PPM Info Needed

Ok so i am a fairly decent grower if i may say so myself, however i want to be pro. I am in the process of upgrading my room times 3. As with this upgrade i will like to advance my cultivation knowledge. I hear so much about ppm. My question is what is it and why is it important. What i do know about ppm is it is measured by a tds meter, and it means parts per million. It basically measures the abundance of dissolved minerals or pollutants in water. Ok i got that, but how is this used with growing? Is this too figure out how much nutrients to use? I mean i usually feed like 1 tsp to the gallon of grow big, if i measured ppms would i go by how many ppm it is or??? I don't know im confused on this matter. A link to a thread or anything with valuable info will be appreciated, or if someone could break it down for me then that would be great. Im growing in soil with the whole fox farm lineup if that helps. Thanks in advance.

This thread was great until t got into a internet pissin match:

https://www.rollitup.org/nutrients/295437-methodical-scientific-approach-nutrients-nutrient.html

checkin it out, if i find useful info, i will post it here, so other can learn with me.

yeah that thread is fucking intense. i dont know if i can soak all that in, it was mostly info about nutes, i just want to know about these ppms one good post i seen was this

hymem said:

According to Botanicare these are ranges to keep your nutrient solution for each elementnot necessarily MJ)


N 160 – 250ppm
P 100 – 200ppm
K 250 – 350ppm
Ca 160 – 280ppm
Mg 45 – 75ppm
Fe 2 – 7ppm

Also I have a conversion for converting nutrient percentage to ppms, liquid nutrients only. Works for any brand name. These are the approximations.

1% N = 14 ppm (5ml of nut sol/gal)
1% P = 6 ppm (5ml of nut sol/gal)
1% K = 11 ppm (5 ml of nut sol/gal)
1% Ca = 13 ppm (5 ml of nut sol/gal)
1% Mg = 12 ppm (5ml of n. sol/gal)
0.1% Fe = 1.5 ppm(5ml of nut sol/gal)

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appreciate that... how do these number come about though? i.e. how much nitroger equals 250ppm . i know nothing about how this shit works.

Im not exactly sure how measuring these elements into PPM's per gallon cause i have no idea, I did get that from a credible source.. But for Simple minded people stuck on NPK's- Vegetative 30-30-15 and Flower 15-30-30

EvolAlex said:

appreciate that... how do these number come about though? i.e. how much nitroger equals 250ppm . i know nothing about how this shit works.

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Hey Evol!

You would have to work backwards with that one--

250 ppm of nitrogen in liter of water would either be

1 gram of 25-0-0
2 g 12.5-0-0
25g of 1-0-0

See a pattern here?

This applies to salt based fertilizers, however, not organic.

X grams times Y percent of whatever you are figuring in 1 liter of water,

then multiply by 10. That's PPM.





PPM is a guideline- nothing more. There are so many environmental factors that influence the availability of the elements, namely the ph and medium you are growing in. A few ppm of N, for example, can get bound to coir- as well as calcium, X amount of phosphorus can suddenly be rendered useless because the ph is too high.

nutrients are salt based having a Ec meter / ppm you can check out your tap water which varies in many areas of the world for instance i get a reading of 140 ppm in my water i will mix my nutes accordingly to also add the 140 into the equation thus helping me not to get into nute burns or other issues
many people just mix nutes as per bottle an not take into consideration the water reading thus giving you more ppm in time salt builds up in your medium giving you bigger problems having this tool will help you in many ways for instance when i flush prior to goin into flowering where my ppm will get very large i flush and see what my returns are if for instance i gave my plants a 600 ppm an my returns show me 900 and more commonly way more like 1200 i then know i got lots of un used nutes in my medium so i need to flush cause my plants are not into the weeks in flower for that kind of strength of nutes

in this day and age people hammer there plants with nutes for maximum yields and with this tool you can really get in depth on knowing your plants i found this tool extremely helpfull in all growth stages especially in flower