GH pH up down all the way around

[NOOOBIENOT]

I agree on the spring water but it states a ppm number on its bottle and yet the actual ppm of the water are a lot higher was my point .Canadian artic spring water never has a ppm reading over 300 and nestle pure life is always over 500 ppm and yet both spring water , point being you have to read the fine print on the bottle and still have to test the water to see what you really have for water quality .my point was don't trust the label on any water r.o. or distilled , spring water etc

 

[TheFertilizer]

I can't believe anyone would sell 500 ppm water. It comes out of my tap at less than 50.

I tested a bottle of distilled water at 3 ppm, but I'm going to chock that up more to my meter being inaccurate.

When you make colloidal silver one of the tricks is to shine a laser light through the water. When it's got silver in it, the light reflects off all the water particles. Well, tap water with a real high solid content level will do that as well. I couldn't see any kind of reflectivity when I shined it through the distilled water until I had generated about 30 ppm of silver particles into it. So even at 30 ppm, solids should be visible if shined through with a laser (of course, those were highly reflective silver particles).

 

[philthegeek]

Straight water has no buffering capacity. A little of the pH up and down products (quite concentrated acids /bases actually) can shift the pH of a bucket pretty dramatically.

I find adding even a little in the way of nutes to the water and THEN testing pH works better.

I have one of those cheap yellow pH pens off eBay and that works very well. I calibrate that in the lab at work against proper lab grade pH 4, 7, and 10 std's on occasion.

 

[Weaselcracker]

Straight water has no buffering capacity. A little of the pH up and down products (quite concentrated acids /bases actually) can shift the pH of a bucket pretty dramatically

I operate under the assumption that the inverse is also true and, depending what medium you’re growing in, straight water* should have almost no impact on the ph of your grow medium. The ph of any reasonably pure (low ppm) water is basically a meaningless value. I don’t bother to adjust the ph of my water.

* Actual pure water will always have a neutral ph of 7. But even a tiny amount of dissolved minerals can radically change the ph value. It doesn’t necessarily mean much. Rainwater for example is normally around 5.6, only because it picks up a little carbon from the atmosphere on its way down- making a weak carbonic acid.
Just because my bucket of rainwater got some pine needles in it and shows a ph of 3.5- doesn’t mean my plants are going to freak out and die from the acidity, or even notice it. Feed them a high ppm nutrient mix with that same ph and it will be a different story

 

[Perfect Sun LED]

Try putting some nutrients in the water, then test PH again. See if the issue is still there.