Hey man.... So i haven't rolled anything up in a bit. Hows your new crop?
Wanted to tell the story of my first stint with root rot. I think its kind of entertaining, but didn't want to get into it when you were having issues. So I had a mother plant that was in a 5 gal bucket and I was doing DWC. I had two airstones in res and 3 3/4" net pot holding her with hydroton. So she just wasn't growing and the new growth that had developed was just yellowish. Couldn't figure it out. But i noticed my water was nasty and I really didn't think too much about it cause my roots looked ok. The root mass was round, pretty much filled the bucket, and was a little bigger than a basketball. So I pulled the lid off the bucket with the 4 foot plant and everything. It was topped 4 times so it was pretty much a bush with a stem bigger than a quarter that was busting the net pot. My point is she was big.
Anyway, I took the lid, plant and all into the bath tub and started to wash out some dead root mass. She had eaten the two airstones. There was a little bit of brown on the roots. At this time i didn't want to do too much damage to the plant so i was being very gentle washing out decaying root mass. Next two days, not much improvement, but also not looking any worse. So I got a little more bold and was pulling dead roots out. Started with the bottom and it was no big deal...they were mostly brown. So I reached my hand up in the mass to find my airstones, found this huge lump that was really compressed, and ripped it out. The roots had spun themselves into a ball about the size of a fist that was tighter than you could possibly replicate. Not even with a vice cause it wasn't crushed; it was just a huge knot. So I took a knife, got my airstone back, and threw out the rest. My nutes were brown, so I didn't put much consideration into the brown color of roots. But after that she quickly regrew some pure white feathery looking roots, and rebounded with incredible new green shoots and fan leaves.
So that was fun. My root rot was locking out nutrients for a while. The whole time I was diagnosing it as N deficiency and throwing more nutes in every couple of days.