Many greenhouse and also baby room procedures use fertilizer injectors, additionally known as proportioners, to supply specific focus of water-soluble nutrients to plants with watering systems. Injectors draw a focused fertilizer option from a stock storage tank as well as include it to the irrigation water.
Due to the fact that appropriate fertilization of greenhouse crops is vital for generating top-quality plants, it is essential to mix stock remedies to the correct concentration for each and every injector proportion.
Ounces each gallon, injector proportions, parts each million, dilution aspects, conversion constants … is this another inhuman word trouble from elementary school math class? Commonly when people are confronted with what feel like complex calculations, such as ways to mix a stock option of the proper option for a plant food shot setup, they may feel overloaded and lose confidence that they could arrive at the right response. Let’s debunk this by breaking down the problem right into workable actions.
Start by defining the problem
What do you know? What do you need to know? To mix a stock solution, you will need to know the following:
- Desired concentrationof the nutrient. Usually this is in parts per million, or ppm, and nitrogen is often the nutrient in question.
- Injector ratio. That is the number that looks like 1:100 or 1:300 or even 1:1200. Many injectors have dials so that you can adjust the injector ratio, at least within the range of the injector model.
- Dilution factor. This is an easy one; it is the larger number in the injector ratio number (i.e. the number following the 1).
- Fertilizer analysis. The fertilizer product must have a label showing the analysis, for example 20-10-20 or 17-5-24. The first number is the percentage by weight of nitrogen (N); the second is the percentage of phosphorus (P) as P2O5; and the third is the percentage of potassium (K) as K20.
- Ounces of fertilizer to make one gallon of stock solution. This is what you are trying to figure out so you can mix the proper concentration of fertilizer.
Three approaches to calculations
Make use of the fertilizer label. Package deals of soluble fertilizer almost always have a table which defines just how much product to utilize for a given plant food focus. The tables reveal the ounces of fertilizer needed for a range of nutrient focus (e.g. 25-400 ppm nitrogen) as well as for an array of injector proportions (e.g. 1:15 with 1:300). So if the stock remedy you need to mix falls under the specifications of the table, after that there is no demand for further estimations. Nonetheless, you might discover times when the stock solution you should mix for an offered application and also injector proportion is not defined by the item tables. Then you will have to do some estimation, either by hand or making use of an online calculator.
Calculate based on the percentage of nutrient in the fertilizer.
A useful formula for calculating how many ounces of dry soluble fertilizer are needed to make 1 gallon of stock solution is as follows.
