How do I read my tds tester my ppm for feeding water is a 488 I don’t understand what good ppm and what bad can someone help?
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OK, your water is 488. That’s a high parts per million of total dissolved solids. Ideally you would want 0.0 ppm in your water. So if you start at 0.0 and nutrients feed schedule calls for 900 ppm then you would add nutrients to water until its at 900 ppm. So if you start at 488 ppm you would only add 412 ppm of nutrients. The problem is you don’t know what is in that 488 ppm. That’s why you would want a water source with ppm as low as possible. Will you be OK, with water ppm that high. Possibly will be OK but you won’t know until you start feeding and see. My tap water is 350 ppm so I bought a RO Buddy which filters solids out of water down to 5 ppm. Hopefully this will help you to understand how to use TDS meter. I’m going to tag the person who helped me understand how to use TDS meter. He’ll let us both know if I got it right. @Myfriendis410
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Thank you! But my water is a 488 with the nutrients added in the water I haven’t tested the water without nutrients yet
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Either way the idea is to not over feed. So after you add nutrients, test and get TDS level where you want it. Just a heads up on nutrients you may want to start dosage lower than recommended. See how your girls tolerate them and then raise as you go. Many people will start at 1/4 dose and go up from there.
So then I should add more nutrients then to go up to 900ppm?
See what happen was, I was using distilled water sense seedlings and never thought on checking it at all. So when I did test it, it was putting out 5.5 ph! Never realizing how bad distilled is. But crazy this is when I put the full dosage of big bloom in it dropped to a 4.4ph never checked the tds on it tho. So what I did was added everything I put in this ph booster
would that mess with my plants is I added that until it got to a 6.8ph? Is that too high of ph?
Most soils you would want ph between 6.3 and 6.8 So if you are at 6.8 you’re good.
900 was just a figure I chose to illustrate TDS reading. Here’s a feeding schedule to follow for feeding.
Another thing that maybe I should have said is as far as using TDS meter you should be taking runoff readings. So you would water plants until you get enough runoff to collect. Use the meter check what your ppm reading is. If you are in Foxfarm soil and your runoff readings are under 1000 ppm then on next watering you would feed. As far as taking ppm reading on water going in that is so you’ll know how high ppm was going in. So you aren’t adding nutrients to water going in to get ppm’s going in to a certain level. You just want to know what is coming out to determine if you need to feed.