I actually got humidity up a bit (its at 33% now) by soaking a towel in warm water and hanging it in the closet. It does drop when I open the door to the closet though. I was going to try and lower the PH and I got some PH down from a pet store and was going to mix a very small amount with water.
Few questions on that. I am trying to get my waters Ph to around 5.5 before I use it to get hte soil there too right? Also is testing the runoff a good way to check soil PH? I test water than the runoff and they were clearly different (7 vs 6.5). I may need to get a new water PH tester because i got cheap strips and they dont measure below 6.5. Also I was going to do it very slowly as i heard this ph down is very potent. Once i get the pH down do I need to keep using the solution or should i stop using it for a while? Also is it safe to mist the leaves with the solution with the PH down in it or should i use separate water for that? I am going to try and mist the leaves 3 times a day or so because it make a lot of sense when someone pointed out they are just drying out. Thanks.
You mean get the water to
6.5? There's no need to do that if your water is at 7.0 to begin with. You saw it yourself -- the soil buffers out that tiny bit of base and voila... 6.5 out of the bottom.
Yes, runoff is a good way to check it, but people get carried away about what this represents. It's a good yard stick -- it will tell you if you're getting "way off", but that's it. The runoff method only measures the most mobile fractions of acid vs base; there's alot more buffering that hangs on the microsurfaces of the soil that isn't measured (and this buffering is why you shouldn't stress about this factor in soil).
Don't use pH ups and downs in soil unless you have a major swing to correct. They introduce additional salts that can cause other problems. And it's just unnecessary steps and cost.
Colorimetric pH strips are good for the level of precision we need in soil. They're more reliable and consistent than cheap single-point meters, which give you a kind of "faux accuracy" (as in, yeah, the meter says 6.3 or 7.1 and it looks so precise on the output but, really, those cheap meters are so unstable it's just as likely to be way off). Colorimetry is so simple and cheap that people mistakenly write it off, but the science of it is very tight. Get a bottle of strips for the 5 to 8 pH range for $3 or so - it's good enough.
Some people misinterpret my advice on pH as "Kriegs thinks pH doesn't matter". Nothing could be further from the truth. It matters big-time. Cool thing is that, for so so many reasons, soil manages this factor for us, so all this other stuff (meters, ups and downs, tweaking our water by 0.2 points, etc) is just simply unnecessary.
Check your runoff pH with 5 to 8 paper strips once a week. If you turn up a 5.0 or something some day, PM me and we'll figure it out. As long as you have good soil (you do) and follow basic sense on amounts and concentrations of nutrients, I bet pH will never be an issue.