My plants were exhibiting what looked like early signs of a potassium deficiency and it was the day before a scheduled water change, so I figure that is what the problem is. I grow hydroponically in rockwool, and needed to just top off the reservoir with fresh water to bring the ppm down a little from 1150 to 1050 (I am in 3rd week of flowering), so I disconnected the pump while I topped the res off (did not want nute solution spewing everywhere if the pumps came on)...but I forgot to plug the pump back in. I did not check the plants until almost 24 hours later and they looked WAY worse than the day before. It was time for a water change, so I went to dump out my res and found that I forgot to reconnect the pump after topping off the day before. All of the cubes had dried way out, the roots
had gotten pretty dry and begun shrinking, and a whole lot of older growth began getting dark and papery, while the leaves around the top of alot of the budsites were spindly and bright yellow and some older leaves were/are getting holes in them.

I did a complete water change and continued on at the correct nute levels for the stage of flowering that I am in, which was Friday afternoon. It is Sunday night, and while they seem to be doing better, it is not much better.

How long should I expect it to take for 2 ft. tall plants to recover from not receiving a watering for 24 hours and drying out like that? And does that sound like what would be the expected effect of plants in 4" rockwool cubes drying out and getting no nutes for 24 hrs (for the plants to get pretty bad that fast)? I mean they were BONE dry by the time I realized the problem.

Also, I read all this stuff about nute lockout (never happened to me before), but here is where I get confused...let's say that I check my ph daily (sometimes 2x) and I go to check it at some point and the ph has risen to 6.1 or so when the last time I took a reading it was 5.8. Once the ph has gone outside of the 5.5-5.8 zone for ANY amount of time (even if it has only been off by a little for only a couple of hours), does that just mean you are fucked and have to do a flush? Or is it okay for the ph to go above 5.8 for a few hours or so and then be readjusted and all will be okay? Everybody says nute lock occurs at this or that ph for different elements and the solution is to flush, but what if the ph is just off a little between ph checks? Can I just continue as normal and everything will be okay? I am confused about that aspect of nute lockout.

Any help would be appreciated...

I forgot to mention my system is a top-drip GH Ecogrower, so once the timer got plugged back in it ain't like they soaked up a whole bunch of nute solution really quick, either. I let em feed for a good 45 minutes or so to try to get the rockwool wet again and then put them back on my normal timer settings which are feed 15 minutes once every 2 hours.