First Grow, First Post, First Problem. Advice Needed.

Well first off I would like to thank this community for all the information I have gathered over the last year or so. I am not usually the type of person to post questions, especially when the search function is indeed my friend. I have however come across a problem that I cannot solve. First things first, my set up:

3 Fem Moby Dick. (Germinated 5 seeds but lost two due to Dampning) These plants have been in Veg for 7 weeks, are topped and have had 3 cuttings taken from each plant including the part of the plant that was topped.
I am using Premium Nature Mix by Hortibec, which is supposed to have a neutral ph and is comprised of equal parts Peat moss, compost, and perlite.
1 self made grow tent that measures 5 feet by 6 feet. It is in an attic so the roof is slanted on either side and leaves me with about 7 and a half feet at its peak.
1 600w HPS/MH switchable ballast that can be dimmed to 400w and 250w respectfully.


You can see here, where i have built the tent, have the plants Vegging under the lights and have built an exhaust which leads out a window. I do know I am not getting full use out of my cool-tube but until I can get my hands on an inline fan for general exhaust I just use a fan to pull air out of the room through the light which for now seems to work just fine. I am running lights 18 hours on and 6 hours off. My temps are between 64 to 69 degrees during dark hours and 78 to 84 degrees with lights on. I have an intake pulling ac cooled air into the room with 2 fans for circulation.


Now for my problem, I had been watering my plants every 2 days or so with what I thought was 6-7ph tap water that has sat out for 24 hours at least. I water when the pots feel quite lite and the soil is noticeably dry and I feed every third watering. I use quite a modest amount of General Organics Flora line (Growth, Micro, and Bloom). Usually I will use about 3ml of the growth and Micro and 1ml of the Bloom per gallon for each feeding, sometimes even less for fear of over feeding. The PH meter I had originally been using was quite useless. It is one of those cheap 2 pronged pos ones that I found out are very inaccurate. That PH meter always showed my water as being 8 or above in PH, and without any PH up or down on hand I used lemon juice to lower the gauge down to between 6 and 7. When I finally got a decent digital PH pen I realized that the water I had been using was actually about a 6.5 and I was lowering it further. About 3 days ago I noticed some brown spots on some of the leaves on one plant, and in the last 3 days it has gotten out of control and many leaves are dying and curling up.



As you can see this started out on just the oldest fan leaves and now has started to show signs on the newest leaves as well. These pictures are from the plant that has the most advanced symptoms of whatever this is (this plant was also the biggest and healthiest before this occurred), my other two plants are unfortunately exhibiting some of the same signs of this starting.

I have done as much reading and researching as I can and I have determined that these could very well be signs of Nute Lockout due to low ph in the soil. As such I began testing the runoff of the water. When watering the plants I now put in water that is 6.5 PH but the runoff is reading 4. To combat this I tried flushing one plant with 6.5 PH water to no avail, three times the containers volume of water still yielded 4 PH in the runoff. I then tested one of the other plants and found the same thing, to which I tested flushing that one with water with a PH of 8 to try to bring the soil PH up. Even with the high PH water I flushed it with the runoff still came out as 4.

I am now hesitant to make any other decisions before getting some advice from people much more knowledgeable than I. Any and all help would be greatly appreciated.

Also if requested I can take pictures without the MH light on to avoid the greenish tinge of the pictures.

seems like every two days is a lot personally, but who knows. Are you spilling your water onto those lower fan leaves as you water, and water with the nutrients...or are those fan leaves drooping into the murky soil as you water it??? The bottom leaves of mine that would catch the water and droop into the mud would look something like that. the nutrients in the water, and or in the soil arent supposed to get directly on the leaves, it will burn them.

yeah every 2 days does sound like an awful amount of water......you want those roots to receive Oxygen and if you don't let the soil dry out then your depriving them of it.

Try waiting until they are almost dry, say 20% before watering again other than that looking good.

I think everyone is kinda hitting on the same point 2 days watering is a lot, BUT your also saying that the pots are dry and light. Ive run into this issue myself in the past, what I found it be caused by the roots out growing the container. By needing to constantly have to water that means your feeding twice as frequent and the excess salts left over from the nutes will build up in the soil which throws off pretty much everything and your leaves will start doing that dried out look.. MY suggestion is that your going in the right direction, flush the soil with just water for the next 2-3 waterings (in your case for about a week) They look nice and green so they shouldn't show any signs of nute def, then transplant to larger containers.

Hey guys, thanks for the quick responses! I do water usually every second day because it is clear that the plants need it, if I don't they start to wilt a bit during the daylight hours on the third day. I did at one point spray the leaves with water because I read some threads that said plants liked that, and I did find some brown spots about a week later, but that was in the early stages of the plants lives and I have not done anything like that again, nor are the affected leaves hanging in the pot when I water. I also transplanted these plants into new bigger pots (which I thoroughly sanitized using plant safe sanitizer) about two weeks ago today. Do you guys have any suggestions about the runoff PH? I'll let the pots dry out a bit and water them less frequently if that will help them. I find myself enjoying growing as a hobby but the plants being stressed out the last few days has actually started stressing me out too haha.

NEVER, EVER, get stressed growing a weed.......breathe in, breathe out, load another rip.....think happy thoughts......paint a picture where little bunnys live ( not making a joke I used to watch that guy on PBS and then did a few paintings myself ).....do anything, just do not stress over your plants, 'cause they feel those vibes man.......