Second go at first grow in new UC system

If the funk has taken hold yeah....your going to fight a losing battle.
My friend that runs sterile...when he got slimed, we took that whole shit apart and cleaned it, bleached it and started Hypocholorus Acid from the moment we filled it. Not saying you have to do that just my experience. His res has been clean since.
I am running my plants in rdwc full flower, at 650 ppm or 1.2EC. That is pushing it and I have some shitty tips even there.
Depending on how much air you are pumping in there, you may not have to run nutes strong at all.
I am just speaking from what I have seen.
 
Like with me you will not have much success with sanitizer if it already took hold. Though my situation was a bit different because I had the cyano (brown slime) but i did also have a bit of root rot I believe. EWC tea will knock the slime away in days but the brown roots slowly creeped until harvest but was kept in check with the EWC and Great White so it really didnt affect the plant at all from what I observed.

Your constant doses could make the pathogens more resistant. I'll use a hot tub for example, in that situation you keep your water at 2-5ppm and it keeps it maintained and safe but every few weeks you give it a supershock at 30-50ppm (10+ppm is when you do not enter water anymore). You do this due to Bio Film which occurs when the pathogens start to resist the normal dose by creating a protective film and can be seen as blobs of goop colonies that may dislodge from a pipe. By shocking this high you destroy everything and reset your tub.

Obviously we cannot do this with plants as the most they usually can handle is 5ppm and so that is why I suggested to take cuts and start new with a clean system and run it with just peroxide and non organic nutes. Once the system has microbes in it you need to keep it microbes. This is what I beleive my problem was...I added my version of "hydroguard" to a system that had peroxide still and the die off turned into a nightmare.

The EWC works and works well, so if you want to keep at this you need to brew this tea and add it (i know you tried but try again). Maybe change the EWC to a different brand and make sure to brew it at least 30 hours at room temp. give it a sniff before you add it, if it makes you gag its bad. you can store this in the fridge for 7 days and dose using this every 2 days for a while then you can back off a bit. again sniff before you add it, it should smell earthy and kinda sweet.
Sweet and earthy is spot on. Once you know the smell you can pull the res lid and take a whiff. That smell tells you what you need to know.
 
If I was to pretreat any water going into the system with pool shock would that even ensure I was safe if my tap water is bad or is going back to expensive ro the only way to ensure I'm good to go?
 
is your tap water municipal or well?

if muni, does it have chloramine or chlorine?

you can request a water analysis from your muni and they are required by law to give it to you.
 
your roots look fine to me now.

keep adding somewhere b/t 1 to 3ppm maybe 2x a week. you'll eventually notice when that chlorine smell starts to go away. then add some more.

you can get some of those HTH test strips. i don't know what ppm they show but that might help you diagnose when it's gone.
 
Its muni but we often get need to boil notices for a number of reasons.

The problem with the roots is all the root hairs are dying. Those pics are the worse they've looked, never brown or slimy at all. Yet every root is losing its hair. I've searched all over and I can't find one post about this specific issue.

I put about 2ppm of chlorine in there yesterday, based on other posts, so a total of 3ppm. Water never smelled like chlorine and today it smells like the beginning of a fish tank again. Not strong but you know that just starting to smell smell.

I've been reading hydroponic studies and they are seeing pathagens build a tolerance to the use of chlorine as a steralizor.
 
that's strange. when i put 3ppm in my res, it smells like a swimming pool for at least 48 hrs.

i guess you could try h2o2. i personally have never used it so can't help you there.

what i use now (was sterile for many years) is southern ag garden friendly fungicide. same as hydroguard but a million times stronger. it's pretty cheap on ebay. maybe give that a shot?

i used to buy RO from walmart but that got to be a pain in the arse and kinda expensive too. that would at least eliminate your water as the problem until you get it figured out.

good luck man!
 
If it was my water would my outdoor coco plant have the same problems or would the air ratio keep it from happening?

I ask because my outdoor coco looks beautiful yet my indoor dwc has root issues galore. Those leaves are from an animal going to town not a plant issue.
 

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Another weird thing that happened after changing out water and treating with pool shock.

Lower portion of plants look seriously over-fertilzed after just one night. For the entire 2 weeks my solution has stayed constant. Whether it's at 380 or 500 it never dropped or raised once. After switching out water, which takes a couple hours for me, setting the ppm to 480 and adding chlorine the next morning my ppms dropped in less than 12 hours 20 points.

Is it possible that being out of the water for a couple hours and the chlorine together increased the nutrient absorption to such a point it burnt the lower leaves?
 
that's strange. when i put 3ppm in my res, it smells like a swimming pool for at least 48 hrs.

i guess you could try h2o2. i personally have never used it so can't help you there.

what i use now (was sterile for many years) is southern ag garden friendly fungicide. same as hydroguard but a million times stronger. it's pretty cheap on ebay. maybe give that a shot?

i used to buy RO from walmart but that got to be a pain in the arse and kinda expensive too. that would at least eliminate your water as the problem until you get it figured out.

good luck man!

USE CAUTION with southern ag as it was the root cause of my problem. I am leaning to that it was the h2o2 present in the system when added that may have been the cause, or it was a bad bottle. So make sure to drain and rinse the system before going bio!
 
I was using southern ag not hydroguard when this all started but it all looked beautiful till it didn't. Once it went bad with ag already in there that's when I treated with h202 and drained and then refilled with water, nutes, h202 and pool shock.

I only say hydroguard because most people wouldn't have a clue what ag even is.
 
What strength solution are you using for your ag? I'm using a 20:1 @ 1ml per gal. I was using this for 48 hours before ever putting a plant in the system and it still got root issues. Temps were 68-70 with a chiller and for clones with ag those temps should be easy!
 
Alright so I did a check in the buckets and saw white goop growing on the air stones and on the uniseals I had sterilized everything with over 60ppm bleach for 3 days and wiped everything, peroxide right from the start so I dunno... dumped, cleaned and refilled ( boiling hot water and bleach soak for 2 hours for air stones). Threw in my great white and got tea brewing.

fuck this running sterile bullshit, I don't know how some people are doing it that way ffs.
 
Now that I think about it ove had this issue from the beginning even with my other positive grows. Thinking back I've always noticed that roots would grow white and then turn light brown, not rot, then stop growing for a couple days and then start growing white hairs again. This happened over and over till the end of my, own opinion , great grow.

Is this the normal life cycle of roots or should the roots stay pearly white the entire grow?

Other than that I went out to the tent, I thought they were dead yesterday, and I'm starting to get white roots growing out of the damaged ones!

This is classic over-fert right? This happened over night to a few lower leaves after draining and filling and adding hth solution.
 

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I just thought this should be seperate.

I did some tests and if you mix a solution of 1g of hth with 1/4gal of water and add 4ml of solution per gallon you get 1ppm of chlorine!

I did this test with tap water and testing ppm after each addition of a ml of hth solution.

FYI!!!
 
Alright so I did a check in the buckets and saw white goop growing on the air stones and on the uniseals I had sterilized everything with over 60ppm bleach for 3 days and wiped everything, peroxide right from the start so I dunno... dumped, cleaned and refilled ( boiling hot water and bleach soak for 2 hours for air stones). Threw in my great white and got tea brewing.

fuck this running sterile bullshit, I don't know how some people are doing it that way ffs.

Suck!

Here's an interesting link to a side by side grow with hydroguard vs. uc roots aka hth pool shock.

https://forum.grasscity.com/threads/hydroguard-vs-uc-roots-dwc-experiment.1454906/
 
Suck!

Here's an interesting link to a side by side grow with hydroguard vs. uc roots aka hth pool shock.

https://forum.grasscity.com/threads/hydroguard-vs-uc-roots-dwc-experiment.1454906/

Yeah thats how my roots looked all last grow with the EWC tea and Great White, thought it was root rot but they were not goopy or smell (smelled like a flower shop fridge) and plants never showed any distress.

Now the fine roots falling off, I did not have any of that unless i went in the bucket to move roots out of the intake way, this is when I would end up with fine roots in my inline filter.
 
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