Micro Hydro Virgin needs a guide...

[fully baked]

Well for all of you hydro guru's out there, the names fully baked. Started off in soil, moved to organics, and now onto hydro! I made myself my own little bubbler and have a blueberry girl in there.

I'm gonna try to provide as much clear info as I can so someone out there can help me out.

Here is a top shot of my cab. On the left we have another blueberry girl in some organic soil. Nice and green, rootbound like you wouldn't believe, but still green. On the right there is my little hydro unit. You can see the unhappy colors



The bubbler is just a rubbermaid with some airstones on the bottom and a screen made of pvc and twine on the top.



Here's some closer shots of the leaves so you can see how they are reacting...







Now onto some stats about my water, and environment.

First any and all unrelated facts.
The screen is just around 1 sq foot. It is lit by 4 - 23w CFLs. Temp and humidity are fine.

Tap water is hard, around 350 ppm out of the faucet. Sits at an unruly pH of 8.3. Up until 3 days ago, I did not have a pH meter and was just letting her sit in that water. I'm assuming that is where my original problems came from.

So I finally get my pH meter and this is what I did. I added a tiny amount of water soluble ferts I had lying around. When I say tiny, I mean tiny. No chance of burning in my opinion whatsoever. Then I added some pH down (generic aquarium type pH down) till I got the pH down to 5.5.

So yesterday, I check on the pH, which had climbed back up to 7.3. So back to the pH down, until it hit 6.2. (I didn't want to add that much more pH down. Seemed like a bad idea...)

Onto today, I check the pH and its at 7.2 again. So decide fuck it, and put the pH down to 5.5 again.

Now hydro gurus, I went ahead and bought some general hydroponics nutes and they should be here in a few days. Hopefully that can help my issues a bit. But in the meantime I would like some input on what I'm doing here. Cause honestly, I'm flying by the seat of my pants and applying what I know about pH. All these fluctuations can't be good for my girl though...

Any advice (do this, don't do this) would be greatly appreciated. Any more information needed to help me diagnose the situation will be provided if u let me know whatever it is you need. I'll be updating constantly, as I'm sure I'll have lots more problems before I can get this figured out.

Thanks to any and all that wander by my thread here.

 

[confedrate69]

hey fully baked nice to meet u
i'm fairly new to hydro myself but with a ph of 8 or higher it has locked the nutes out.
i have had to add mass quanties of ph down at first till i had started adding nutes full streingth i found with the gh 3 part u also need to supplement with a cal mag supplement. a friend turned me on to the lucas formula and it was just right for my water im at less than 100 ppm out of the tap and a 7.5 ph with lucas i add 120 ml of micro and 240 ml of bloom to 15 gal of water and it puts me at 1200ppm and a ph of 5.8-6 .
its recomended to use 8 micro and 16 ml bloom for flower and flip it for veg thats per gallon and that will get u veary close to were u want to be at to help your babies.
i did have a similar deficancy on some and the lucas formula cleared my girls up within a week i seen new healthy growth.
the other thing to watch in a bubbler is rez temp i learned the hard way hi temps cause root rot . i personally ditched the bubbler and turned it to a ebb and flow witch seems to work well in my enviroments

 

[FreezerBoy]

350 PPM ain't that bad. GH makes a hard water formula just for folks like you.

pH 8.3 is definitely bad. Good call. Shoot for 5.6-6.0 in SWC as no one pH number makes all nutes available.

Don't know what your nutes were or what type of pH solution you've got but, I'd be inclined to place blame there till proven otherwise. Using DWC, 250 PPM tap water, GH FloraMicro and FloraBloom with the occasional drop of AN pH Down (phosphoric acid) I easily locked down (forget dialed in) EC and pH for over a month with NO fluctuation. OOPS! Man, was that a BAD thing. Widespread Mag deficiancy was my reward. Why? Because no one pH figure allows for absorption of all nutes. A mild pH swing is your friend.

 

[KAMy]

im having trouble with my biobuckets my ph is at~~7 the general hydro dye crappy ph tester says its light green lol! so im gonna go withit being in the 7- 6 range and not it seems the girls havent sufferd from much besides they havent grown since i took them out of the bubble cloner that works great thanks to icmag diy >< the bad thing is im using tap water now and was using distilled on mybubbler ive been hearing using RO water isnt a good idea for bio buckets throughout the fourms am i wrong should i go buy some RO water i mean i dont care about the $ i might have to pay just for the fact i would always need bottles or a machine on hand

 

[Haps]

There are not any virgins here to deflower, are there? It would do me wonders to deflower a virgin, too bad. Cut off the damage, mix your water days in advance, mr no virgins.
H

 

[fully baked]

confedrate69 - Thanks man. Looked into the Lucas formula and found this which will be great once my GH nutes get here. Hopefully my pH will balance out like yours did. Just gotta keep her alive until they arrive.

FreezerBoy - Thanks for stopping by. I appreciate your input greatly. I definitely have a nice pH swing going though. Just checked on the res, and it's only been 6 hours and the pH is between 6.0 and 6.1 again (up .5), so it's climbing. Hopefully the GH nutes can balance that out once they get here.

As for my pH down, it's topfin aquarium pH down. I figure if it's safe for fish it should be alright for plants... So my logic goes, but that has proved fatal in the past.

KAMy - Not too sure about bio-buckets. Maybe someone can help you out in the bio-bucket thread here

But it's time for a goodnight bong load .

Take care...

 

[fully baked]

There are not any virgins here to deflower, are there? It would do me wonders to deflower a virgin, too bad. Cut off the damage, mix your water days in advance, mr no virgins.
H

You can pop my hydro cherry haps. That's about all I have left to deflower.
I'll mix up my water in advance on the next change out.

Thanks for the advice.

 

[eLiguL]

Your SWC tub looks like it holds approximetely 1.5-2gals of water??

I had a tub almost exactly the same size for vegging. My experience has taught me that PH fluxation and a small rez(anything below 5gal IMO) go hand in hand, I could never stablize my PH. My flowering DWC tub was 10gal's and this was easy as pie to maintain my PH.

It looks like you have the head room. You may want to consider putting her in a bigger bucket.

 

[fully baked]

eLiguL - Never thought about my small res causing the pH fluctuations... But you nailed it on the head, I can fit a max of 2 gallons in there. The only thing is, in this box I can fit two of these SWC and hope to have both going once I can get through a run or two with just a single lady. If it turns out the pH fluctuations are too much to handle once my GH nutes show up, I will definitely upgrade to a larger res.

Thanks for stopping by, and the advice is much appreciated,
FB

 

[fully baked]

Hey there guys. She's looking a little better. Just a little, but any type of improvement makes me happy. The pH was at 7.5 after changing it 2 days ago. So I went ahead and brought that back down to 5.7. PPM was 900 and the res was sitting at 23 degrees. I'm not too sure what the ppm and temp should even be, so those numbers are for you knowledgeable ones out there.

Visually, she threw out another node in most places. Most of the tops were down to just a single leaf and were rounding off (Just to give you an idea how stressed she was. Looks like a bunch of marijuana leaves giving you the finger.), now the newest leaves are starting to get their serration back. Still single fuck-you fingers, but a little nicer and greener. Hopefully she keeps going in that direction...

Enough words, here she is.

Right out of the box. You see her as I saw her...


After a little tucking and cleaning...




A premature thanks to anyone out there taking the time to help me out.
FB

 

[FreezerBoy]

pH 5.7 is good.

23º is a tad high. 18º-20º is optimum.

900 PPM is a good start but, it takes several readings to know if it's "right." Measure everyday and see which way the reading goes. If it goes up (and pH goes down) then you're too rich. If it goes down (and pH goes up) you're too lean. When the numbers stop moving, that's the "right" solution.

HOWEVER, no one pH number provides all nutes. I feed slightly rich which raises EC and lowers pH from 6.0-5.6. Every two weeks I top off with plain tap water which lowers EC and raises pH back to my starting numbers.

 

[fully baked]

FreezerBoy - Thanks a lot buddy. I just got my GH nutes today, so I should be able to start using that wonderful ec and pH info you dropped on me in the last post. I'm letting some of my 8.3 tap water sit out for a few hours bubbling away, then I'll go ahead and do a res change and throw out some updates.

Anticipation sucks, all I wanna do is get those new nutes in there, but I will show some self control and let that water bubble for a few hours.

Back with pics and the results of the res change later tonight.

Cheers,
FB

 

[fully baked]

Just changed out the res and added the nutrients. I used 3/4 strength of the Lucas formula and the pH dropped to 7.1. I then proceeded to add pH down till it was 5.5. Then plopped it back into the box. We'll see if she likes it in a few days....

Here's some pics and a root shot...












Peace,
FB

 

[eLiguL]

I can see she is greening up quite a bit .

I think you will enjoy hydro quite a bit now that you have your PH pen. When you have a bit more cash on hand you should prolly get a EC/PPM pen, these two things are essential for hydro growing.

 

[CrystalsCrystal]

looks like you got algae growing in ur rez... ur gunna wanna either wrap it up with poly or slip a black plastic 1gallon grow bag under her netpot to protect the roots from light. Use purified bottled water as your water source.. scew tap as it is too high in salts... secondly I recomend using ur nutes at seedling strength to start and buy a CHEAP liquid pH test kit for 5 bucks.. really what your doing should cost u nuthing and you should get OUNCES

 

[FreezerBoy]

Here's some pics and a root shot...

What's all the black gunk? Raisins? Wha ...?

 

[fully baked]

eLiguL - Oh she is greening up alright. Looking better and better everyday. I think she likes the Lucas juice...

CrystalsCrystal - I was hoping it wasn't algae, but I went ahead and threw a little h202 in the res. Maybe that will help it out. This lady was also transferred from soil into hydro, so that could have something to do with it.

Let me know what you think...

FreezerBoy - Haha no raisins. Just bits of peat moss and perlite stuck in there. She use to be lsted in a pot just like her soil sister in the pics. About 3 weeks ago I switched her over to the SWC. I could only get so much of the "gunk" out. I threw a little h202 into the res. Hopefully that was a good idea...

pH is staying steady. I left her alone for a day and a half and the pH had gone up, but only to 6.3. So I dropped it back down just a little bit. You can see the new growth popping back up on her, and shes starting to put out more than single fingered leaves.

Thanks for the help guys. Think I'm heading in the right direction now, but I can only assume I'll be needing more help in the near future.

I'll get some more pics up later today of the improvements along with some more hard numbers from the res.

Peace,
FB

 

[fully baked]

And here we go... It has only been 6 days, since the start of this thread, and while she still isn't the most beautiful looking thing, her improvements from then till today are awesome...

pH is at 5.9. ppm is at 1270. Temp is at 23 C. Any cheap and effective methods of cooling the water in there???

New growth is coming in, 3 leaves, 5 leaves, she's liking the new res change out and nutes for sure.

I'm still a little concerned about the color of the roots when I compare it to other pics here at IC. I added a bit of H202 a few days ago. Still waiting for an explosion of white roots....

The screen is starting to fill up, just wondering when you guys think I might be alright switching to flower. She's been under a lot of stress and wasn't sure if you hydro guys would recommend flipping it anytime soon.

Check it out.

Root Porn


Top Shot


Sidewinder...


Thanks for stopping by,
FB

 

[fully baked]

bump for some advice... ^^^

 

[Johnny Blaze]

nice system you got there buddy. im pretty new to the system and you look
like you know your stuff. check out my thread i could use some pointers.

http://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?t=100045

JB