Hello everyone. I've been brainstorming some things and want your opinions. I've been researching it for a few weeks, and wanted to wait and see if it worked before posting, but that's going to take many months of testing and monitoring. I've seen some similar and relevant info posted on threads in here, but nothing in depth.
So we all know that res temps, to the hydro/aero grower, are right up there in importance as lighting and nutes. Everyone wants to maintain a low nutrient temp to ward off Pythium and other harmful critters. What I think some people don't realize (and a lot DO realize I'm sure) is that it's not the temperature of the water that inhibits pyth, its the dissolved Oxygen level. Pyth and other similar critters love low to no oxygen environments, and by lowering the temperature of the water, you are raising the DO, therefore creating an environment pyth doesn't like, great.
The thing I've been researching is plant growth vs root zone temperature. In every article I read the plant growth was increased 25-75% when the root zone/nutrients were heated to 30C (86F), compared to the control at 20C (68F), which is what most people here run. None of the studies were done on MJ, most were tomatoes, peppers, and lettuce, but the fact that more plant matter was produced in all of these different plants, it should transfer over to MJ also.
So, I looked up a DO chart, and found that at 68F, water at 100% saturation will hold 9.1 mg/L of oxygen. So with 9.1 mg/L, pythium should be kept at bay, as most people on here running <70F res temps have no problems. Now if we wanted the water at 86F, the DO content at 100% saturation drops to 7.5 mg/L. Not good. The nice thing about water is, you can Supersaturate it relatively easily. Using an Oxygen Injection system (working on an affordable one right now) you would only have to supersaturate your 86F water to 125%, which would give you 9.4 mg/L. So you now have the optimum nutrient temperature for root respiration/growth, along with the optimum DO levels. The Injection systems actually have the capability to get the nutrient up to 200% Saturation which would give you a whopping 15 mg/L, which is equivalent to around 25F water. I'm sure at a point there would be a case of diminishing returns, I don't know where exactly though.
I'm still finding out exactly how intensive and expensive it's going to be to keep the nutrients supersaturated, and even then it will depend on the individual growers reservoir size, but it will be a ballpark for anyone interested in trying the theory.
So what do y'all think? Am I crazy with too much time on my hands?
Or is this something that makes a shred of sense?
Thanks for taking the time to read.