battery it has I think it's 3 000 milliamp hour battery uh 2 900 milliamp
hour battery that's in there so you can charge it up but it only lasts for about three or four days
and the Ubibots guys saw that I said that in the video and they said well hey we can send
you a solar panel and they did I might probably use this on the ph and ec meter
but yeah very cool thank you so much to Ubibots uh you know they really have a lot of cool kit
and they've been good to me and the channel helped me to bring more content so go check them out I
believe there is a five percent discount if you mention my name when you're checking out
anything over 250 dollars you get five percent off and uh any purchases you make there also just
transparency because i'm not getting paid to talk about these but any purchases you make through
Ubibot um there's a link down in the description I get a small kickback off that uh no extra cost
to yourself but again anything that I get off that helps me to do more of these sort of experiments
anyway enough of that uh I want to get to actually using it I was just so keen to open these things
up and I didn't want to open it up until I did a video because I love gadgets anyway let's put that
aside for now we don't need this just yet we will need the plug because I need to start cycling the
nutrients through these systems as soon as I have it built so we will get into that but the
other stuff yeah keep an eye out for a video on my second channel and we'll go into some techy
geeky detail on how those all set up and working so we've given these a good rinsing you can see
the roots are pretty much exposed there's a little bit of soil and stuff inside there still but
that's not a problem and that's really now to go in hydroponics so if you're going to be doing this
for just a normal hydroponic system and you want to get ready for it and you're taking it from soil
into hydroponics then yeah that's all you need to do go and give it a good spraying down and clean
off the roots and there you go but we need to get this into a medium and get it wet again because
it is quite a warm day and this is not going to be very happy if it stays dry let's have a look we've
got three plants here and I think this they're all actually super hot they're all capsicum
this one is pine and yellow lantern and we can see there already is a
pod on there actually there's pods on all three of these plants this one here
is my big black mama and you can see those are gnarly looking
pods and the last one here I know exactly which one this is this is one of my crosses it's a super
hot cross that i've been working on for a little while I have a few of them growing in the large
greenhouse at the moment big chunk and we're going to be doing this one here inside one of these pots
for the initial nutrient mix i'm going to use a standard three-part nutrient
i've used this successfully in the past so I know it works it's
basically going to be used just for the first nutrient batch but after that i'm
going to change over to something else that i've been working on for a little while as well
and that's also going to be part of this experiment i'll talk about that in a future video
but if that nutrient mix works so the one that i'll use after this as well as this new hydroponic
system then I have a very efficient way to grow next year so i'm really hoping it does work
while that's filling up this here is an ec meter or an ec truncheon and this is typically what
people will use when they don't have something that can automate the whole thing like this and I
mean it does a good job and i'll be using it here and i'll use it to double check what's going on
with this machine making sure it's accurate but if it is accurate and I can rely on it then it
just makes life so much easier be interesting to see how long this lasts as well because with the
system that i'm doing with the dripper i'm hoping that it's going to use less liquid so there'll be
less waste but again we'll see maybe there's not enough liquid I don't know to experiment anyway
let's take a look at what the ec is so it's got about a 2 ec could go a little bit higher you want
to aim for around 2.5 2 is probably the minimum I would go especially at the stage of growth
so probably we will dose this up a little higher
i think for the initial mix that'll be okay i'll definitely be going stronger when we do
the next batch yeah it's about 2.2 there that's fine we're just going to flood these systems
just to give them a good soaking and then we'll start the drip system in a little while
oh there's a lot of a lot of dirt coming through here that's not ideal I had cleaned these off but
um seems like some more dusters appeared that's fine I have a filter on the intake
of the pump so it should be just fine with it all the overflow's working that's good
now ideally i'd have this flush with this system here that just means that there's going to be
liquid left behind in here not ideal like I said but what it is doing is it's catching all of the
the grit that's coming out from these buckets so that's probably a good thing
so let's switch the pump on and hope that we don't have water spraying everywhere
that's a good sign you can hear the drippers working you can see that that's dripping through
nicely these are pressure compensated drippers that you can easily clean you just pop off this
end and you can give it a good rinse which is very nice keep an eye out for that if you are going to
use dripper systems make sure that you can clean them out because it's a pain in the backside to
keep these clear these drippers are four liters per hour you can get ones that can put out more
water but these are what I currently use for the rest of my plants and four liters per hour means
353 milliliters for every five minutes and that is around about a liter every 15 minutes so that's
what i'll be doing my schedule will be every three hours maybe every four hours we'll see how
the weather is doing just give me one sec want to switch off the pump it's making a hell of a noise
much better there will be update videos on this uh at least one later on in the season to see how
this experiment has worked out and i'll give you the results if you want to see updates on these
sort of things in between these videos or you want to ask me questions personally then think about
joining up on patreon or on youtube memberships it gives you access to my private discord and I spend
a lot of time on there discussing experiments like this and you guys can ask me some questions and
things like that it's a great little community a lot of friendly people very knowledgeable as well
and we really have a good laugh and it helps the channel out it helps me keep doing these
videos and uh you know coming up with experiments like this which hopefully if this works if this
experiment works and it works the way I think it might then it could really change the way that
things are done especially for myself I have a lot of plants and if I can move over to this system
it's just a complete game changer and i'm sure that it could help you guys out as well
thank you so much for watching I really appreciate
it and I look forward to seeing you on the next video until then stay spicy