Adding Hydrogen-Rich Water to an Existing Fertigation System
Written for the person who will actually sign off the installation: head grower, irrigation engineer or technical manager. The question this page answers is narrow and practical — what has to change in a commissioned fertigation system, and what does not.
HERO Irrigation dissolves hydrogen into the water inline, upstream of the existing fertigation dosing point. Nutrient dosing, EC and pH control and irrigation scheduling are unaffected: the unit adds a dissolved gas rather than ions, so setpoints, recipes and injector calibration stay as commissioned. Installation is a single outlet-to-pipe connection on the pressurised main, downstream of filtration.
What changes, and what does not
What changes: the water arriving at the injection manifold carries dissolved molecular hydrogen at 3,000–5,000 ppb, read with a dissolved-gas sensor as a new logged parameter. One additional inline device exists on the main, with its own single-phase supply.
What does not change: nutrient dosing, EC and pH setpoints, injector calibration, mixing-tank arrangement, crop recipes, valve sequencing, cycle length and controller programming. The device is upstream of the dosing point, so nutrients are injected into treated water exactly as they were previously injected into untreated water.
The reason the boundary is this clean: hydrogen infusion alters the dissolved-gas state of the water and nothing else. There is no ionic contribution, so no EC shift to compensate for and no pH correction to re-balance in the recipe.
Water-quality prerequisites for the fertigation line
The unit requires potable, reverse-osmosis or distilled feed water at TDS ≤ 50 ppm, temperature 5–40 °C, and inlet pressure within 0.1–0.4 MPa. Output is 0–0.2 MPa at 20 L/min, with a recommended flow capacity up to 6,000 L/day.
Framed for a fertigation system specifically: the connection point belongs after the filter bank and after any softening or reverse-osmosis stage, and before the injection manifold. Sites blending raw bore or surface water should confirm post-treatment TDS at the intended connection point rather than at source, because the figure that matters is what the unit actually sees. Existing filtration, disinfection and remediation equipment all stay in place — hydrogen infusion is additive to a treatment train, never a replacement for part of it.
Installation note
One connection: outlet to pipe, in series on the pressurised main. Dosing pumps, venturi injectors and their control wiring are not touched, and no emitter, dripper or manifold work is required. The cabinet is stainless steel, 550 × 350 × 970 mm, 83 kg including accessories, IP54, caster-mounted, and needs a single-phase 100–240 V ±15% supply at 800 W. In most head houses this is a half-day plumbing and electrical task scheduled around an irrigation window.
Timing: align generation with the fertigation cycle
Dissolved hydrogen dissipates over roughly two hours from generation. For a fertigation operation that has one clear implication: treat water while the cycle runs, not hours before it. Inline operation during the irrigation window keeps concentration at the emitter close to the generated figure; a long dwell in a buffer or mixing tank ahead of the cycle spends it.
Where a mixing tank is structurally unavoidable, the practical approach is to keep pre-cycle residence short and to sequence generation to the start of the dosing window rather than to a fixed clock time. Multi-zone sites running staggered windows are the usual reason unit count is set per zone rather than per hectare — covered on the commercial specification page.
Published research on hydrogen-rich irrigation water is early-stage and study-specific. Trial figures on this page are reported outcomes from the trials named, not projections for your site. No yield, disease, plant-health or therapeutic claims are made.
Have the integration specified in writing
Send the source-water analysis, peak flow per zone, window lengths and the intended connection point, and the specification returns unit count, placement, prerequisites and a DDP landed price. Full specifications, the instruction manual and the technical data sheet are published on the HERO Irrigation product page.