Oh man good to know! Hahahaha I love the "efforts to kill it off" lmfao. Okay so I have fresh nutrients in there (ppm at 3-400) we'll say.... Next day or two later my ppm goes down (now at 250-350)...add more nutrients. That would make sense because it would be sucking them right the fuck up. Good to know, kinda common sense now that I think of it.
Yes an no, sometimes you'll want to just top off with fresh water. But it is a good gauge as to what your plants are doing.
If I remember correctly in watching a video, after a week this guys ppm went from 600 or so and dropped to about 350 or so by the end of the week. So expect nutes to drop in half roughly by the end of the week? Again if I remember correctly he had just started flowering. I will also be supplementing with other nutrients during watering. Not just the GH trio. So I'll prolly have to pay REAL close attention to my plants then.
You may want to chill on the supplements. There are plenty of commercial growers who rely on lucas only formula of GH and get damn good results. Your plants dont need supplements and it makes it really difficult to determine what they need more or less of when there are a dozen nutrients being mixed into your water. Also for the expectations - don't have any. Every strain is different and will react to the seemingly infinite number of variables differently. Some plants love higher doses, some do not. Lighting and age of plant make a huge difference as well. Right now I have two girls about half way through their 2nd week of flower cycle and their roots fill the bucket. You cannot compare their current feed rate to what it was a month ago or a month from now.
And then vise versa for over feeding. ppm is at 3-400 Monday and then Wednesday their at 450-500 ppm I would want to back off. Doesn't make sense to me why they would be releasing nutes back into the water tho. Plants are trying to purge maybe? I'll do some more reading for sure tho. HUGE help man. Have you grown before or did you jump right into hydro like myself?
Think clearly - if you have a plant sitting in 1 gallon of water with 100ppm and in one week, you see the ppm rise to 150. Well sure the nutrient concentration has gone up 50% but guess what, your water level is half way down. So now you know that your plant is nutrient locked. Why? Because it drank 50% of the water but zero percent of the nutrients thereby raising the ppm by 50%, or 50ppm. The plant is not releasing nutrients, its just simply not consuming them. None of those numbers have any relevance except to make for easy math but hopefully you get the idea.
I will tell you that I jumped right into hydro years ago when a company called stealth hydro had all inclusive kits with 2 part feed and a bubbleponics system. I killed my first plant to pythium bc i ignored res temps for the most part. The 2nd plant was a success in that I could smoke the buds but the yield was complete shit. Then i had a couple good runs all things considered and took a break for a while. Now I'm running with my first photoperiod plants, started from seed and cloned for the first time, and made my own RDWC system with ScrOG. I have learned a little each time and would probably have failed this go around had it not been for past experience, which more than anything taught me the value of patience.
Also if you have extended experience and TO ANYONE READING THIS THREAD what can I expect to see and or what should I shoot for ppm for seedling, veg, full veg, transition and flower? Keep in mind I'll probably be starting with clones. I'll save seeds for when I'm more comfortable. (Clones are harder to fuck up compared to seeds as far as I know)
Again - too many variables. First off people will school you about using ppm as a reference since to calculate ppm, there is no international standard and because of that, one meter may read 500 ppm while another reads 400 ppm and neither are wrong, just different math. EC is considered to be more universal bc all PPM calculations are based off of it. But to over simplify and generalize, if you're running DWC, straight tap water (assuming non hard conditions apply) for seedling, vegging clones prob below 200, full veg around 400, and in flower, up and up as time passes. DWC doesn't require the high concentrations other hydro setups do b/c the nutrients are so readily available to the plant. Think about a 5 gal bucket FULL of roots compared to a rockwool cube.
Crawl before you walk. Start really small. Grab a clone from your source, drop it in a bucket with an airstone from wally world and veg it under cfl. Use only a base 2 part or 3 part nutrient solution. Buy a solid pH meter and EC/TDS/PPM meter - journal the changes. If you make it to flower, switch out the bulb or for a little more fun, add a bobo LED or something. You'll spend almost nothing but the knowledge gained will be invaluable and you can repurpose all that stuff.
Good meters are your best friend.
