If you're using coco, I would stick to 5ml. It's really hard to overdo it with calmag, I've used it at 10ml/gal and the plants ate it up. A calcium or mag def in coco is a pain in the ass to fix, and they really get used up in this medium.
This is an informative thread! Keep the good info coming. Also for anyone who wants to use tap, and has a water softener, use your garden house spigot, they are still hard lined into un softened water. I live in the city, so I just will have to use water from my hose and let it sit open for 24 hours or so to rid of excess chlorine and whatnot, I dont know my ppm or pH of my tap, but when my tent is ready to be growing, I plan on running a "trial" period where everything will be on and running as it would when in use but without plants in place so I can see what problems may arise with heat and other issues that will come to light after its operational. Then I will know what my water's values will be. I just hope it doesn't freeze in the winter!
Good point on the water softeners - definitely bad news. They replace the water hardness with sodium (from the rock salt), and plants absorb sodium before any other nutrient. It's like giving a kid a ton of candy before diner. I've seen people complain about this with Walmart purified water, but I don't know if it's high in sodium or not myself.
just passing on info i have learned about tapwater .. they do not use clorine anymore . they use something of the same affect but you dont have to treat like chlorine .i-e 24 hour sweats . i still fill a rez and airate cuz its faster to water than the faucet n mix seperate galls but just thought you'ld like to know they dont actualy use chlorine anymore ....
Where do you live? They might not here but I will say this is a janky ass town, and they probably wouldn't care, especially if the chlorine is cheaper than the alternative, the river that runs by our plant is one of the most polluted around, sad cause it didn't use to be like that.
you might want to check i think its a chemical thing so we dont have to ingest it and they made it specificaly for our water .
Your probably right, but I will say this interesting fact about chlorine consumption. We all know chlorine is deadly in enough amounts, well apparently, back in the day, smaller amounts( what we would easily consume today) would still make people get sick, I watched a show that said the human body has become immune to small amounts of chlorine because he have ingested it in little quantities for a long time now, I love the way our body's work That's also why some people from cities cant taste it anymore, and then a person with clean well water comes to town, and is disgusted with the taste(still probably immune, just not to the taste)
I worked at a waste water plant and also did some work at a water plant. We put sulphur dioxide into the water to remove the chlorine that we added. So, even though the water still smells like chlorine, it is mostly removed by the sulpher dioxide. Luckily, I have well water to drink.
yea my water company doesnt usse chlorine anymore either.since i started this thread ive started a coco grow and have been using tape water for a couple months now and it def seems it doesnt have a bad effect on the plant at all.in fact my water is a bit on the hard side but the mj love calcium so i think its actually better to use tap than ro or distilled bc the tap water has a decent amount of calcium.. so if you supplement cal mag on top of that you ll never have a calcium or mag deficiency which is hugely prevelant in coco.
I use tap and it works just fine. If the water is heavily on the calcium or lime you won't need to supplement quite so much cal for your setup but calmag still helps a lot. If the water is fairly clean with a low tds then just use it as is, make sure to ad a pinch of epsom salt as needed usually every 2-3 gallons of water that go in. Epsom and calmag will be your two best friends. I don't even need to ph adjust my water anymore, the coco will balance itself out at around the 6.0 mark so as long as your water isnt super acidic there should be nothing to worry about. Especially if you are not reusing nutrients. and dumping the drip pans after 24 hours.
Yo guys my tap is 400 ppm but when filtered (through brita) it is 300ppm. can i use the straight tap, or filter it?
aha ya its prety dam useless, but it sure makes a difference to our taste buds my bottled water is 200 ppm :/
hm this is what it says for my meter: HM Digital meters come factory calibrated (at 342 PPM or 1414 µS, depending on the product) and are ready to use out of the box. how do i even recalibrate? buy some distilled water and set it to 0 when testing it?
No, most of them come with sachets of calibration fluids, I got a Hanna continuous and it came with one or two of each, but I went ahead and bout bottles of all the solutions I will be needing.
I have the HM meter (both ph and tds). For the TDS I bought a bottle of 342ppm and 1000ppm calibration solution. I got them on amazon, just look up "ppm calibration" and it should come up.