DWC setup 3.5 gallon bucket with aged tap water. water is about 7.4 right from the tap i add my nutes and that brings it down to about 6.2 - 6.4 i then add PH down and bring it to 5.5 - 5.7 in order to keep my PH under 7 i have to add a ridicules amount of PH down in my res. is this cuz my water quality sucks? also my water here is very very hard. anyone have any ideas on what i can do to keep from adding a ton of PH down to my res just to keep it under 7?
Same here. It should steadily rise as the plants take in nutes. But mine will see full spectrum in one day
same is this normal? or just bad quality water? does anyone use distilled water? i know if you can you just gotta add mag and cal right?
My ph from tap is the same i use holland secret nutes i set my ph 6 and it will rise to 6.2 with in a few days i just bring back down the nutes i use have good ph staberlisers in it may be your nutes just thought!
ph flux is normal... adding lots of PH down is normal as well... thats the breaks of doing a hydro grow... invest in a ph nanny if you get tired of the game...
i dont mind one bit i love tending to my plants. you could say its more my morning ritual then anything. simply curious about the hardness of my water and how big of an affect that plays in ph flux. if i used distilled water ( RO not available to me) will this hurt the plants?
The only problem with this is that it isnt completely automatic. You have to set it to either add more acid, or add more base. It wont do both.
Don't go for the band-aid fixer of getting an automatic doser just yet. To begin with, the bad water is the first problem you need to eliminate. Good RO water is near 0 PPM, and distilled should be around the same. Using distilled water should actually help with your problem UNLESS your nutrients are buffered and developed specifically for hard water, in hich case they would have left out cal and mag. If you nutrients aren't specifically for hard water, then getting better quality water should allow for more of your nutrients to be available to the plant. Distilled water is usually less available than RO, so its weird than you have better access to it, however not really important. Since your only doing a few gallons at a time its not to big a deal to use distilled water. Do you have a PPM Tester? If you do try it out on the tap water. This will show you how much chlorine/chloramine/other water treatment chemicals are in your water. These chemicals throw off buffering. Ph will fluctuate with the plants uptake of water/nutes. However typically the ph falls because the plants uses more water than nutes. I have never seen a healthy plant absorb more nutrients than water. How are your roots doing? Dying roots send the ph up.
thanks so much for the info! and yea i have looked all over for RO water and i just cant seem to get it out here! distilled how ever is every were. i got some magical that ill be adding to the distilled water ill be picking up and see if this helps things out.
I had a question: could the metal probe I'm using affect the nutes or plants any? The reason I ask is because sometimes I take it out of the rez and wipe it off to take a more correct reading since gunk gets on it. The tip of the probe makes black marks on the towel I use to wipe it off with. Could it damage the plants?
if the ph wont rise as time goes then something is wrong. its good for you. means its eating. distilled water isnt a good idea for growing as its completley dead source of water. the stuff in our tap is actulay food for the ploant. not a great source but it is food. you may want to look into nutes for hard water if its the water doing this. temps also play a roll on pH and time of day. should be checkin at same times day and night have 2 diff ph depending on what the ploant is doing