Here’s the overview of my setup. Over on one of the other forums there is a pretty famous Blumats thread that is over 500 pages long, going back to 2009 or something like that. I read the whole thing! LOL! Took me a couple weeks to slog through it. I’m glutton for punishment I guess, but I did walk away with what I felt was a good understanding of how these work. Below are pics and descriptions of my setup. I’ve also included a few diagrams borrowed from some knowledgeable folks on the other thread I mentioned. I do recommend exploring that other thread. Happy to do my best to answer any questions I can.
As I said I use these outdoors but all of this can be used indoors easily. This is my elevated gravity fed reservoir that feeds the system. It consists of a 32 gallon thrash can on the bottom with a submersible pump placed inside. This is supplied by my municipal water supply via 1/2” drip line into a slip fitting bulkhead. The bulkhead is located high up on the can so that as it fills it sprays and splashes to help blow off chlorine. The lid is also drilled with holes and covered with screen to allow the chlorine to off gas from the water over time. From there the water is fed to the upper res, which is a 20 gallon trash can, via the submersible pump. The black pvc is an overflow from the top res back down to the bottom res. I could just leave the pump plugged in all the time and the water would just cycle from top to bottom. This can be desirable for people running nutes in their res, to keep it aerated. But for me, running straight water, I just plug it in and fill the top as needed. Oh yeah, if you plan on running a gravity feed res, the more head pressure the better. That’s why I have them stacked to gain some elevation. Low pressure and fluctuations are a couple causes of runaways. You can set these up as pressurized systems too and people have had great success doing that but gravity fit my needs perfect and was cheap and easy.
From the top res the water flows to the Blumat carrots as needed based on the moisture of the soil in their respective pots. Through the Blumat bulkhead the water flows down the supply line to where the feed lines are tee’d in and run to the carrots. I’ve been battling rodents eating my lines trying to drink the water so I ended up wrapping everything in tin foil. Pain in the ass but it has worked great. Not something most people will need to do. I also installed an inline shutoff just down from the bulkhead at the start of the run and another one at the end of the supply run. The first one is great for shutting off flow for when I need to add lines or make changes. Otherwise the Blumat bulkhead is direct flow all the time. The shutoff at the end of the run acts as a purge valve to purge air from the system. Blumats do not like air in the system. Air in the lines, not enough head pressure, and running nutes in your lines are the biggest causes of runaways.
Even though the system is “charged” all the time, water only flows to the plants as it is needed. Meaning, each carrot acts independently of the other carrots based on the moisture level they are set at by you. I won’t get into how all that works for now but just know that it is based on how the moisture is drawn through the ceramic base of the Blumat carrots. This pressure differential is what activates the diaphragm in the carrot and allows the water to flow. Anyway, each carrot operates individually. This is the difference between Blumats and a traditional drip system. Blumats only water when the plant needs water, not on a time based schedule. I’m trying different configurations to see what works best. Here they are below.
Three standard Blumats evenly spread out in a 25 gallon pot.
A single Blumat Maxi in a 5 gallon pot.
A standard Blumat with drip emitters in a 5 gallon pot.
I’ve been running these since about April or May and I have had almost zero problems. I do make some minor tweaks here and there but otherwise it’s just topping up the res as needed. They keep the soil moist and the plants are happy. I think adding a mulch layer would help keep the top soil moist but at worst I’ve had a 1/4” of dry soil. But, just below it is damp throughout. As I adapt the system to include an indoor tent it will be interesting to see if any different issues pop up. If you want to know about that other thread hit me on the PM’s. Some forums don’t like talking about other forums so I’ll just leave it at that.
Here are a few diagrams that illustrate a couple different ways to run the Blumats and also the design I based my res on. These are not my drawings but are what I used to build mine.
Let me know if you have any questions. Peace
