Thread: water level
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Old 07-03-2009, 09:21 PM
GpsFrontier GpsFrontier is offline
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Location: Lake Havasu AZ.
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Originally Posted by chinamon View Post
so i am going to start my very first hydroponics garden very soon. i bought a few black pails (12L/3gal) with lids and 5" net pots. i will be doing a bubbler system. what im wondering is how high the water level needs to be in the pail. does the net pot with hydroton need to be submerged in the water? or does the water level need to be below the net pot?
That is pretty cool, I always like hearing someone is building there own system instead of buying one. If I understand correctly you are going to use a blubber/air pump to do what is basically a drip system, and they will be getting the water/nutrients from above. As long as they are dripping fast enough to keep the roots saturated there is no need to keep them submerged into the nutrient solution.

Although if you are planing an system where the plants roots are submerged continuously, and adding the air bubbles to the nutrient solution so the roots get enough oxygen/air. It would be best if you could design it so the water level is adjustable, so you can test it at different heights. But a basic rule of thumb is that you want the water level high enough to submerge all the roots but not so high that the plants develop stem rot. Probably somewhere between 1 and 3 inches depending on the plants you are growing. My pepper plants seemed to do fine with the water level about 2 inches below the growing medium. My strawberry's were more tricky because they don't have a single stem but rather a bunch of stems coming out of a ball, but I tried to keep that about 1 1/2 inches below the growing medium. I didn't have a way to adjust the water level on my strawberry's until I redesigned that system. Hope this helps some.

It would be great if you could post some pictures when you get it all together....
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Last edited by GpsFrontier; 07-04-2009 at 12:57 AM.
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