can someone help me please?

I know these aren't the best quality but its the best I can do. I have a deficiency that started on lower leaves as a ton of brown dots. I mistook it as a cal deficiency but after a few days of reading seems more like a potassium or phosphorus def due to purple stems. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I mean it I would owe you one.

So many problems can look a lot alike. My advice to anyone is first make sure you are not over watering. That is usually 75% of the problems in here....

what nutes do you use and how often do you use.

Strain is moonshine's og ghost train haze. Started from seed. 600 w aircooled mh with 435 cfm inline and carbon filter (gonna need it this stinks so much already). Had pH issues from the start using php GMB in 3 gal dwc with clay pebbles mixed with rockwool. Ro water tested 8 and after 200 ppm of nutes dropped to 7 so I phed down to 5.8 and had to keep dropping every few hours. Ppm didn't rise much so I thought I was good. Then def started showing and I read you shouldn't pH those nutes. So I flushed and mixed the nutes the way I was told at 300 ppm the following week. A couple days later I saw what I believe was nutes burn so I diluted down to 200 ppm and still having def climbing the plant with purple stems here and there. Sorry just trying to be as detailed as possible. So I decided to try my own rules and added calmag, root excellurator and pH down. Temps are 65-75 in room 65-71 in rez. Rh ranges quite a bit between 30 and 50. Tired of messing with it so I ordered GH trio and more pH down since I used the rest of mine. Changing pH down from citric to phosphoric. Am I missing something here? Thank you for taking time out of yours to help mine. Need anymore info let me know and I will get back asap.

Weekly rez changes and I now have 2 airstones running on one pump and a bubble wand on another pump. Roots look good. They were a little brown after a kelp soak but back to white now. The last pic was taken two weeks before the third pic so it is growing but not as well as it should be. And the quality of pic isn't very good but the single leaves are almost completely brown and yellow but not all stems are purple. The new growth is twisted and deformed and I may have given them light burn. I moved the light to 20 inches to be safe. I would like to put it under scrog but don't want to top or defoiliate until problems get fixed.

Maybe try soil or coco coir. Coco gives you the ease of soil with the speed of hydro.

I will try that in the future but I would really like to be able to grow in any setup and screwing up is how I learned most of what I know. I know I can master hydro just need some advice from some people who know more. My first was in soil and I didn't care for it too much. I did a lot of research after the fact and learned what I did wrong. Its hard to pick fact out of all the different info tho. Like the 15 charts saying this is the best pH range for hydro and they are all different

I gotta be at work in a couple hours so I better go to sleep. Thank you everyone for the input you gave and to anyone who adds more while I'm away. Very grateful.

Your plants look fine but you really need to stop swing the pH around. The ideal range for lower nutrients is 5.5 to 5.8 pH but you can use a wider range when using more nutrients such as 5.5 to 6.5. But it is most important not to swing pH around that is your twisted leaves it will be shooting odd growth soon. When we move pH we want to do it at .1 at a time if possible. pH fluctuations, why is your RO water testing at 8.0 pH? I just tested mine earlier and found it was 6.9 pH and thought, ut oh time to calibrate my meter again but it should be near 7. The Calcium problem could be contaminated water also or just hungry plants. Cal Mag Plus is great it makes beautiful plants and goes a long way.

One last thing when I started to adjust pH and add calmag and root excellurator I didn't see a noticeable difference except some impressive root growth. Def is still climbing even tho I got the pH to stabilize at 5.6 after adjusting to 5.5 before 11 hour shift. Added nute mix to top the rez pH stayed ppm at 200. Will update those readings after work.

I'm not sure why it tests so high. I get the primo from Walmart. I calibrated right before testing. ppm is about 10. I have been adding calmag plus at about 150 ppm before adding nutes. This strain seems very sensitive to nutrients but if ppm drops tomorrow I will increase to 250 ppm. I was very concerned about the pH of the ro water so I got a Britta filter and ran the water through before mixing the last rez change it took the pH to around 7.3 then the nutes dropped it to 6.8. I will update measurements after work and if the ph is still stable I will adjust by .1 a day because that sounds like solid advice. Thank you.

OK it was bugging me so I looked it up on growweedeasy.com(where I get most of my info) and purple stems with lower leaf problems is most likely a phosphorus def. Which is best absorbed between 5.5 and 6.2. According to that site so my pH is 5.5 and as long as my ppm and pH don't swing while I'm at work I should just watch for changes over the next few days correct? And I think I understand why you said check for overwatering ganjagurl420 because there was a couple times I thought they looked over watered and realized I forgot to turn the air pump back up after testing pH and ppm. Sad part is i haven't smoked since January because my conscience made me think of how hard it would be for my girl if I lost my job over it, so I don't even have an excuse. Seriously though thank you all. Failure is not an option for me so I really appreciate your help.

I am new to the forum as well so if I broke any rules let me know and it won't happen again. Before I forget mejuana from the different sites I looked at calcium is best absorbed between 6-6.5 will it still be OK at 5.5-5.8 with lower nute levels and did you find that info online or from experience? If online can you send me a link or site to find it. I don't doubt what you said cause it makes sense, i would just like another tool to answer my own questions.

I realize now your problem is your plants are hungry and your ppm is probably low so they are taking something which is raising your pH my guess is Nitrogen. If your nutrients are burning your plants get better nutrients as you mentioned above but I am sorry there is a lot of posts so if you want to talk nutrients bring it up please. If you think you are right on the deficiency you can pH down to 5.5 then pH up to 5.8 then pH down to 5.5 again assuming you are using standard pH up and down. Looking at your photos again I think you are just light on everything.

What I meant by if you think you are phosphorus def you can bump it with your buffers, funny but true. If you are right the swing should slow down if you are wrong stop doing it because it gets in the way to add too much of your N P K. Add a quality nutrient such as Dynagro and use a higher ppm. I would need to google to get a good starting ppm for dwc with dynagro it has been awhile.
pH Up: This base solution is formulated using potassium hydroxide and potassium carbonate.
pH Down: This acid formulation uses food grade phosphoric acid to lower the pH to the proper level.

In answer to your last post no don't raise your pH. Always from here forward keep your pH 5.5 to 5.8 your plants want consistency and this is the best pH. Besides honestly your plants look fairly healthy to me. If you are concerned about Calcium get a wetting agent and foliage feed but don't go overboard with that and not under the lights it can burn the leaves.

Ok I know GH Trio is good I've a friend who uses it. Adjust your pH and go to work but don't mess with them much. When you have time tell me why you think it was nute burn. I will try to look up those nutrients of yours but I need you to not do a shit load of stuff to them.. Research foliage feeding but don't do it.

Thanks that was some solid thought out advice. I am grateful to you for taking the time to do that for me. And I thought nutrient burn because of yellow tips on new growth along with an increase in ppm. But it wasn't a large spike so it could have been light bleaching as well. I moved the light to 20 inches. My main concern with using more nutrients is the full recommended dose from advanced nutrients for plants size and res comes out to about 300 ppm without calmag and pH sits in the high 6s and is very stubborn to change. They claim chelated nutrients allow absorption at a range of pH 5-8 but I tried leaving it alone and the problem spread faster than when I messed with it. When I bought those nutrients I was under the impression that they were some of the best quality available. Another forum said they lock pH at 5.8 every time but only at full dose which is a 1:1:1 ratio at 4ml per liter. I tried contacting them to ask what to do at lower dose but no response. That's what made me reach out for help cause its bad when I mess with it and worse when I don't. I foliar fed when problems first started. I used a very weak mix of calmag plus and kelp right before lights out plant loved it but i didn't want to continue doing it and make things worse. I will keep the pH between 5.5 and 5.8 and keep updating changes and not mess with the mix until you have a chance to get back. Thanks again for your time.

Micro 4-0-0 @ 4 ml per litter
Ingredients: Calcium nitrate, potassium nitrate, urea, iron EDDHA, free form EDTA, iron DTPA, iron EDTA, manganese EDTA, boron, zinc EDTA, copper EDTA, sodium molybdate and cobalt chelate.

Grow 1-1-6 @ 4 ml per litter
Ingredients: Potassium nitrate, magnesium sulfate, monopotassium phosphate, ammonium sulfate and potassium sulfate.

Bloom 1-3-4 @ 4 ml per litter
Ingredients: Monopotassium phosphate, magnesium sulfate and potassium sulfate.

They said you can mix at different rates to get different ratios but all the Nitrogen is in the Micro it doesn't matter how you mix grow or bloom Nitrogen is the same so it seems limited on that. You can't add Cal Mag because I am confident that breaks pH perfect technology. Also their feed schedule seems high on Nitrogen already. Have you added Cal Mag Plus with 2-0-0? If so then I am thinking that may be the N burn so maybe follow their instructions this time no Cal Mag. It is now no wonder why your pH is swinging though these nutrients aren't designed to be diluted. The other idea I had was using 1/2 the micro and replacing it with bloom, not the veg one. ammonium can't be over a certain amount for hydro so without knowing the levels I can't recommend more.
http://scienceinhydroponics.com/2009/02/nitrogen-fertilization-in-hydroponics.html

Between 11 pm and 4 am the pH went from 5.5 to 5.8 should I adjust to 5.5. And should I flush when I get home and try a full dose? I will also check Lowes to see if their ro has a lower pH. I know those pics didn't look to bad but they are poor quality pics. The lower leaves are very brown in person. I will have to look at the bottles but I believe the micro is the main pH controller so cutting that concerns me. I will check the bottles for ammonium levels and post what I find before acting.

I am about out of time but I was just searching to see if you could use Lucas formula with my nutrients and it looks like you can't do it so Im not sure about playing with the ratio. Someone did say if you use jungle juice with php bloom it will work but that will have to be a later experiment. One thing that is misleading about my nutrients is they have directions for seedlings, young plants and mature plants. If they aren't meant to be diluted why tell people to. I think I will try a full dose after work to see if it keeps pH stable and see if it burns. If you think its a bad idea let me know because I will take your advice over my own.

And another concern I had with adjusting ratio is risk of lockout. I am still new and this is my first hydro attempt so I still don't fully understand how much of this I can add before that gets locked out.