Tropf-Blumat, how do get them into coco with roots?

First of all, I have never used a Tropf Blumat before

It would be nice if one of the Blumat users could explain how you would go on about installing the Tropf Blumats like 2-3 weeks after repotting.

How do you deal with all the roots? Is it still possible?

I'd just push them into place midway between the stalk and the edge of the pot, but I can't say that I've ever done it that long after transplanting. I wouldn't think that the root density would be much of a problem at that point - there might be some incidental root damage, but I would bet that the plants would quickly recover. If your coco has perlite mixed in, I would install and remove the spike, and then fill the hole with some straight coco (no perlite). Push the spike into the same hole, remove, repeat. This will give you a good marriage between the coco and the spike - I've found that this helps the spike more accurately sense the moisture content of the media than when there are chunks up against it.

There is NO way you can stick a blumat in a container that has been growing without breaking a lot of roots. NONE/NADA.
It must be done when re-potting. You have to stick it in the new coco right at the edge of the root ball when you re-pot. You don't have to hook them up, pull the 3mm hose right out of the carrot and the carrot MUST reserve it's spot till you are ready to pull it out, soak it in water, put it back in and start them up. Nobody even talked about this in the blumat novel on here. Today I took some 1" dowel and made a bunch of wood carrots the same size as the blumats. From now on I will stick these dummy carrots in when I do my last re-pot to reserve a hole. I used 1" dowel and a table sander to shape them, took about 5 minutes per carrot

And how much do you suspect that this root damage is going to impact the plant? A bit of shock for a couple of days? As I said above, I don't have any direct experience with it because I do things differently, but I have done a fair bit of root pruning on my bonsai moms. They shrug it off in pretty short order. Given the choice of finishing the run out via hand watering or slowing the plants progress down a bit for a couple of days would be a pretty simple choice for me.

Incidentally, I don't repot other than from the jump from beer cups to the final pot. Blumats keep a set moisture content, so the problem of having too much media, too wet, for too long goes away.

Whatever Mr X ray vision. I just looked myself today when I pulled out a carrot at how many roots it would destroy to move it closer to midway between the container wall and the stalk after less than 3 weeks veg a in a pot. He has no choice in the matter now. Jam it in, sever roots and deal with the hiccup and slowdown. I just told him he WILL destroy roots and next time when he re-pots to stick the carrot minus the 3mm hose in there if he is not hooking it up to run right away. Don't wait till the container has roots. If I ever want to stunt a plants growth like with a bonsai I'll get a hold of you.

stoned40yrs said:

Whatever Mr X ray vision. I just looked myself today when I pulled out a carrot at how many roots it would destroy to move it closer to midway between the container wall and the stalk after less than 3 weeks veg a in a pot. He has no choice in the matter now. Jam it in, sever roots and deal with the hiccup and slowdown. I just told him he WILL destroy roots and next time when he re-pots to stick the carrot minus the 3mm hose in there if he is not hooking it up to run right away. Don't wait till the container has roots. If I ever want to stunt a plants growth like with a bonsai I'll get a hold of you.

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Ooh, testy aren't we?.

Actually, I posted what I did because your answer up above made it sound like it would be impossible, or at least very ill-advised, to do at this point. Installing the carrot at this point will undoubtedly damage some roots. My point was that I don't think that it will have much of an impact on the plant's progress.

Thank you, stoned40yrs, that was just the information I needed!

One more question though:

I was thinking you could moisture the blumats, do the repotting and if u keep the pots moist and dont let them dry out, shouldn't they work straight away after hooking them up 3 weeks later?

I mean, would you still pull them out and activate them again, even if u kept them moist and had them activated before?

jimmyd42 said:

Thank you, stoned40yrs, that was just the information I needed!

One more question though:

I was thinking you could moisture the blumats, do the repotting and if u keep the pots moist and dont let them dry out, shouldn't they work straight away after hooking them up 3 weeks later?

I mean, would you still pull them out and activate them again, even if u kept them moist and had them activated before?

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I'm a newbie with these blumats like you. I was relaying only what I saw so far. When I re-potted for the final time I knew I would break roots if I didn't stick the blumat in to reserve its place. I wasn't ready for blumats yet as I had no rez or feed tube hooked up and not enough blumats for veg and flower.
I see no reason why you can't fill the blumats up and start them up 3 weeks later. I don't think you have to keep the medium wet those 3 weeks. Do it normal. It also doesn't hurt the roots to pull these blumats out and put them back in. I've been doing it, they slip in and out easy. My roots have circled the blumat and it's pure white when I look in the hole.
I also didn't mean to imply you shouldn't put these blumats in right now. It's not going to kill the plant just shock it for a few days if even that. I tried to re-position one yesterday, I only got one inch down and the sound of breaking roots made me quit. Jam it in there, going slow won't save any roots, they snap either way.

just stab em in I do and not noticed any harm

If the blumats are left in the media without being hooked up and the moisture level drops below their setpoint, they will eventually lose their fill water - the pinch valve works via the pressure change from the fill water trying to migrate through the spike's porous ceramic wall to equalize moisture with the surrounding media. The internal pressure drops as water moves out of the spike, which in turns pulls the valve open. The pressure equalizes as the two moisture levels reach equilibrium and the valve closes. As air accumulates in the spike, the blumat will usually continue to function but the response becomes "mushy", leading to both drier conditions than desirable and runaways.

Removing and replacing the spikes disturbs the bond between the media and the spike, increasing the potential for runaways. If possible, they work best if they can be left undisturbed.

rives said:

Removing and replacing the spikes disturbs the bond between the media and the spike, increasing the potential for runaways. If possible, they work best if they can be left undisturbed.

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Baaah, another opinion presented as fact There is no media around my blumats, it's solid white roots in the hole. Like it's so hard to sprinkle some more coco into the hole when I eventually hook them up. Bond that.

What a goof. You admit to being a newbie, I've got several years and a hell of a lot of runs as well as continuous usage in my mom cabinet with them. Keep presenting your bullshit as fact for the people that haven't caught on to you yet. Why don't you expound on your ignorance about V+B while you are at it?

rives said:

What a goof. You admit to being a newbie, I've got several years and a hell of a lot of runs as well as continuous usage in my mom cabinet with them. Keep presenting your bullshit as fact for the people that haven't caught on to you yet. Why don't you expound on your ignorance about V+B while you are at it?

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It doesn't take any experience to know there is no bond between plastic and ceramic blumats and the media. There is no bond between a stake and the media and there is no bond between the plastic walls of the container and roots or coco either. No bonds. Where you come up with this? As far as V+B I ran it for two weeks on some clones and they lagged behind the GH 6/9 so I stuck it on a back shelf. You want it send a PM

I obviously wasn't talking about bonding like an adhesive, but bond as in marital bond - blumats, if left in place long enough, will "grow in". The roots will adhere to the pores in the ceramic cone, the air entrained in the surrounding media will be compressed out, and the spike will more accurately sense what is going on around it. This is when they function best - if they are disturbed the surrounding media is loosened up, and the disruption of this interface (if you prefer that word over bond) makes for wider swings in the moisture content of the media before the blumat reacts.

There are many references to this in the blumat thread. There is also a recent post from a fellow using side-mounted maxis that he is having runaway problems with because the top of the maxi gets bumped occasionally and disrupts this "bond".

And the V+B reference was to your post in the V+B thread where you were expounding on what it was and was not good for, and you hadn't used it yet or even received your sample. Posts #1514 - #1523 in that thread if you would like to refresh your memory.

Thanks for the input, rives, you are always of such great help!

Let me try to ask my question from a different view point:

Let's say u let the plants veg for a few weeks in the final pots and then move them to the flower room, how would you do that with the blumats?

Atm I don't see how exactly they could easily get hooked up at two locations with 2 set of ducting..... The ducting seems so hard to remove?

So I was thinking, it might be easier to prepare having the blumats in some spot, or even stick them in, and then hook them up in flower, right?

It's a bit unclear to me how someone would prepare to use blumats after 3 weeks of vegging during flowering.

My other idea would involve repotting 2 times, the clones to 0.3 gal pots and let them veg there, the last time 1 or 1/2 week before flowering into 2 gal pots and then put the blumat in a few days later when there aren't many roots yet.

I might not even have to worry about them building up a root system during flower in 2 gal pots, right?

What would you guys advice?

Thanks for all the help!

I have four different areas set up for the blumats. I will eventually wind up with three, but I've been in the process of putting together a closet for a long time and life keeps interfering with getting it done. However, I needed the partially-completed closet for vegging a while back and took a 10 gallon roughneck tote, mounted it on a shelf with some heavy-duty brackets above the door to the closet, and used it for a reservoir. It will hold enough for a couple of weeks for small vegging plants, and is hand-filled. I use the same arrangement for my mom cab. A valve is inserted into the feed line immediately after the reservoir and another one right before the feed loop for the plants, so it's easy to shut the water off from either place depending on your needs. A third valve is located at the very end of the feed tubing and is used for purging air out.

The plants all get a 4' long section of 3mm tube so that they can be moved around as necessary, and when they get moved from one area to another, the 3mm tubing is just pulled off of the feed loop T and re-installed at the new location. You do need to be cautious about bleeding any air bubbles out so that the blumats don't vapor lock. I've found that using a white-out correction pen to put a small white dot above the pointer on the blumat aides in resetting the valve back to where it should be after purging any air out. The setting on the spikes doesn't change much at all from when you use them the next time, so the dot is helpful in getting things setup on the next round. If the setting does need to change the dot can easily be scraped off with a fingernail and a new one put on at the correct spot.

The flowering areas have large reservoirs at floor level which feed small, elevated reservoirs. These are set to transfer nutrient automatically a couple of times a day. I use a pretty healthy lift pump because fighting the head (elevation change) is difficult for a pump and really lowers their effective volume. The pump uses 3/4" PVC for the pressure line, not because it needs to be that big but because a 1/2" PVC pipe is pretty floppy. A 1-1/4" pipe is used for an overflow return so that there is no chance of overrunning the drain side with the pump. The pump is then kicked on for a few minutes twice a day and the upper reservoir gets topped off with the excess just draining back to the main reservoir. This eliminates the need for float switches or whatever to shut off the pump when the upper reservoir is full.

As I mentioned up above, I stopped transplanting a long time ago. The plants go straight from beer cups to their final air pot in one move. I used to use 3 gallon air pots, but found that they were bigger than necessary with coco and dropped the size down to the 2 gallon (+/-) units. These have the benefit of working better with the blumats because the roots will really lock in the spike. This has helped reduce runaways substantially.

Hope some of this long-winded dissertation helped. There is lots more information in the blumat thread, but it's so damn big that it's pretty unwieldy.

*Edit* - In a response to another thread, I looked more closely at my air pots to figure out exactly which ones they are. They are the pots with the red 7" base, about 8.5" tall, and actually only hold about 5 liters (1.3 gallons) of media. They are advertised as being "2 gallon equivalent", which is what had stuck in my mind.

Wow, great setup!

Ok, I think I got it sorted out now! Thank you all so much for your help!

I have one more question, what setting should the tropf blumats be at?

I was wondering, because there is supposed to be 30% runoff in coco.

Currently I use the LukasFormula with HG Drip Clean.

How do I find a good setting for the blumats?

I've never been able to attain any consistent level of runoff with blumats - I think that once the media hits saturation, they are pretty much at the limits of their control and trying for runoff results in runaways.

The good news is that you don't need it if you keep the EC at a reasonable level (as much as the plants need, but not so much that it results in a build-up) and use 1ml/gallon of Drip Clean in your nutrient mix. I try and keep the media very moist, but a bit short of having runoff.

As an initial setting, having the top of the stationary green pointer at the level of the bottom of the adjustment cap is a pretty good spot to start.