So here's the deal. I've been growing for several years now, nothing big, just some nice closet grows for personal use/sharing. Started out with soil at my old place, gave hydro a try with outstanding success. I got a couple of soil and hydro grows under my belt before moving/investing in any serious equipment. Then I moved to my new place. Tried doing hydro again (always DWC), and got root rot. Got more air pumps, concentrated h2o2, etc. Started another hydro grow, got root rot with the h2o2 and extra air. Ok, picked up a chiller. Now I'm running h2o2, lots of air, and temps consistently between 65-68 regardless of air temp. Start my next grow, decide to skip the h2o2/sm-90 and go the beneficial microbe route instead. BOOM! root rot. Now I'm pissed. Time to start my latest grow. It's winter, so the chiller isn't needed, water is consistently between 61 and 65 degree. I'm currently running a 60 lpm air pump (Hailea v-60) in a single 18 gallon (10 gallons of water in it) tub. This pump is enough to keep 10+ plants happy, nevermind a single site DWC tub. I light proofed my tub using black/white poly all around and on top. It is definitely 99% light proof, so there should be no algae. I started off with not even RO water, i went a step further and am using deionized water. I bleached my old equipment before starting with highly chlorinated water for 2 days. I baked my hydroton for 2 hours at 350 before using it. I innoculated my res with aquashield, GH's subculture M and subculture B. Everything looks great for about a month, until BOOM! root rot explosion one day... I'm at my wits end. I brewed tea using a sample from the hydro shop (extreme gardening's tea) aquashield, and a little subculture B, let that brew for 48 hours, did a quick h2o2 wash two days ago, drained the res, half filled it, rinsed, drained again, filled and drained one more time to try and get as many pythium spores out as possible. filled with 3 gallons of beneficial microbe tea and 7 gallons ph'd nutrient solution at 1.0 ec. i sprayed the whole root system and netpot with the microbe tea to innoculate it. not even 5 hours later, the roots were covered in rot again. I rinsed it off, hoping the beneficial microbes would out compete the rot. no such luck, the ENTIRE root system was completely coated in rot not 2 hours after that. gave it a day to sit and hopefully get better, until today when i decided ef that, and bombed it with 6.5 ml concentrated h2o2 per gallon. that's sitting, hopfully killing everything in there, but I am at my wits end. nothing i do to prevent the rot keeps it at bay. What the hell am i doing wrong?! Am i doomed to work in soil forever instead of hydro!? HALP?! :/
i did get a new container. Tough I reused the fittings (they're expensive!) but i soaked them in the chlorine solution for 2 days with everything else while I pumped it through the chiller, too. I even bought new black air pump tubing because the old one was clear, and I thought maybe somehow light was being transmitted into the tub through the tube...
Damn, Im stumped. Hopefully someone can come along and find a solution. Keep us updated, best of luck. http://forum.grasscity.com/index.php?/topic/1329219-My-2Nd-Real-Grow-Attempt%2C-W--Pics%21-Bubble-Cloner-clone-Machine%2C-Dwc
Are you sure what you have is root rot? I had it several years ago. conquered it, never had it again. Clean everything (netpots, hydroton, tub, tubing, chiller, pumps, air stones etc.) with bleach, let it soak for a few hours then scub it, rinse thoroughly with water. 2 things that make pythium breed is high water temps and lack of oxygenated water period. Air being more important. How many air stones are you running? I use the eccoair comercial pumps with multiple large air stones. Are you starting over with new seedlings or keeping the affected plants? It sounds like you've addressed all the issues that support the growth of it. I think you're missing something in the clean-up, sterilization or your air pump isn't putting out enough air.
Does the water smell funky? It could be just the nutes your using...any dark nute will cause the root to darken. Are you changing your solution out weekly? Soak the roots in florashield alone for a few hrs before you add the nutes. ©ðŸðŸŒ›
This may help: http://buymarijuanaseeds.com/community/threads/the-official-anti-root-rot-thread.134267/ First off, what is it we're really talking about here? "Most damping off [root rot] is caused by two Protoctistan Pythium species (technically they are o–mycetes, not fungi), P. aphanidermatum and P. ultimum. Several fungi also cause damping off-Rhizoctonia solani, Botrytis cinerea, Macrophomina phaseolina, and several Fusarium species, F. solani, F. oxysporum, F. sulphurem, F. avenaceum, F. graminearum. Together they make damping off a ubiquitous problem, attacking all cultivars of Cannabis (Bush Doctor 1985). source article" Note that quote was from 1985, and has nothing to do with hydroponic environments. How many are hydro-specific, and cannot exist in soil? Have they even been identified by now? Or perhaps created.... Is the DEA Developing strains that target cannabis? "In July, McDonough announced he wanted to release a pot-eating fungus to finish off the state's domestic crop of marijuana. "If science says this is a safe way to effectively eradicate drug crops, then that's a good discovery," he says. "It's science." But scientists who regularly work in agriculture have serious reservations. "It's a manifestly bad idea to go ahead with large-scale use of untested pesticides," say Margaret Mellon, director of agriculture and biological technology at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C. She says law enforcement's attempt to eradicate cannabis sometimes borders on reefer madness. The fungus, Fusarium oxysporum, developed by a Montana biotechnology firm to target cannabis, infects the plant with a deadly root-eating canker, literally choking the life out of it." So as you can see there is at least a dozen strains, 3 entire different species to boot, now the gov't might even be bioengineering strains... How do we know what strain we're dealing with? I would assume different strains require different plans of attack.
Another great post and worth further reading: http://forum.grasscity.com/sick-plants-problems/486715-how-too-pythium-root-rot-treating.html