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It's not a "hard" spray per say, but it's coming out of the sprayers pretty good. Certainly not enough pressure to actually turn the water into a fine mist, but I get a nice fan spray out of all of them. I don't doubt I could easily add a handfull of sprayers without any noticable drop in performance, but how far could I actually expand before seeing a drop?? I don't know to be honest. As a comparison my first system has a 185gph pump with 8 of the same emitters inside a much smaller tote and, though I get good enough coverage for the application, it's a fairly weak spray and I honestly feel the pump should be a bit larger (or that I should at the least reduce the number of sprayers). Though I could also say that the new 400gph pump I have in the larger system would be waaaay to much for the smaller one.
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Thanks, that helps. One system I have planed will have somewhere between 24 and 48 emitters/misters. The other will probably have something like 15 per growing chamber and I am not sure how many growing chambers but I am thinking 4 right now. The spray should not really be a mist anyway so that I am not concerned with, but rather a good constant flow for root saturation. The emitters/misters I will get from a hydro store and will take care of getting the right droplet size. But it's good to know that a regular pump can put out enough presser to run a descent amount of emitters/misters.
The presser washer and presser regulator that I had in mind would run around $100 for the presser washer and $80 for the regulator, plus miscellaneous fittings and hoses. So I was figuring around $200 to $225 to get it working. Thanks for the link to the pump. I see they also have larger pumps up to 1000 gallons per hr. Though I wont be able to get these pumps for these prices because we don't have a hydroponics store in our town, I would need to order online and add the shipping cost to the price.
I recently bought a pump (picture attached) to run
my third hydro system and it is rated at 300-500 gallons per hr and up to 8.7 feet. I think the feet height is probably the import part because the higher it can go the more back presser it can take. This pump is too powerful for this system because it kept filling faster than it would drain. It was already built so I couldn't just add a second overflow, so I put a "T" inline with the tube and just ran it strait back into the reservoir to cut down the flow to the system. But that got me thinking this pump might be able to run the emitters/misters, how many was the question. I just got this pump at Lowe's for $44. Even if I needed 2 of these to run the 48 and/or 60 emitters/misters for each of the two systems it would still be cheaper, and I wouldn't need to figure out how to make it work.
Even though I still like the presser washer idea there are many unknowns and would be expensive to buy everything just to learn it wont work. It will put out 1500 psi and that can run hundreds of emitters/misters with that kind of presser (regulated to the system needs of coarse). Though that brings up the other major issue and that is volume, how many gallons per hour it could put out, how many gallons are needed for that many emitters/misters. I forget what it said on the box but it was probably wasn't high, but then again it is designed for presser not volume. I would be able to fit a larger/wider hose to it, but the size of the original opening/water outlet would dictate the ultimate volume it can put out. The last issue is filtration. I would need to make sure it had a non restrictive filtration system that will keep small particles out, or I am not sure what might happen to it.
I will probably build a similar design to yours sometime in the future. I especially like the idea of the upside down lids, and the use of weather stripping for waterproofing.