so yeah....i have a small closet grow going on, ebb and flow scrog......all actual plant discussions aside....WTF IS HAPPENING? is my pump charging the water therefor altering the PH? if the pump is UNPLUGGED from the timer, ph will stay at 7, once the pumped get plugged in it within 2 seconds goes down to 2 or 3, even 1 the other day, if i lift the pump out, back to 7 in a few seconds. PH meter is a hanna, i store it in buffer solution and it tests perfectly with my 7.01 fluid. anyone ever had this happen before? do you think its messing with the meter or the actual PH? my plants are rather sick right now, but i dont know if i was helping or harming!
hmmmm, pumps are cheap, did you try another pump? What nutes are you using? What happens with your ec/ppm readings? What is your water source?
Technafloura bc boost and grow, magi-cal, I don't currently have a ec meter, water source was bottled water for a month or so ( then I realized distilled water doesn't show ph correctly, now I've been using tap water for the past month, comes out the tap at 7.4 after nutes it's down to 6.5/6.8 then goes down to 5.8 with a couple drops of down.
I dont know why distilled water doesnt show ph correctly but any way if I were having this problem first I would try another pump to see if the problem continues or possibly something in the tap water. When I used tap water I was constantly adjusting ph (though not as low as you're getting) once I switched to r.o. water I found that once the nutes were mixed in the ph became very stable and almost never had to be adjusted. I'd try mixing up some nutes in a separate bucket with distilled and check ph. I would suspect something wrong with your pump though.
Air bubbles can mess with the meters. They don't effect my ph meter but they do effect my ppm meter. When I measure the ppm I simply unplug the air pump. The ph of the water isn't actually changing it is just the meter reading it wrong because of the bubbles.
I dip a shot glass in to get a sample then test that. I dont want to drop my meters in the reservoir.