I ran out of DE and don’t really want to wait for it to come in the mail. Am I able to use any food grade DE just as well as the DE from USALAB.com? Based on what I read on the website it’s looking like all the DE is the same stuff and the stuff in town is food grade as well.
I use the DE typically after my 20um paper filter - “paper filter<DE<AC&T-5 slurry”
I use it in a pinch. Seems to work fine, just slow.
I have a kilo of celite 545 for sale if you need.
How much you want?
No way. There’s alot of de on market. Ground pulled harden or comercial de has alot of heavy metals and alot of other shit in it. Only use food for production Powders.
Get Food Grade DE from Amazon bake it in a Vac oven. Pulls whatever moisture it absorbed from it’s storage or packaging process out.
Most animal feed supply locations have food grade DE in 50lb bags for next to nothing. I can’t guarantee it meets your purity needs, but it may be worth looking into.
Edit: We use it to control insects in our greenhouses.
I’ll have to look and see what I paid.
How does it control insects?
Its basically like crawling on broken glass for soft bodied insects. Slices the soft exoskeleton of immature grasshoppers leading to death.
What about mature grasshoppers?
Any insect that crawls thru de will be shredded up. It’s like scuffing them with sand paper. Bits of de gets embodies into their body. And as they more, it tears their bodies up .
You line this around your grow?
Ingenious
You can if you have a bug issue. Once water hits DE, it’s not useful any longer.
Wear PPE respirator when dusting this. It will mess your lungs up.
I paid 60.00 for the kilo.
my wife puts it on our carpet and vacuums it up, it kills fleas and other insects. not sure how. suffocation?>
I just ordered from @Killa12345 - he’s the cheapest. But thanks anyways man.
And its like a bunch of little razor blades for insects - they walk across it and it cuts them to shreds.
It is the puncturing, but it is also the dehydration that occurs after that kills.
Mature grasshoppers, usually brown, have too hard of an exoskeleton to take damage from the DE. Depending on your growing preferences, there are certain fungal based pesticides that invade the spaces in their shells, grow, and eventually burst the grasshoppers from within. Organic pest control is a brutal world.
Absolutely correct. Here’s a fun picture from this past season in our greenhouse demonstrating the effect.