This is my second run of Night Owl seeds in a 4x4 tent with sf4000 led. Biobizz soil with worm castings. I gave them reverse osmosis water only first 30 days. Age old organics bloom every other feeding when they started flowering.
I had ph balanced* most of the time until I think my pen got uncalibrated and i Phd down way to low one feed and started turning colors on me. Now I think it’s time to flush. Anyway does anyone have any advice on how to grow in a way that does not require checking ph all the time? I wish there was a way that I didn’t have to handle that chemical ph down stuff
*Maybe next run I will try build a soil living organic mixs, not sure if that will be more or less work but will find out lol.
I feel this hard. Found out I had this issue and my week 7 of 12 Jalisco landrace plants are PISSED OFF. I’m now marking in my calendar to re-calibrate my PH pen as part of my weekly checklist versus monthly.
I know another grower that works via house-calls for home growers and carries 3 pens on him “just to be sure”. (note, these are all good pens, he uses a $300 one as his primary and then 2x $100 units as his back-up and redundancy back-up.)
I thought RO water was almost neutral, but after reading this:
Reverse osmosis water is nearly pure water with a PH of 7. Reverse osmosis is a filtration method that removes more than 99% of all the contaminants in water.
The result is nearly pure water, which has neutral pH of 7. But if it’s exposed to air, RO water drops down to an acidic pH range of 5 – 5.5. Why? Pure water is very hungry. it actually grabs CO2 right out of the air! Within about an hour, a glass of pure RO water can drop from a pH of 7 down to a pH of 5.5 or lower and become acidic water. Alkaline water has a pH of greater than 7, so reverse osmosis water is not alkaline water. To alkalize it, you have to add calcium and other minerals to it.
seems to be acidic, so that pH down you use may worsen the situation. An easy solution may be change your nutrients to Advanced Nutrients pH Perfect and forget about measuring it, I have used it this last years with good results …
Do run off or slurry tests. Not hard to do.
Water …wait… Test runoff.
Best thing I did was buy a BluLabs meter (pH & ppm/temp probe) not cheap but not wasting money in balancers and other products will save time, money & stress. MSRP is like $300 USD but if your crop has worth to you not a bad investment imo. Replacement pH probes have dropped in price considerable over the past 5 yrs too.
Daz seems to be a cool cat, so maybe hhu on some type of social media.
(note, these are all good pens, he uses a $300 one as his primary and then 2x $100 units as his back-up and redundancy back-up.)
