doneit 03-23-2014 07:12 PM
I bought the big jug of that stuff a few months ago, it worked for a minute, short minute!
Hey Snype, thanks for the insight. Pull up a chair and brainstorm along.
I've experienced chlorine and chloramine resistant microbes. I haven't met anything personally I couldn't kill with Physan20. Fingers crossed I never do. The issue I'm inclined to think is going on here is an issue of air born spores and cysts from a mutant strain of pythium re-infecting time after time. That's why it will not go away after it made its first appearance after they all had 10+ years of successful growing beforehand.
If you were to fully sterilize a grow room and had perfectly clean water, all it would take is for spores to go airborn when that orange ballast in doneits pic above kicks on in the perfect room and finds its way into the rez or RO water storage. That ballast has been in an infected room circulated spore filled air to cool itself down. How many of us clean our ballasts guts? How about all the other similar things in our grow rooms? A wipe down of bleach or Physan20 will have little affect on a mutant spores and cysts like this. They have to be dealt with another way.
We can't see spores and cysts with our eyes; they are microscopic. And they are usually built like armored trucks. That's why the spores and cyst live thru the bleach and Physan20.
Control is a going to be one facet of a multifaceted attack plan for doneit.
doneit,
What was your protocol with the antibiotic. Did you dose the intitial rez? Did you treat each weekly rez? etc.
Snype, chime in on this one when doneit responds.
Snype... First, the cuts you received from me where not from an infected source.
I do believe the pathogen we have is immune to chlorines and that it is most certainly airborne in spore form.
The antibiotics were applied as described by you, the system fully saturates the medium 4 times a day, it worked on the initial trial but the pathogen came right back, i did not want to attempt a constant use of the antibiotic.. for obvious reasons.
The first pic i showed of the clones in cups are from my place, i brought them to my friends and the next day the brown stuff was growing on the tops of the perlite, they were not given any water/feed from the infected spot.
anyways... im glad your here and still trying to help, you know what my guys have been going threw!
I think his problems can be solved and always could but I also think that he may have to change the method of growing to combat the problem if your methods don't work. I've always thought that when I was originally helping him but at that time his people were set in there growing methods. I don't know if its an airborne problem and there's no way that I can tell that but it's at least a water quality problem. Now if his whole area is infected with this, I have cuts directly from this place and if it was airborne, it never created a problem with my grow. I just don't know what is going on because I'm not there. I think your tea method is a good idea and if it works, it's going to have to become part of his process for growing because it sounds like more of a bandaid approach. Hey I could be wrong. I know that I wasn't able to kill my problems because it was in my tap water. Those RO filters don't catch them because they are microscopic like you say. I'm interested to see how it goes.
My method of approach was to do some testing and then that would lead to an answer and better method of approach. The problem was that I don't believe that his grow method would be right for the antibiotic test. Because his system wasn't saturated or somehow sprayed 24 hours a day, it would not be a good way to try and fix the problem with that product. In another method of growing like Aeroponics or RDWC, it is easier to treat the problem as opposed to other growing methods using media. Like he said it was working for a few but then stopped. The medium and roots and water has to be saturated 24 hours a day.
There's so many easy tests that he can run to find at least 1 source of his problem. One would be to take a clean 5 Gallon Bucket of his water source and do testing with different concentrations of Chorine Via Clorox Bleach. You have multiple buckets all in a clean room. You can put a cover on it as well so nothing airborne gets in. You can compare your results to bottled water under the same conditions. When the Chlorine in the bleach is fighting the problem, you see the numbers going down in your chlorine meter. There is loads of information to gain from those numbers and data. You have a clean source of bottled water to compare it too and you can also see if you have a resistant strain of whatever the problem is by analyzing the data of numbers in different concentrations of tests up to about 4 PPM of CL. This test could take a little while to perform and it all has to be done in a timely scheduled manner. Even every hour sometimes to record all the data. This was all suggested beforehand. I've done this type of testing many times before and have learned loads of information. It's how I was able to determine that I had a chlorine resistant problem and had to use a different method to combat my problem. I don't use Antibiotics with plants but I noticed if I can keep the slime at bay by cleaning my cloner with Erythromycin and cloning with bottled water, once the plant had a healthy root structure and was in perfect health, the pathogen wasn't able to take over when they got transferred to the hydro systems with infected tap water.
My first test after the bleach was the Erythromycin. You can see in the first pictures the dreaded slime:
[URL=https://www.icmag.com/ic/picture.php?albumid=47614&pictureid=1111864&thumb=1]View Image[/url] [URL=https://www.icmag.com/ic/picture.php?albumid=47614&pictureid=1111863&thumb=1]View Image[/url]
I was dealing with this slime for a while trying to fix it somehow. I lost many crops over this slime. The slime multiplies so fast that it sort of suffocates the stem. Roots were impossible to get in the cloners. Impossible. I dumped a whole bottle of Physan20 in my cloner. It did nothing at all. The slime just multiplies like it normally did. Every crop got worse and worse. Then after I took those pictures above, I added my Erythromycin treatments and couldn't believe what happen:
[URL=https://www.icmag.com/ic/picture.php?albumid=47614&pictureid=1111865&thumb=1]View Image[/url] [URL=https://www.icmag.com/ic/picture.php?albumid=47614&pictureid=1111868&thumb=1]View Image[/url]
When I took the first pics of the slime, it was everywhere. All over brand new air stones, stuck all over the manifold and in the manifold. It would only take 24 hours for the slime to multiply at alarming rates. After the first day of the treatments, the slime still came. It took a few days for the Erythromycin to knock them dead. I had 4 or 5 EZ cloners that did not work anymore because of the slime. I used to have to buy new ones all the time just to be able to try to have a good crop. Once I saw what it did to my clones, I cleaned all my cloners for 5 or 7 days with the Erythromycin and they all worked like they were brand new again. I never saw the slime again but I use bottled water in the cloners now as well.
I was able to figure this out by going back to my old city where I grew for 10 years with no problems. I pulled my hair our for months before this. I drove a couple hours away and took a jar of my old tap water from a previous city and compared it to the tap water that I was using now. I was doing all these chlorine tests before this so I happen to compare both samples of water with a chlorine meter. I had no idea what I was going to learn. My old location water where I had no problems tested at 2 ppm of Chlorine and my current water with where I had all the problems tested at 0.1 or 0.2 PPM Chlorine. From that point I knew I was on to something. Many tests were performed. I almost gave up growing before I checked the water. I had no idea to even look into the water. I checked everything else. I couldn't even get a crop and was running out of money dealing with these problems. One day I just woke up and thought about the water and then found a solution.
Its my initial thought that if I ever went the antibiotic route, I would use it all the way through the grow cycle; that means with plants in. I have a lot of fish antibiotics, same stuff and other kinds, that I have left over from my fish tanks. When used in fish tanks you have to dose every 5 to 7 days for a few weeks. I would incorporate the same into my reservoir management.
I could forsee spores/cysts quickly finding themselves landing in the reservoir after an antibiotic treatment is done. That is why I would run it all the way through. Its probably what happened to done it because of heavy spore/cyst infestation.
Constant saturation would be ideal.
Thats some good and valuable testing info there.
I know what you mean. The slime is wicked fast. Good lord, a whole bottle of Physan20. Just curious, where did you buy the bottle from? Did it foam up like crazy? Did you clean your cloner similar to my instructions? I'll post them below.
RichyRich's How to Sterilize Your EZ Cloner and Hydro Systems
1. Depending on what you can get, Pysan20 is tops. Second, regular unscented bleach, and third, whatever you might want to try. I only advocate Physan20 and bleach for now.
2. For sterilizing equipment, use hot hot water, your choice of one of the products of above, and antibacterial dish washing soap. The dish soap is antibacterial so it will help somewhat. It also is a surfactant and will make the scrubbing much easier. For Physan20 you will use 1mL per 5 gallons. For regular unscented bleach use 1 cup per 5 gallons. For other products you need to figure that out.
3. If you are cleaning a system with a lot of tubes (eg. ez cloner, drip systems, dwrc, drip feed, connected buckets, etc.), make sure your system is drained, then fill up your rez with one of the products, super hot water, and enough antibacterial dishwashing soap to get enough suds going. Now run the system for 4 hours.
4. For an ez cloner, take the lid off. Put all the puks in the sterilizing water. Take the pump apart. Take the red sprayers off the manifold. Soad everything in the bottome portion of the ez cloner for 2 hours then move on to step 5 below.
5. Take everything apart and scrub everything down like your life depends on it. Use a dishwashing sponge that has a scruff pad on the back side. Also get and use an old tooth brush, one of those tooth brush looking things that has brass bristles, etc.. Get into all the nooks and crannies. To clean the ez cloner puks spread the puks and clean the inside of them while dunking into the bleach soap water at the same time.
6. After scrubbing is complete, rinse everything off with hot hot water. Then put everything back together.
7. Fill up your rez or cloner again with hot hot water and one of the products above to the same ratios listed. Do not use dishsoap this time. Run the system for 2 hours.
8. Dump the rez or cloner of all the sterilizing water. Get it all out. Use a shop vac to suck out what you can't drain.
9. This is your last rinse. Only add hot hot water this round to your rez or cloner. Run it for 1 hour. Drain it all out.
10. You are now ready to start growing.
Snype,
Those are some seriously wicked roots. Root porn... What kind of rooting hormone did you use?