Talk water to me

[skipeye]

I'm starting to realize my water at home from the tap isn't great. I live in a city and have looked up specs on it, and they use chlorine and my PPM's straight out of the faucet sit somewhere around 350. I, of course, pH my water and let it sit 24 hours before using to de-chlorinate.

I have a few water questions though:

1. Is there a good way to lower ppm other than buying distilled water or an RO system? ppm's do go down once I pH, but they're still not great.

2. Do you follow the same rules for your humidifier water? pH/de-chlorinate? I haven't been, and I'm wondering if this is something crucial.

3. I have been giving them pH-ed/de-chlorinated tap water at this point. If I switch it up and start giving them distilled, or some sort of better ppm water, will they suffer? I know it's important to note the soil ppm during that time, but anything else I should think about?

Thanks!

 

[BooMtoLate]

I stuck my ph meter is a bottle of distilled water I got from the store and it’s reading 8.3

 

[bluter]

a lot of it depends how you grow.

hydro is super finicky and can require ro in some circumstances to be successful.

soil is usually a bit more forgiving. biggest issue with using tap is you are not in control of what is in it. adding nutes to get to a target ppm becomes increasingly difficult over the grow, especially with salt based ferts. build up leads to an occasional flushing in those circumstances.


loads of growers do grow successfully with tap. they have gotten used to the water, and tailor their methods to it. it takes a bit of experience to get there tho, and the only way to do it is keep up until you hit on the correct method for your circumstances.

 

[bluter]

I stuck my ph meter is a bottle of distilled water I got from the store and it’s reading 8.3

ro is ok. distilled is not great. can be too alkaline. many places add stuff to distilled to make it unsuitable for human consumption. if i can't drink it i don't want my plants to.

 

[skipeye]

a lot of it depends how you grow.

hydro is super finicky and can require ro in some circumstances to be successful.

soil is usually a bit more forgiving. biggest issue with using tap is you are not in control of what is in it. adding nutes to get to a target ppm becomes increasingly difficult over the grow, especially with salt based ferts. build up leads to an occasional flushing in those circumstances.


loads of growers do grow successfully with tap. they have gotten used to the water, and tailor their methods to it. it takes a bit of experience to get there tho, and the only way to do it is keep up until you hit on the correct method for your circumstances.

Thanks for the insight. I think i need to vigorously test my run-off more often to get a better idea of the water.

Is being concerned about humidifier water crazy? Or should I be concentrating on that too?

 

[skipeye]

I stuck my ph meter is a bottle of distilled water I got from the store and it’s reading 8.3

Yikes! Most of the distilled i've tested was around the 6.8-7.2 mark fortunately. I've only used it or germination though.

 

[Finnicki]

My new grows from seed had leaves turning yellow at the tips. Tap water ph was/is 7.0. I learned that my girls need 6.3-6.5. White vinegar will drop the ph down. I needed 1 1/2 teaspoons to do that. So within a day or so the leaves turned back to a healthy green. I’m sure our city water has chlorine in it. Not sure how that affects our plants. Found ro water from a stand at our local big box grocer, that I will use on the clones. Maybe someone will chime in with their methods. Guud luck.

 

[Nunyabiz]

I use RO water for both watering and humidifier.
RO is dechlorinated, is usually about 6.9 pH and is a blank slate so I know exactly what's going in my soil.
Also your humidifier will last a lot longer if you use the cleanest water you can get your hands on.

 

[skipeye]

My new grows from seed had leaves turning yellow at the tips. Tap water ph was/is 7.0. I learned that my girls need 6.3-6.5. White vinegar will drop the ph down. I needed 1 1/2 teaspoons to do that. So within a day or so the leaves turned back to a healthy green. I’m sure our city water has chlorine in it. Not sure how that affects our plants. Found ro water from a stand at our local big box grocer, that I will use on the clones. Maybe someone will chime in with their methods. Guud luck.

Yes. I particularly like lowering/increasing pH with vinegar and/or baking soda as it tends to solve a longer term problem.

Chorine can essentially poison your plant if your tap water has too much. I would suggest de-chlorinating! Just let your tap water sit for 24 hours before using and the chlorine will evaporate from the water.

 

[skipeye]

I use RO water for both watering and humidifier.
RO is dechlorinated, is usually about 6.9 pH and is a blank slate so I know exactly what's going in my soil.
Also your humidifier will last a lot longer if you use the cleanest water you can get your hands on.

I hear you. It's just so damn expensive! And i've heard RO systems are something you don't want to go cheap/amazon with.

 

[bluter]

Thanks for the insight. I think i need to vigorously test my run-off more often to get a better idea of the water.

run off means little. it's the inputs you need to control. they are the crucial side of the equation. not the outputs

 

[skipeye]

run off means little. it's the inputs you need to control. they are the crucial side of the equation. not the outputs

And I do pay close attention there. Maybe I'm just paranoid.

 

[Nunyabiz]

I hear you. It's just so damn expensive! And i've heard RO systems are something you don't want to go cheap/amazon with.

I buy mine from of all places Whole Foods at .39c a gallon and for whatever reason at least 75% of the time they dont even ring it up, I got two big 5 gal jugs right there in the cart right in front of them and its if they dont even see it and rarely ring it up.
I am not complaining, it makes my RO supply extremely cheap, I might pay .10c a gallon probably.

But even if I paid the full .39c it comes out to under $4 a week and that's watering 2 big 25 gallon No-till pots that drink a lot of water.

That's probably cheaper than buying filters for an RO system.

 

[Emilya Green]

It depends totally on how you grow as to how much work you have to do to the water. Most soil based grow systems do not care one bit about the ppm of your water, you are simply instructed to add a certain amount of nutes per gallon, and because of this, most soil growers don't even own a ppm meter.

Chlorine is often misunderstood and although it is a needed trace element for our plants, most grow "experts" try to advise to never give water with chlorine in it. This is balderdash... the chlorine does not hurt a thing unless you either need to closely track ppms such as in a hydro grow, or if you are running a strictly organic grow where you are letting the soil feed the plant entirely by itself and to do so you have a need to keep the microbes in that soil alive. If you are feeding out of a bottle in a soil grow, you do not need to remove chlorine. Also misunderstood is how to get rid of chlorine or more importantly the commonly used chloramine product that DOES NOT evaporate out of the water. Sitting it out does nothing, but yet it can easily be removed either by filtration, distillation or chemical reaction by adding a vitamin c tablet to a bathtub sized vat of water... boom, the chlorine products drop out of the water as sediment. Chlorine is NOT poison to our plants... I run tap water all the time and grow excellent plants when I am giving fertilizers and not trying to keep an organic soil alive. Even in an organic grow, it would take swimming pool strength chlorine to kill off all of the microbes... the chlorine in our tap water is vastly misunderstood.

Then lets talk pH. Pure water, distilled has to be 7.000 pH, exactly... there are no variations. The only errors here are measurements taken outside of a vacuum where co2 has been allowed in contact with the water. The quick interchange of atoms at the surface of the water does change the pH... so readings of 6.9 or even more variant are not uncommon. The ONLY reason we worry about pH is when using salt based synthetic nutrients. These artificial nutrient formulas are made stable for long term storage by binding them to salt molecules that only break apart at a certain range of pH. Hydro nutes are designed to become mobile between 5.5-6.1 pH and Soil nutes work in the range of 6.2-6.8 pH. Since not all nutes are the same amount of mobile at all pH ranges, our goal as synthetic gardeners is to adjust our fluids going into the soil to the low end of the range, and allow the medium to drift the pH upward through the entire range as the water is being used by the plant.
If you are running an organic grow, you don't even need a pH pen. Microbes do not care about pH. If you are running the new amino-acid bound nutrients instead of the old synthetics, you also do not need to worry about pH.

Runoff. In soil, a total and complete waste of time. In soilless mediums, it is a valid measurement to see what happened to your nutes as they passed through, but in soil, the measurements of runoff pH or PPM are meaningless. Think of runoff as coffee out of a percolator, picking up not just nutrient, but also sludge and micro soil parts and leftover nutes and salts and carbon and anything else in that soil small enough to tag along. It is an unknown what you end up with. The more water that runs through, the weaker the coffee (or runoff) gets. At what point do you think the runoff is at such a level of strength that it has ANY relationship with the soil above, either in PPM or pH? The answer is never.
In soil, simply make sure that every fluid, whether it is plain water or water mixed with nutes, is properly pH adjusted to the bottom of the range you are working in, immediately before adding it to your soil, IF AND ONLY IF, you are working with synthetic nutes. Then, your soil will do what it was designed to do to make those nutes do their job.

 

[SamSmith]

I have a RO unit here that I use for salt water aquaria. I prefer to keep all the trace nutes in the tap water. Cuts down on the cal-mag. Mine comes out to 220-230ppm after a 24 hour bubble.

 

[skipeye]

I have a RO unit here that I use for salt water aquaria. I prefer to keep all the trace nutes in the tap water. Cuts down on the cal-mag. Mine comes out to 220-230ppm after a 24 hour bubble.

You bubble your tap water?

 

[SamSmith]

Airstone in a bucket it aerating it for 24hrs to remove the chlorine. I have had less issues with that combo than I did with RO.

Nothing wrong with going with it as the units are not that expensive depending on how fast you want to push the water through it and how pure you want it to be.

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[Edzzed]

You bubble your tap water?

I have airstones in my reservoir. Plants and fish need air to live so aerated is the way to go for me. It is a 5 gallon bucket with a water pump in there too. I have a small hose I use to water the plants.