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Working With Dosatrons

Aheadatime

New member
Hey all, was wondering if anyone could help with a bit of confusion I have about the dosatrons. I'm basically confused as to what happens before the water gets to the dosatron. City water > RO filter > reservoir is obvious. Then what? Do we need a timer/irrigation controller if we are using a dab pump? I'm not sure what a dab pump is to be honest, but it seems to be recommended hand-in-hand with dosatron units. I'm only familiar with sub pumps, ball valves, pvc, etc., smaller scale sort of stuff. Anyone help me piece together mentally what a system would look like with a dosatron in place?
 

CrushnYuba

Active member
I have never heard of a " dab" pump. I have posted pictures of one of my doser manifolds on here somewhere. Dosers are powered by the pressure in the water line. If you skipped the RO You could do city water > doser With no problem.

The reason you would need a pump is because you are ro filtering into a rez. You just need a pump to get water out of the rez with any pressure.
Tell me more about what kind of flow you want, how big the garden is, what type of irrigation you want to use, and i can recommend a pump.

I can also help you design a pvc manifold for the doser. And a timer/valve setup of you want it to be automated. I know this sounds.sort of complicated, but it's not at all. And it's not expensive either.
 

CrushnYuba

Active member
I just googled "dab pump". It's just some gimicky overpriced booster pump marketed for weed. I would never consider getting something like that.

I mean, there are REAL known pump manufacturers that make pumps that last 30+ years that cost less.

Booster pumps are just pumps that have a built in pressure switch. So you turn on a faucet, and the pump turns on automatically. Chances are if you aren't commercial and using less then 500 gallons a day, your pump should only be 50-100$.

I have gardens that use 4000 gallons a day and the pumps were only like 400$.
 

Aheadatime

New member
What a helpful post! I'm designing a setup for a larger scale situation involving multiple 30k watt rooms. Lets start by assuming 2 30k rooms. Scaling up from my smaller grows, each room would have 120 pots (coco) being top-fed via 2 lines each, so 240 'sites' total. Each plant between .6-1 gallon/day means maximum .5 gallon per site per day.

My smaller grows use Mondi pumps with this timer;

https://www.superfeederstore.com/ac...cond/?utm_medium=googleshopping&utm_source=bc

..which is nice because it gets down to the second. Feeding through simple pvc manifolds with a ball valve per site, mimicking this setup;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRQXE_-YpUw

For the larger rooms I'm designing, I'm attempting to understand/mimic this setup;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E031bt5A7LU&t=230s

..which seems to be a universal way of designing larger grows, be it miami.mango, jungleboys, hisandhergrow, etc. Not many people show their pumps/timers/controllers, which makes understanding the setup tricky in regards to the minute details. I have a general understanding that works like this;

City > RO (a must-have for me) > Pump/Timer > Dosatron > Feed Lines

Confusion with a larger scale setup involves;

- Getting equal pressure to each line
- Correct pump/timer/controller sizing
- Ensuring customization of feed volumes in multi-strain situations
 

Aheadatime

New member
Forgot to mention, the dab pump was just something I caught onto when looking into larger setups. If it's unnecessary and overpriced, I'm cool with saving money! I've no attachment to any particular grower or piece of equipment. I'm into learning and designing, tweaking and changing all the time.
 

CrushnYuba

Active member
It's kind complicated. There are allot of different ways to skin a cat. We should really have an irrigation section or at least thread. I guess all the info on here is really for small indoor stuff. For warehouse sized grows you do irrigation more like you would a greenhouse.
Basically you would want a manifold with a couple dosers. A bunch of valves. You should look up 24v sprinkler valves and controllers online. These are what they use to turn on underground sprinklers or irrigation by timer.
Watch a youtube of how a fertalizer doser works. With your valves you can route it through each doser or skip all the dosers and just do plain water. All a doser needs to work is water routed through it.
You need a sprinkler controller for your doser setup and you need another controller for your irrigation zones. Each irrigation zone can be fed or watered differently. All your controllers do is open and close valves. The pump comes on automatically when a zone valve opens. Your water lines stay pressurized and when valves open, the pressure drops and the pump kicks on. The pump stays on until the valve closes, Pressure builds and the Pressure switch kills power to the pump.

This stuff is not expensive. The only thing that is a specialty item it's the doser. Everything else can be gotten from a good hardware store.
 

Limeygreen

Well-known member
Veteran
You should make sure to have a ball check valve in the inlet side of your dosatrons to prevent backflow.
 

CrushnYuba

Active member
It should be a swing check on the outlet sides of the doser to prevent backflow and a check on the inlet of the pump to keep the lines pressurized.
 

bsgospel

Bat Macumba
Crushn- how many booster pumps do you usually recommend? I've found one for every 2000 sq ft or in the middle of 8000 servicing four areas to be totally adequate. This was without swing checks or backflow prevention if memory serves.
 

CrushnYuba

Active member
You only need 1 good pump per PROPERTY because you can split it into zones. I have one property with multiple gardens across over 20 acres. Every corner of that property has pressurized water that can be injected with fertalizer flowing at 15 gpm. I laid over 3000 feet of pipe there to get to gardens.
There is one well. One set of storage tanks. One irrigation pump. One set of dosatrons all in one convenient location. There is a greenhouse 40ft away and one 1500 ft away and up a hill. One pump does everything.

The right pump can do whatever you want. Average submersible well pumps sit hundreds of feet underground.
 

coldcanna

Active member
Veteran
The less pumps/equipment the better IMO. As you scale up your going to be paying people for their time, as well as relying on them to do things correctly. Equipment fails and malfunctions it WILL happen, so I find having less pieces of equipment is directly correlated to less headaches, less hours spent monitoring or fixing multiple things.
 

Aheadatime

New member
Going to spend some time today digesting some of what's been said here. Been a busy week in the garden! Cleaning out mini split handlers is nasty work.
 

Aheadatime

New member
Basically you would want a manifold with a couple dosers. A bunch of valves. You should look up 24v sprinkler valves and controllers online. These are what they use to turn on underground sprinklers or irrigation by timer.

And these are solenoid valves right?


The pump comes on automatically when a zone valve opens. Your water lines stay pressurized and when valves open, the pressure drops and the pump kicks on. The pump stays on until the valve closes, Pressure builds and the Pressure switch kills power to the pump.

Is this image basically how it works?

https://www.icmag.com/ic/attachment.php?attachmentid=477204&stc=1&d=1542384012
 

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CrushnYuba

Active member
They are solenoid valves! Here is a picture of one. I keep extras in my car in case i am at a site and something fails. I also included a picture of a "booster pump" and a diagram that should explain how the dosers are plumbed and wired.
1116181017a.jpg

1116181022.jpg

1116181028.jpg


The pump doesn't connect to the controler. You just plug it into an outlet and plumb it in. It knows when to turn on based inn a pressure switch.

The controlers only control solenoid valves.
controller 1 controls the path of the water through the doser manifold. This chooses which dosers to go through therefore what nutrients are in the water line going to your next manifold

The second controller controls the water through the irrigation zone manifold. That's how you decide what plants are going to get irrigated.
 

ganjourno

Member
I just run mine directly off city water supply (no RO or res). My city water is very clean (70ppm) so I can skip the RO. Just have a solenoid on an irrigation controller that controls the flow into the doser. If you wanted to have multiple zones you'd add a second layer of output solenoids after the doser, with the one before the doser as a master valve (so that the doser is only under pressure when actively watering). If using a res and a booster pump, the same setup applies; you need a pump with a pressure cutoff built-in, such that the pump is always "on," but shuts off automatically when the master valve is closed and the pressure rises above 50psi.

A helpful tip, the chemilizer injectors are MUCH more reliable than the dosatron or minidos injectors. They operate on a vacuum bypass such that the nutrient solution never actually enters the piston body, which means the piston mechanism doesn't get gummed up over time. I've run dosatrons and minidos units in the past; both had to be frequently removed and fully disassembled for deep cleaning, since the concentrated nutrient solution eventually forms deposits or has some algae growth that results in accuracy issues or even leak-backs that can ruin batches of nutes and cause flooding. Switched to the chemilizer units and all these problems have gone away.

One downside is that the ratio is not as adjustable as the dosatron-type units. There is an adjustable head that allows control between 1:50 and 1:164 concentration, but 1:164 tends to be on the higher end of concentration with full strength nutes. An easy solution is to pre-dilute your nutes 1:1 with distilled water, effectively changing the ratio to 1:100 through 1:328.

https://www.qcsupply.com/chemilizer-hn55-injector-1-128.html
https://www.qcsupply.com/chemilizer-adjustable-ratio-viton-pump.html
 

WFAMFARMS

Member
Awesome info on dosers, I'm an designing a warehouse set up now and would love to avoid rez's altogether. I can't remember my old log in from years back so I need to get my posts up so I can DM.
 

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