Annabanana
Well-Known Member
Hey. Just FYI, my tap water is ~320 ppm usually. So I bought a Brita Water Filter jug and a couple of extra cartridges. I used it on my water and then repeated the process...and the water was still 320 ppm. Complete waste of money.
I used rainwater whenever possible but mainly my tap water all throughout my veg phase and had no problems. I'm having some problems atm but that's week 7.
I'm no expert but that's just my experience with hard tap water.
FarmerMark
New Member
i have used rain water for years, the only problem with it is if you let it sit outside for long you get all types of nasty stuff in it. Little bugs, and green growth on the sides of the container.
gr0w
Well-Known Member
You need to introduce Oxygen to the water. Grab a air pump and air stone from online/ pet store. Put some water in a bucket and run it for about a day. (Depends how much water)
My ppm is 320 and I fill 5gal bucket and and have two air stones sit for 1 day and the ppm drops to about 200
Bucudinkydow
Well-Known Member
Ive used numerous filtered water over the past year and have been able to determine no advantage over my well water. My ppm is, however, actually super low. I compared it to my daughters twice filtered municipal water mine out of the tap is exponentially lower. My ph is somewhat high. I've occasionally used ph down but again notice no appreciable difference.
I never understood that particular... logic(?). Why short your nutrients due to something else? And if it's not something else, then you wouldn't be shorting your nutrients.
My tap water has traces of several things making up its total dissolved solids, but it's mostly calcium with a little bit of iron. So I don't add a "cal/mg" product (that often includes iron). I sometimes add a little Epsom salt to balance out the Ca:Mg ratio. Other than that, I just mix my nutrients and go.
<SCRATCHES HEAD> Maybe it helps to know that "nutrient" is a generic term instead of one substance and, therefore, that "# ppms" is not a measurement of one single thing. Actually, in this context, "PPM" is not a measurement of anything - your meter is measuring electrical conductivity, then performing a simple calculation to give the user a "PPM" number. But it's not going to give you the actual parts per million of TDS in your sample; the only real way for you to get that would be to take a sample, evaporate all the moisture from it, and weigh the remaining material (on a very, very accurate scale). But anyway, EC (or "TDS") meters cannot measure every dissolved solid that could potentially be in a sample - dissolved organic solids and colloids don't significantly affect the EC of a solution, so their presence (or absence) won't change the reading. Additionally, that conversion factor used in calculating a "TDS" number from the measured EC of a sample is typically .5 or .7. At any rate, it's not a different number for each and every dissolved solid in the sample - but the various salts require different conversion factors in order to get an accurate idea of the actual PPM. Potassium chloride is .5 to .57, sodium chloride is .47 to .5, some minerals require a CF as high as .85, et cetera. Or to put it a different way, if you add enough of each of 15 different substances to bring their specific concentrations in the solution up to 100 parts per million (each) and then stick an EC - or "TDS" - meter into the resulting solution, it's not going to read 1,500 PPM.
An EC/TDS meter is good to show trends, I suppose. If your solution level is dropping but your reading increases, then you know that your plant is consuming more water than nutrients. But these meters cannot show you what your plants are consuming. Have they consumed more nitrogen than potassium? How much calcium is left in your solution? An EC/TDS meter cannot answer such questions.
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