What is Flushing and how does it work?

Not everyone who starting out with hydroponics understands flushing and what it does for a hydroponics system -- and there’s actually not a whole lot of information readily available out there about flushing. Do a Google search for flushing, and you get a whole lot about toilets. That's partly because hydroponics is such a specialized and elite type of project. Anyway, from time to time we answer grower questions about the role of reservoir flushing in hydroponics. So what does this do for your system?

Flushing for Sanitation

One type of reservoir flushing helps to correct problems where there's simply too much of something in a hydroponics reservoir.

Think of hydroponics like a recipe. You're adding nutrients to clean water to try to get plants what they need to develop. You add a little of this, a little of that. A little calcium, a little phosphorus. If you see that pH is getting too high or low, you add elements like pH up and pH down.

But over time, you may see your reservoir chemical balance getting out of control. You might be getting way too much acid in terms of pH value, and all that stuff that was put into the reservoir might be generating some type of green stuff or other solids buildup. So what you do?

In some cases, you have to flush the reservoir. That means emptying out all of the contaminated water and putting in clean water. Then you start all over again, carefully building up that recipe for plant growth.

Flushing for Growth

There's another kind of flushing that's not as commonly talked about, but some growers swear by it. It's done at the end of plant cycles, in the mad rush for harvest. It has a different goal than the above type of flushing that growers do to wipe the slate clean on chemical balance.

Flushing for growth involves giving plants a kind of ‘last bite’ of some type of element that's going to elevate their growth quickly. Growers may use natural components like bone meal or other things that have high levels of calcium or enzymes or other materials for quick weight gain. Like a bodybuilder juicing up with creatine or protein, growers are helping their plants to develop quickly as they approach the end of their cycle.

Either one of these kinds of hydroponics flushing can be create solutions in different kinds of scenarios. For more about how to handle all sorts of hydroponics, check out the product catalog and other information that Dealzer offers growers around the world.