Should you get a bluelab ph pen and a lumatek air cooled ballast

Posted by AmandaTom on September 26th, 2013

When you’re building your hydroponic set up, you have two paths. Both will eventually provide you with healthy plants and plentiful yields, be it herbs, fruits or vegetables you’re after, and both will give you tons of fun. The difference between those paths is the meaning of “eventually”. If you view yourself as a weekend grower, an amateur hydroponic farmer for whom hydroponics is just another hobby, well, you can wait for the first good harvest. You can let yourself experiment, trying to grow plants first with just a weak lamp with no ballast.

Then you see your plants die, or not make it to the flowering stage. As you realize something is wrong, you take to the forums, and who knows what you’ll read? You can go anywhere from there. Maybe you’ll get a bluelab ph pen or a lumatek air cooled ballast, maybe you’ll get just a pH paper, and maybe you’ll install a RO water filtering system. You will wait for your second harvest. You won’t see it. You will, again, take to the forums with a different problem, and again get a bluelab ph pen, or even a combo meter, or perhaps you will add something like canna boost, or install a lumatek air cooled ballast, and again wait for the harvest, and again run into some kind of problem.

Eventually you will learn how to grow a specific crop with specific needs using specific equipment, which may or may not be a most efficient solution. You might end up buying a combo meter where a bluelab ph pen would’ve been enough, or you can get a lumatek air cooled ballast when you’d do better with just a lamp and a DIY reflector and vents. If you’re the type that enjoys tinkering and experimenting and likes hydroponics for the process of it, you’ll enjoy this path, a lot.

What if you’re also looking forward to a bountiful harvest of fruit? What if you want to get the tastiest tomatoes you ever had from your very own hydroponic garden, as soon as possible? Then you obviously realize that experimenting if a bluelab ph pen is better than a test paper for your purposes and if lumatek air cooled ballast is needed or if you can make it with a low end device will just waste your time. This is obviously frustrating if you’re a more result oriented person in the hydroponics sphere. Or what if you plan to commercialize your hydroponic enterprise?

It goes without saying then that you just can’t let yourself waste time and money on experimenting. You have to know right from the start what equipment you need, and if you’re looking to go commercial with it, then you’ll need some quality hardware and plant nutrients, too. Of course, specific hardware and nutrients depend on the type of plant you want to grow. Tomatoes, for example, need more light that celery, and different plants thrive in different pH levels. Still, getting a bluelab ph pen and a lumatek air cooled ballast will be useful to anyone, no matter which plants you plan to grow.

If you plan to be efficient about your hydroponics, bluelab ph pen and lumatek air cooled ballast is the necessary equipment that people often neglect.