Hey guys this is Nate Storey here with Bright Agrotech
and today we're gonna talk about Hydroton
or expanded clay pebbles
and how and/or why you would use them as a growth medium
in your system.
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So Hydroton is basically an expanded clay pebble.
If you guys have been kinda following along in this series
you now we've talked about things like perlite,
we talked about rockwool.
A lot of these things are basically a mineral
or mineral products that we heat up really, really hot
and they expand and they pop up like popcorn basically.
Clay is one of these things.
So these are basically clay pebbles
that we heat up really, really hot the clay expands
and you end up with this nice hard
but very light weight clay pebble
and it's great, great, great for growing plants in.
So this stuff is super useful for small applications,
applications where you're going to be putting your hands
in the medium quite often, growing plants,
pulling them out, removing them.
It's really, really easy to work with.
And so for small-scale hydroponic applications
this stuff is primo.
The only drawback is it is kind of expensive
but you get what you pay for
and it's a really, really great medium.
So the water holding capacity on these things
is not huge but it is much better
than a lot of other types of plant medium
and that's just because these things
have a lot of biological surface area
or a lot of surface area.
Once they're kind of colonized,
once you've got a little organic matter in there
they end up holding actually surprising amounts of water
and so these can be a great type of medium
for flood and drain systems especially
with the caveat that it does float on the front end.
So when you're first getting started
these things still have a lot of air in them
and they tend to float but after time with enough time
as they get saturated with water they stop floating
and they become more and more useful
and a really, really great medium for those ebb and flow
or flood and drain type production systems.
So the nice thing about these things
is they have a ton of pore space
so when you stack 'em together there's a lot of air
in between these clay pebbles.
So right off the bat too
they've also got a lot of air inside of them.
So as the system matures
you maintain a lot of that pore space
so as the water drains away you have all this oxygen
and air that's kind of circulating down there
into the root zone and you also have the ability
for this to actually hold some air or to trap little bubbles
as it's flooded.
So this can be a really great medium
from kind of an air-holding capacity
or from the standpoint of getting air
down into the root zone.
These are pretty renewable.
I mean clay is very abundant and it doesn't take very much
to make this kind of stuff.
Also, because we're dealing with a mineral,
it's not like these are a problem, right?
There are areas of the country where people dump this stuff.
That's not great, but by and large
you basically got little rocks, right?
So whether or not you classify them as a pollutant
or as something you should be really concerned
about going to a landfill, that's up to you.
But by and large they're pretty darn renewable
and you can reuse them for quite some time.
The only reason you can't reuse these
is if you were to use these in really high salinity
or a hot, high-salt application for a long period of time
and they were to build up a lot of salt.
That's the only condition in which I would consider
actually throwing this medium away.
So the pros of clay pebbles
are that they're really, really easy to work with.
You can find them in a lot of different places.
They're a great growing medium for putting plants in
and taking plants out of a system.
Additionally, they're pretty good
when it comes to biological surface area.
They don't really have a smooth outside
and so you get a lot of really good colonization
by your microbes.
The cons are that it's pretty expensive stuff.
It isn't the cheapest stuff in the world
and it tends to float on the front end.
So if you're doing ebb and flow or flood and drain type beds
you can have quite a bit of disruption
as these things tend to float up
at the beginning of their life in your system.
Besides that, they're great on your hands.
They're really, really easy to work with.
Everyone loves this stuff.
It's not a question of is it a great growing medium?
It's a question of can you afford it?
So clay pebbles, the one thing
that they can cause some problems with
is pumps and plumbing.
Because they float on the front end
some of these smaller pebbles sometimes float up,
get sucked into pipes or sucked into pumps
and can kind of cause some issues there.
Additionally, they tend to be a little bit dusty
so you wanna make sure you give this stuff a rinse
before you get it into your system.
If you're rinsing it and once it's established
it's not gonna cause you any problems
but you do wanna keep an eye on your pumps,
on your plumbing overflow, and basically uptake pipes
on the front end of your system just to make sure
you're not sucking too much of this into those pipes
or into your pumps.
So I hope that answered some questions about Hydroton
or expanded clay pebbles.
They're a great, great medium if you can afford them
I highly recommend them.
If this answered your questions, awesome.
If you have more leave them below.
Check out our blog and as always, please do subscribe.
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