- Reverse Osmosis
- Carbon Pre-treatment
- Dissolved Oxygen
- UV Sterilization
- Water Quality Tests
- Irrigation Supplies
Start from a number you chose
Every feed chart ever written assumes one thing: that the water you are mixing into is predictable. Municipal water is not. It shifts with the season, with which reservoir it came from, and with whatever the utility is doing to keep it safe on the way to you. Well water moves less, but it usually starts harder.
That variability lands on your crop. If your source water already carries 150 ppm of dissolved solids, every recipe you mix sits on top of a number you did not choose — and when that number drifts, your EC drifts with it, no matter how carefully you measured.
Water treatment is how you take that variable off the table. Once your starting water is a known quantity, your feed chart means what it says, and a problem in the room becomes a problem you can actually diagnose.
What each stage is actually for
Carbon pre-treatment
Chlorine and chloramine are in municipal water on purpose, and they will oxidize an RO membrane from the inside. Carbon strips them before they ever reach it. Skipping this stage is the most common reason a new RO system quietly underperforms inside a year.
Reverse osmosis
RO pushes water through a semi-permeable membrane and leaves dissolved salts behind, handing you a near-zero baseline to build on. We supply frame-mount RO systems in two lines: the FMV series where efficiency and drain volume matter most, and the FMHC series where daily throughput matters most.
Antiscalant
Hardness minerals concentrate on the reject side of the membrane and plate out as scale, cutting output long before anything looks wrong. Pretreat Plus keeps them in solution so they leave with the drain water — by the 5 gallon container, or as a complete set-up with the metering pump and tubing already matched.
Filtration
Emitter passages are small enough that one flake of scale or a little biofilm will block them. 120-mesh disc and Y-screen filters sit ahead of your drip lines and are serviceable in place — far cheaper than clearing a plugged zone.
UV sterilization
UV inactivates pathogens on the way past without adding anything to the water. That matters when you are already holding EC and pH inside a narrow band and do not want another variable.
Dissolved oxygen
Roots respire, and so do the aerobic organisms you want around them. Raising dissolved oxygen supports both — see nanobubble technology for how we do it at scale.
How to work out what your water needs
Start with a test, not a system. A basic water quality panel gives you the three numbers that drive every decision after it: total dissolved solids, hardness, and alkalinity.
Alkalinity is the one growers most often skip past. It is not pH — it is how hard your water fights a change in pH. Water can read a comfortable 7.2 and still resist every drop of acid you add, because the bicarbonate buffering it is high. If you are using more pH-down than the chart suggests and seeing less movement than you expected, alkalinity is usually why.
We run water quality tests as a service, and we will read the results with you rather than hand you a number. Often the answer is less equipment than people expect — plenty of grows need filtration and a carbon stage but not full RO.
Size RO by peak day, not by room count
The most common sizing mistake is buying against square footage. What matters is peak daily draw — the largest volume you will need in any 24-hour window at full canopy, plus whatever buffer your storage gives you. A system sized to average demand runs fine for weeks and then falls behind exactly when the crop can least afford it.
We will size it with you off your own irrigation numbers rather than a rule of thumb.
