Hydroponics & Seed Starting

Temp Hydroponic

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Posted by admin | Posted in Hydroponics & Seed Starting | Posted on 05-04-2010

Temp Hydroponic

Home Hydroponics Gardening â Fun Endeavor

We have seen soil gardening and the experience is pretty much very hard and messy.Â With home hydroponics gardening, itâ€™s all fun and exciting. Home hydroponics gardening is easy and requires less maintenance.Â Although monitoring is something that hydroponics gardening greatly demands but the whole experience is all about enjoyment.
With soil is not required because the roots are held and supported by a soil substitute while water carries away the nutrients.Â It is so efficient as well with growing plants because of the high availability of water and nutrients. What you need to monitor in home hydroponics gardening is the pH, water level, nutrients, temperature, light, CO2 level and humidity.Â All these factors play a significant role to the growth and development of plants.
Make sure that nutrient solution pH is maintained at the range of 5 â€“ 6 because roots absorb nutrients effectively at this pH level.Â Watering of plants is also important to minimize the nutrients from building up and become more acidic in the long run.

Temperature is also important to monitor and be maintained at an acceptable range of 71 â€“ 76 degrees Fahrenheit.Â But temperature requirement varies greatly with the type of plant you are growing.Â There are plants that best grow in low temp and there are also those that best grow in slightly high temp.
Light as well is very important in growing your plants indoors because light is the one that assist the plants with their process of photosynthesis.Â Without light, photosynthesis wonâ€™t happen and therefore plants canâ€™t process their food.

Will a hydroponic plant experiencing temperatures of 45-55 degrees be shocked by the respective temp of water?

will low temperatures in turn make the water with a bucket hydro system drop to the point that it shocks a plant that likes temperatures of 70-75 degrees?

My opinion is that this can't be answered with a simple yes or no, my apologies.

Without knowing what type of plant is being grown it's a gamble to say one way or another. A former coworker of mine was growing hydroponic lettuce a couple years ago inside an unheated building that (so I was told) was so frigid that ice would form over the surface of the water within the reservoir. This is less than ideal situation of course but they did pull through and keep in mind that lettuce can be very cold hardy. On another occasion I moved a couple pepper plants from an aeroflo system that was probably 75-80 degrees into a raft system that was just filled with tap water and was consequently around 55 degrees and that did shock the plants, though they survived and did well once the bucket of water's temp warmed a bit. The plant you are working with sounds more adjusted to warmer weather so it's likely to behave more like a pepper than the lettuce.

My recommendation is to visit to a pet store and get an aquarium heater. My concern with keeping the plants in water that cold is that if the temperature doesn't kill them their metabolism will be so slowed that growing just about anything besides the most cold hardy of plants wouldn't be much fun or rewarding. If that's not possible your best chance is going to be making the transition from 75 degrees to 45 degrees as gradual as possible so the plant or plants have time to acclimate with these new conditions.

Good luck