Too Much Calcium?

My tap water is 225 ppm. I just bought a pool test kit that measures CA hardness and I'm showing between 100 and 250. Is that too much? Could I be experiencing nutrient lockout due to hight CA? After adding the nutes (GH), it looks like my CA is between 250 and 450. Given that my total PPM is 690 right now, that seems horrible. It's one of those color match things so I can't be sure on the exact number.

My first grow has gone horribly. I was having res temp issues that I corrected. Now I'm concerned that my tap water is so high in CA.

just keep reading threads, you will figure it out. my first grow sucked too. but agian, most your answer's are in a sticky or thread.

These are pics from 5 days ago:



We then had our first weather cold enough for me to use the heater and I exposed a serious flaw in my ventilation. I had room temps in the 90s and res temps in the high 80s. To make matters worse, I was running foggers that were heating the res and I was only running air stones in the control bucket. I got hit with slime and root rot so I had to clean everything with h202 and I "repotted" the plants so I could apply 3% h202 to the hydroton. I put the plants (in the rapid rooters only) in 0.5% h202. This shocked the plants pretty badly and all of them had their bottom leaves turn brown. Here's pics from today:



I've got my room temps running 68-73 now and my res temps are down to 69. I'm running RDWC under 3 240 watt Blackstar LEDs at 16". I bought a big pond air pump and I'm running three 14" stones in each res so that the water is now "boiling." My PH has been steady at 5.8 and my PPM is 620. Water is clear. I'm putting 1.5 oz of 29% h202 in each day (my total volume is about 36 gallons).

I can't give a better CA reading with the strips I bought. They just give you colors to match and a number for that color.

I'm thinking I may need to go half and half on tap and RO. The problem is I have RO water in the kitchen but I can only get out about 2 gallons at a time. I don't like going out and buying a ton of distilled water -- has to look suspicious.

Thanks FloGro. I plan to suffer through the rest of this grow so I can keep learning like you're suggesting even though it would be faster to restart from scratch. I'm sure I have plenty more mistakes to make so I figure I'll make them on this batch assuming they survive long enough.

I'll drop the nutes and hope for the best.