Cloning Failing? Tried Everything? Found the missing link?

[Ymir]

Hmm thought I posted but I guess I didn't hit send lol. I am using the HTH pool shock shown on the first post. So far the flying skull seems to be working, nothing has grown and the water smells "normal" again without being changed out yet.

Update: March 19th, water smells kinda earthy but no signs of slime reforming and I still haven't even changed the water or added any chlorine since throwing in the flying skull z7. My temps have been better and the couple light leaks I fixed may have done the trick, I'm still not willing to give flying skull any credit but I'm leaning towards sticking with that for now until I see problems since I have a bunch of it left that I was never going to use. My plants that have shown 0 signs of growing since I transplanted started shooting out new, healthy looking roots finally. I was about to take new clones and rip them out and bleach the shit out of the rocks but now I think they are turning around.

 

[luxcultivars]

Z7 definitely works. I have seen it. Just don't use it together with bleach and you should be good to go.

 

[mjg132]

Has anyone used white vinegar instead of chlorine as part of this subject?
I havent got anything in at the mo,but i would like to see a comparison.
Swill the cup, clone jar or whatever with the vinegar and then put in normal chlorinated tap water.
ill try it but it'll b a while...

 

[exploziv]

vinegar can be too acidic, and dunno about it helping rooting. but putting some honey or willow branches in the water will encourage rooting.. you just need to exchange the water every 2 days and should be easy to get roots with the help of natural hormones in honey or willow.

 

[queequeg152]

you really cant compare vinegar to chlorine what so ever. they disinfect with completely different mechanisms.

if you dont believe me i don't know what to tell you.

if you are naturalist leaning, just dont use chlorine. it sounds like the ZR product mentioned above works.

 

[OGEvilgenius]

vinegar can be too acidic, and dunno about it helping rooting. but putting some honey or willow branches in the water will encourage rooting.. you just need to exchange the water every 2 days and should be easy to get roots with the help of natural hormones in honey or willow.

Just make sure you're actually getting honey. Some of the stuff on store shelves cannot be verified as honey. I think it was something like 75% of jars on the shelves studied contained no traces of pollen (which is a requirement to be called honey).

Stuff bought at farms contained traces.

 

[queequeg152]

Just make sure you're actually getting honey. Some of the stuff on store shelves cannot be verified as honey. I think it was something like 75% of jars on the shelves studied contained no traces of pollen (which is a requirement to be called honey).

Stuff bought at farms contained traces.

interesting, i used to brew beer with these cheap ass gallon jugs of 'clove' honey... im wondering if this was even honey at all?

what is this fake honey made from?

 

[Ymir]

So I got my chlorine tester. Even when adding 3x the recommended dose and testing just after it mixes in the reservoir, the chlorine tester hardly registers any chlorine at all. I did a test in a gallon of just water, and the dose did come out to about 1ppm. I guess if the chlorine has a lot of work to do it is basically instantly used up once you put it in. I've read some threads of pool owners who have had the same thing happen when they are shocking their pools and it can be a process of having to keep adding chlorine until it levels out.

This would explain why I didn't have good luck with the 1 oz per 5 gallon dose. My water has been more or less clear using 2x strength every 2-3 days but the wave maker I have eventually gets slime on it's propeller cage and bottom of the cord (assuming because that's where it warms up the most). After I read about leveling off of chlorine, and the fact that most plants can tolerate even pool levels of chlorine without much problem, I wasn't too scared to give it a heavier dose and after adding it in daily, sometimes twice a day, I saw the wave maker had been cleared of it's debris and the water is clearing.

So if you don't normally have issues, the 1ppm dose is probably fine but if you're like me and battling slime then you probably need to use a lot more at first to win the battle. My roots were perfectly white throughout all of this and I don't see any evidence of negative effects.

 

[queequeg152]

that shit on your wave maker could even be a biofilm... anyone owning a pool can attest to how gay and shitty biofilms are.

you just need to break them up though... all will be well.

i still insist that anyone dosing chlorine really should have a tester. they just cost so little... you might as well just get one, even if its just the shitty non FAS colormetric test kits.

what kit did you end up buying btw? if it was the one i reccomended... do you like it?

 

[Ymir]

that shit on your wave maker could even be a biofilm... anyone owning a pool can attest to how gay and shitty biofilms are.

you just need to break them up though... all will be well.

i still insist that anyone dosing chlorine really should have a tester. they just cost so little... you might as well just get one, even if its just the shitty non FAS colormetric test kits.

what kit did you end up buying btw? if it was the one i reccomended... do you like it?

I got the Taylor K-1515-A that you recommended. I did my own research first and found a lot of good reviews on that so thank you for the recommendation. I'm still a bit confused as I seem to keep adding more and more to my res and when I test it, it barely registers .2ppm (barely turns pink, one drop turns it clear in a 25ml sample where 1 drop = .2ppm) The powder stuff you put in takes a while to finally dissolve for me as well which is a bit annoying but it seems to be accurate when I tested it in plain water with chlorine added. However the big blob of shit on my wave maker broke apart finally after adding a bunch of chlorine every day. My humidifier also gets slimey after a while, so I've been adding chlorine to that water to keep it at bay there too. Don't know what exactly it is, but it's resilient for sure. Closest thing I've seen is an iron bacteria that is commonly found in toilets/well water pipes.

I'm using 2grams of the hth pool shock into a gallon (another thing is this stuff seems to absorb moisture so who knows if this weight is the same as when I bought it). 1 oz per 5 gallons is supposed to = 1ppm chlorine. I'm adding in like 12 ounces of double strength into my 35 gallon res for the past 3 days and it still barely registers 0.2ppm.

I'm "happy" with how it's working currently, if the wave maker is the only thing that gets slimey after a week or so I'd consider that good enough for me. before the whole res would get smelly and the sides would get slimey. The roots are all nice and white, only thing "wrong" with my plants is the newest growth is yellow toward the base of the leaves which I haven't been able to figure out. All the old leaves are nice and dark green, showing slight over fertilization, but all the smaller new growth is pale and a bit underdeveloped. I seem to be using a shit ton of sulfuric acid in order to keep my PH down so I'm starting to wonder if it's a sulfur toxicity. I just added in .1grams/gal of a mix of soluble trace elements and they seem happier, they are in stretch mode now so it's probably too late for them to fully recover but they are getting too big and I need to flower them and get it done before the roots clog up my bucket outlets.

Here's the slime, it varies from yellow snot like this to a darker brownish color when it gets worse.

 

[Ymir]

Perhaps I assumed incorrectly that the dosage shown in the original post is supposed to be 1ppm chlorine. The calculator I'm using is saying I'd have to use 5.38 grams to make a gallon solution which would add 1ppm at the 1oz per 5 gallon dose. (With HTH shock n swim 45% available chlorine) http://www.handymath.com/cgi-bin/chlorined.cgi?submit=Entry

 

[queequeg152]

interesting.

do you perhaps use some organic fertilizers? orperhaps you have alot of ammonical nitrogen?
chlorine will quickly reduce ammonium to chloramines even at relatively low concentrations.

i dont remember... does your kit come with the combined chlorine reagent? i think its called r-0003? if so, try taking a combined chlorine reading.

if you are reducing ammonium, you will see an elevated combined chlorine.

 

[Ymir]

I use JRPeters hydroponic + cal-nit, so it ends up being about 1% Ammoniacal Nitrogen and 19.5% Nitrate Nitrogen. I read something about phosphorus having an affect on chlorine too if I remember correctly.

I do have the reagent stuff, and that also only shows less than .2ppm

I'm going to change out my water today or tomorrow so I will re-evaluate the dosages and recheck that calculator and try to come up with a formula for 1ppm chlorine. I just read on another site that the dosage shown in the original post "adds less than 0.5ppm" so perhaps that combined with the amount of slime it's battling with is the reason my levels are low.

Edit: Just added another 8 ounces of double strength (2x the dosage on original post) and still only barely turning pink when I use the tester. The second test shows less than 0.2ppm still. Very confusing, but the slime is gone...for now

 

[mojave green]

The battle rages on.

 

[queequeg152]

what are you dosing exactly? in grams per gallon?

for perspective... say its 2002 and im 14 or 15 or what ever... and im shocking my moms pool to open it for the spring and summer... i typically would toss in 8 cups of chlorine(if i recall correctly) for a lightly algae bloomed post winter pool.

i would come back 3 hours later, with the pool on recirc, and measure the free chlorine, if it was not well above 10 i would toss in another 4 cups. with the aim of holding 10 or so for at least 8 hours.

this pool was (according to the drawings) 26,000 gallons. a cup is 250ml, and the bulk density of granular calcium hypo is about 1.1grams per ml according to google.

so 8 cups = 2,000 grams into 26k gallons yields .08ish grams per gallon of water for lightly bloomed water...

where are you with respect to that?

 

[Ymir]

Ok so the original post says to use 1 gram in a gallon of water, then use 1 ounce of that solution per 5 gallons of water to be treated.

I went with 2x that, so 2 grams into a gallon. My res is usually around 30-35 gallon, I'd say I put in about 16 ounces of that solution after getting my chlorine tester and confident I wasn't going to kill my plants with it.

So if I'm any good at math, 128 ounces in a gallon divided by 2 grams would be 0.0156 grams per ounce. So the first double dose I added (16 ounces) would be a little less than .25 grams, divided by 30 wuold be 0.008ish grams per gallon. I've added about 8 ounces per day over the last 4 days on top of that. The water smells like chlorine and the wavemaker is basically clean now so we will see if I need to go even further with it.

 

[CoCoColaClassic]

So I got my chlorine tester. Even when adding 3x the recommended dose and testing just after it mixes in the reservoir, the chlorine tester hardly registers any chlorine at all. I did a test in a gallon of just water, and the dose did come out to about 1ppm. I guess if the chlorine has a lot of work to do it is basically instantly used up once you put it in. I've read some threads of pool owners who have had the same thing happen when they are shocking their pools and it can be a process of having to keep adding chlorine until it levels out.

This would explain why I didn't have good luck with the 1 oz per 5 gallon dose. My water has been more or less clear using 2x strength every 2-3 days but the wave maker I have eventually gets slime on it's propeller cage and bottom of the cord (assuming because that's where it warms up the most). After I read about leveling off of chlorine, and the fact that most plants can tolerate even pool levels of chlorine without much problem, I wasn't too scared to give it a heavier dose and after adding it in daily, sometimes twice a day, I saw the wave maker had been cleared of it's debris and the water is clearing.

So if you don't normally have issues, the 1ppm dose is probably fine but if you're like me and battling slime then you probably need to use a lot more at first to win the battle. My roots were perfectly white throughout all of this and I don't see any evidence of negative effects.

It may be that your free chlorine does have some work to do in the REZ, but likely your free chlorine is reacting with ammonia (a common ingredient in nutrient, ph down products & additives) which reacts with chlorate ions (free chlorine; reactive chlorine) and producing chloraMINES which have antimicrobiological properties, but at a much limited rates than those found w/ 'free' chlorine.

Add you chlorine before any additive. Use pH adjustusters that DO NOT contain ammonia. GH's pH down has ammonia. Adv nutrient's pH down phosphoric acid which does not yield ammonia ion.
__________________
Canna Coco & Aqua
EZ-Clone w/ Permaclone collars
T5 veg, HPS Bloom
Strains:
Northern Lights (Sensi)
Chocolope (DNA)
Dutch Cheese (DP)

 

[Ymir]

As I mentioned a few posts back, my nutrients only have 1% Ammoniacal Nitrogen, and I use sulfuric acid for PH down, with the occasional phosphoric acid during flowering. (People with jrpeters hydro nutes generally just use the same formula for veg/bloom and it works great).

I believe it at least primarily the dosage I was using simply wasn't enough to battle whatever it is I'm infected with. After using some 4x strength (4 grams of the hth pool shock in a gallon) for a couple days, then using the calculator I linked said to use about .25 grams for 30 gallons to produce about 2ppm chlorine so I tried that 3 days ago. Just changed my res today and everything was clear, even the wavemaker pump was 99.9% clean other than 1 little piece of turd hanging off it (was actually a hair with a little slime on it). Even the little suction cups under my pump were clean which is usually always a little slimy when I change out my water.

I gave it a dose of h2o2 @2ml/liter before emptying my res just to give it a 1-2 punch and will probably give it 1 more dose of that and wait 24 hours to add chlorine. I'll attempt to add .125grams worth for what is probably 35 gallons right now to achieve maybe .8ppm chlorine and see how that works now that I've cleaned it out pretty good.

P.S. Using the calculator I determined that the dosage on the original post would only be about .186 ppm of chlorine. According to the calculator, you'd have to use 5.38 grams to make a gallon of concetrate in order to achieve 1ppm @ 1oz per 5 gallons. Use what you feel is right. I'm still not sure what to think, most people try to remove chlorine from their water not add it, but I've yet to see any negative effects, only benefits.

 

[Ymir]

FYI my problems seem to be solved, I guess I just needed a higher dosage initially to wipe the crap out nice and good. Haven't seen any slime even on my wave maker since and I've been using more moderate doses (still using about 4x the amount shown on the original post though, but that's not even 1ppm)

 

[Matt8800]

One thing I didn't notice any mention of is to cut just below the node. You will get the most root growth from where the node is.

I have tried cloning machines and cubes and I think cubes with humidity domes are by far the most reliable IMHO