For some reason I’m having slight ph issues. I start fresh res full of gh trio nutrients on Friday evening and as the plant drinks up the water I top off with ro water which has ppm 45 and ph of 6.8. After a few days I checked res stats and found the ppm was 1900 and the ph was 4.5 wow! So I added more ro water and got ppm to 1400 ph still below 5.5 had already used all the ph up we have and snowed in so looking for a way to ph up and read that baking soda will raise the ph but also can cause lockout so decided to take some ash from my wood stove which is all hickory and mixed with ro water and strained through coffee filters and ended up with liquid that is ph. 11.5 I added some of this to my res and got ph easily to 6.4 gonna watch and see how this affects the plant. Has anyone tried this successfully or not?
Wow, I commend you for your resourcefulness!
Do you not check your pH daily? Even so, that is a big change. I check mine every morning. I use filtered well water, pH is 7.28…I think, from the tap. I also use the GH Flora series and CaliMagic and Liquid Kool Bloom, pH Up and pH Down. However, I have little to no drift once I get locked in to where I want them. I am trying to think why yours is dropping. Mine would migrate up, if any, as I have a little circulatory pump at the bottom when the level gets low the water is agitated more.
I wonder, and my musings alone here, and I hope a veteran grower has a good thought on this, but would it be so terribly awful if the grower used the water as is? I was thinking GH doesn’t change pH much, but may be wrong. Just the water and nutes, what would the pH run and would that be good enough for now or would that mess up the crop?
Thanks, when i was using straight well water the ph was creeping up daily plus ppm was extreme over 2000. Installed ro system purely for grow. Doesnt make sense with the ph dropping. Cant spend hundreds fighting ph. The commercial up i purchased took entire bottle to get to 6.0. Ill check ph this afternoon. I do check daily 530am before 6am flood. Well see if this works. Im wondering if this water derrived from hardwood ash has any beneficial nutrients or bad. I have plenty of ash.
Thanks for sharing, i was a little concerned since im doing ebb and flow so im mixing the ash with water then strain thru coffee filters so tea only. Dont wanna clog my pump.
Nice to know it is benificial
PH will change as plant takes up nutes. Check daily. Let it go for several days…end up with really bad PH.
What’s your temp and humidity? if you don’t mind me asking
Funny you should ask. The temp avg 75f and usually th is 60% but, our power company did a scheduled outage for a half hour and I forgot that the humidifier doesn’t automatically come back on so for 2 days humidity got down to 38%.
Made me think your fluctuation is because your plant is having trouble transpiring. It’s basically sweating out your water and leaving nutrients behind. Raise rh
Ok, I raised rh set point to 65%. Really confusing how the usual battle is to keep the ph from creeping up now I’m having to raise it. When I left at 11:00 am the ph was 6.2 when I came back in at 5:30 pm ph was 5.2. I used the ph up i made and got to 5.8. I’ll see what it looks like at 5:30 am tomorrow. Here is a current pic. She looks healthy.
Definitely looks healthy, atm
I understand that ideally the humidity and space temp should intersect In the green, blue or purple zones relative to the stage of the plant but what are the numbers at those intersections. Bye the way thank you for reaching out to offer insight and advice
What I do is correlate the humidity to what my heat is during that stage of growth. You’ll notice when your plants are happy, they grow out of control
Not saying this will “fix” the huge swings you have in ph but it should help a great deal
I raised the rh set point to 70% and the ph stabilized a little bit. I removed the air stone from the res( 5 gallon bucket) and ph is steady. I wonder if the air stone is affecting the ph. I put the stone in plain water and will check after work.