Using your Minder to Calculate irrigation and runoff volumes over several days.

New features have been added to the CompuGrow software which enhance the viewing of graphs and allow 'date range' data export.

The data range export feature can be used to analyze in more details fluctuations in anything that is measured e.g. moisture. You can also compare multiple variables, as per table and graph opposite and view several days, with some data manipulation. This is very useful if you would like to see over several days how much water each plant is getting and what percentage is running off.

You can see this also on graphs in the Compugrow software but this method can be used to examine as many days as you wish. The main advantage is that you are able to trends over time, and ultimately trends over time determine the outcome for your plants.

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Vo's Choose Grower Technology Systems for 1.5 Hectare site

Fully commissioned in November is the 1.5 hectare greenhouse site growing tomatoes. 

Vu Voe reviewed several options for systems but ultimately selected Grower Technologies:

• Fertigation
• Climate control
• Runoff monitoring
• Stir fans
• Biological filtration
• Re-blend systems

The tomato crop is on handing gutters and is separated into 3 separate 5000m2 environments.

Mrs. Vo sees the system as a real blessing as previously she spent a big part of the day checking runoff at various sites. Now all this information is centralized to the computer, via Minders and much more growing information is available.

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In the last issue we discussed the fact that water that is high in bicarbonates requires the use of a lot of acid in order to change its pH.

Imagine a system where soft rain water was used for part of the year and harder bore or river water at other times. When using rain water only, just a little acid or alkali would be needed in order to effect a large pH change and if an automatic doser was to be used the dose time would be set very short. At other times when using bore water, however, a much larger dose would be needed. Now imagine an automatic doser set to dose a large dose for bore water. If the water supply was now switched over to rain water the dose size would be much too large and so the controller would possibly overdose with say acid and send the pH down to a low value. If the controller was permitted to automatically switch over to pH Raise it would do so and dose a large dose of alkali sending the pH way too high. There is now a danger of repeatedly switching back and forth from pH raise to pH lower and alternately dosing acid then alkali until their stock tanks were empty. For this reason, it is left for the grower to make a conscious decision and manually change the controller between pH raise and pH lower mode of operation. It is just too dangerous to allow automatic switch over.

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