White powder in hydro water?

Hey everyone, thanks for taking a look. Any weigh-in would be appreciated.

First time running a DWC. This is the second week in (second water change) and I noticed some white growth around the walls of the bucket, as well as on some of the roots. Wipes right off but concerned it could be some bacterial or fungal growth. Pictures below.

Pertinent info:
* Running tap water (I know - I’m installing an RO system) due mostly to the pH fluctuations.
* pH has been kept in the 5.8-6.2 range with minor spikes above 6.2 (city water).
* nutrients were HOG for the first week. After battling pH fluctuations the first week, I elected to simplify and just run GH flora for second week to see if some of the HOG nutes were also impacting pH negatively. Also ran voodoo juice and rapid start in early stages. Didn’t in this water change.
* TDS kept 750-800
* EC ~1.5-1.65
* Water temp: 15.5C
* no light leaks, tubing is tight and bucket lids snapped on.
* running hydroton with plant in a Rockwell cube
* plants are strawberry cough, 3.5 weeks. Autoflower. Growth seems pretty good but haven’t run AF before so can’t really compare. 7-8 nodes and going through some LST at the moment so not very tall but would probably be about 8” tall otherwise.
* room temperature is typically around 21C, running LED lighting. Humidity around 30-50%.

Thanks everyone. Any insights would be appreciated!


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Thanks Trojan, always appreciate your thoughts.

That was my concern. One of the plants has easily 3-4 times the root growth and a lot of lateral roots whereas these couple don’t. Mind you none of them had much for roots 1 week ago, so I didn’t give it much thought until I had another one to compare with.

793 gph commercial air pump feeding 6 pots. Maybe not enough air? Not running any silica.

I’ll try increasing the air, running some h2o2 and praying


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Thanks Trojan.

Just looking a little more at it I’m hoping I’ve caught it relatively early. Some of the discolouration I think is from the old HOG nutes as there was a plethora of colourful nutes that were staining the roots. I check the buckets 1-2 times daily, and this just happened within the last 24 hrs. The root growth and plant growth has been pretty good, but I can see it still should have been better.

I’m thinking I’ll clean the buckets, etc., run new water and nutes, treat with h2o2 for 1-2 days to get a kill and then start a beneficial bacteria program. Does that seem reasonable?


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Sorry for the delay but thought it would be a good idea to share a few before and after pics for anyone else that may run into this.
A couple takeaways from this experience first:

1) I think my air supply was too small. I doubled the output and got larger stones. I think this in part led to the root rot in the first place. There were no light leaks.
2) hitting with h2o2 certainly helped kill off the rot but i wasn’t quite fast enough in adding the beneficial bacteria back (waited 3-4 days). This actually led to a slime outbreak - algae. So when I did add the bacteria back in, they had little effect.
3) I hit the algae with diluted bleach which killed that off. I sanitized all the buckets, air stones etc.
4) I added the beneficial bacteria (voodoo juice) back in within 12 hours, spiked with enzyme komplete (0.5mL per 5 gal bucket), added a little seaweed extract and within hours an explosion of new roots. Within 1 week, masses of new roots.

6 days between (after fighting off rot and algae):





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