Comments

5 responses to “RO Woes!”

1. 

   NayHay

   05/18/2024

   You made the water less stable when you ran it through the RO filter. What did you need to filter out other than chlorine? If your PPMs were super high, was it iron or just calcium? Might have been better just to get a good carbon filter to pull out most of the chlorine and a lot of the heavy metals.

   But if you want to stick with RO, you can worry less about the pH since the “weight” of the water is very low, so the effect of the pH is also low. Your water is like the tip of a pin: if you raised the temperature to 1000F it wouldn’t have nearly the scalding capacity as a gallon of water heated to only 200F.

   You’ll need to practice adding tiny amounts of acid to lower the pH just enough to where you want it.

   I forgot to ask the most important thing: what type of grow? Are you feeding salt nutes, plain water, organic teas? If salts, just follow the feed chart and realize you may need to add calmag, but that should be spelled out on the feed chart somewhere.

   If funky organics, just throw some whatever in there and the pH will change and become less likely to move the more you put in.

   Log in to Reply
2. 

   NayHay

   05/18/2024

   wait, a better analogy would be a cup of air versus a cup of lead. Your old water was lead, your RO water is air. You’re concerned about the effects of a cup of air, but being very light it won’t have much effect. Your old “heavy” water would be much more damaging if its pH was off, just like a hot cup of lead is more dangerous than a cup of hot air.

   Log in to Reply
3. 

   Tokez

   05/18/2024

   First of all NayHay thank you for the excellent explanation. I am running recharge always as it saved my last grow and i feel like it is just an all around great tea. I am currently using grow dots in fox farm soil. But as i move to perpetual harvest I am planning on trying my hand at some coco. Also at that time i’ll be running GH flora series as I just can’t help but mess with things. I originally started with a carbon filter but it raised my ph and ppm substantially. I decided to just go ahead and install an ro so that i could have basically blank water. Then i realized i didn’t know how to properly buffer it. Dr. Harley Smith recommends using fobic acid to stabilize your water. I have also read some that said to do a 20/80 mix of tap/ro. I always aerate my water 24hrs prior anytime i use tap as i have chlorine and not chloramine luckily.

   Log in to Reply
4. 

   Tokez

   05/18/2024

   i forgot to mention. My starting water was around 8.8ph and 480-550 ppm out of the tap. So i didn’t have much room for nutrients. Mostly iron. My old water was very heavy and like you mention it about killed my plants as I was still learning how to balance my ph and nutrients.

   Log in to Reply
   1. 

      NayHay

      05/23/2024

      Yow, high pH and dissolved solid, so yeah, I can see why you went with RO!

      Log in to Reply