First time Hydro Issues - DWC

So its my second grow and i decided to do half my plants in a DWC and its not working out as well as i had hoped.

All seeds were germinated at the same time and planted on the same day into Jiffy Peat balls (will not be using these again).

I will post about the whole set up if needed but if not ill just hit the major points first.

I panted the first seedlings to come up that were the biggest in the hydro (5 5" net pots in a 18 gallon tote with a 2 head pump putting air in both sides) then put the rest of the smaller ones in MG soil in 8" pots. well today they are 12 days old and the soil plants are much bigger and bushier and healthy looking. Granted i did my last grow in soil and am prolly a bit better at it this time around but they look amazing compared to my last grow but thats not the case with the hydro.

The hydro plants seem 3 to 5 days behind and not nearly as leafy, and on top of that 2 of them are turning a bleachy looking yellow in the new leaves with only the leaf veins staying dark green. i am using Technaflora Starter Kit nuets @ 1/4 strength Transplant Mix (sugger daddy, root 66, and green b-1). i also foliar feed a few times a day with 1/10 strength MG veg plant food.

my ph is jumping around a bit but 3 of the plants in the DWC seem healthy just growing really slow.

The yellowing started about 3 or 4 days ago and i haven't been able to fix it so im ready to ask for help =). I had a similar problem with one of the soil plants early on but i just fluffed up the soil to allow more drainage and it cleared right up. But then that wont really work in a DWC lol. again its only in the new growth and to give you an idea of the size of the plants there 3rd and 4th nodes are opening up atm. 4th still closed but you can see it.

i know its hard without pics and i will get some up when i get off work but ill look around on the site and see if i can find any other plants that look similar.

If i have to guess i am saying zinc deficiency prolly cause by ph being to high. i had it at 5.5 when i mixed my nuets and didnt expect it change much in just a day or 2 but when i checked it last night it was around 8 which i think is bad for DWCs. the little vial and drop test for ph is not really cutting it but the 3 probe meters are so high.

Do you run the aerator full time, or on a cycle?

If the babies leaves are turning yellow they likely want more food do a res change and ass another mixture 1/4 strength.. proper PH in hydro and DWC is 5.5 - 6.0 ( 5.8 being perfect) try and shoot for 5.5-5.8 if it fluctuates and gets to 6.0 dont worry anything higher than that might cause problems. Usually when leaves start turning yellow like that its due to the plant eating stored food from the leaves and not the roots.

ok thanks, actually that makes alot of since, i do think that my ph was to high but in both the plants that are effected there roots have not made it to the water lvl yet, sooo maybe i had my order wrong. rather then something being wrong stopping them from growing roots as fast it was the lack of roots to get food with that was stunting the growth. i will up my foliar feed and water from the top for a few days and see how it goes. i just mixed the nutes a few days ago and the other plants are doing fine (not impressive growth like i expected from hydro but still healthy plants) so i want to try and hold off on mixing new nutes unless i have to.

Thanks a bunch for the replies =) +rep

Justin00 said:

ok thanks, actually that makes alot of since, i do think that my ph was to high but in both the plants that are effected there roots have not made it to the water lvl yet, sooo maybe i had my order wrong. rather then something being wrong stopping them from growing roots as fast it was the lack of roots to get food with that was stunting the growth. i will up my foliar feed and water from the top for a few days and see how it goes. i just mixed the nutes a few days ago and the other plants are doing fine (not impressive growth like i expected from hydro but still healthy plants) so i want to try and hold off on mixing new nutes unless i have to.

Thanks a bunch for the replies =) +rep

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I dont use a drip system in DWC the bubbles splashing around hit the roots and it gets it food that way, however I do top feed I just dip a cup in the water and pour it over once a day, I do this until roots are visible usually one - two weeks.

ok well i think i pretty much figured out the problem....lol and wow i feel dumb.

in the transplanting stage on my instructions that came with the netus it has a sentence at the beginning of how to mix the netus that tells how to make a foliar spray and my brother just read it off to me as part of the res nutes so i had about 75ml of B-1 green in my res that was not susposed to be there. the water dark brown and muddy looking and gelled on a lot of the roots, even the healthy plants. so i flushed the res and mixed up a new batch of veg stage nutes. they might have looked a tad greener this morning but im not sure, by the time i get of work this evening i will prolly be able to tell.

From my experience the ph will flucuate every 24 hours while using DWC. I always try to shoot for 5.8-6.0, however if it's 5.5-6.5 I'll just let it go and see what it does. I believe from what I've read the ph should flucuate anyways between 5.5 and 6.5 because the nutrients are all uptaked better at different ph levels, with 5.8 being a happy medium for most if not all of them. When I had problems with DWC usually I fixed them with just a simple res change. I would change my res every 2 weeks anyways up until the last month because near the end the girls would drink nearly all of it anyways. My reasoning for changing it was that I could still see if the ppms were correct but had no way of knowing if the npk rations were still correct. Hope this info helps.