Hot Diggity Sog
Well-Known Member
Chapter 12 - Day 50 of 12/12
Plant health is suffering. I no longer think it has much of anything to do with my feeding strategies and I now believe it is PH related. I don't remember if I shared this information or not, but a few months ago I began messing around with building my own PH/EC sensor, among other things. At the time, I used a BlueLab Guardian for PH and EC monitoring. It has served me well over the years but as I was writing code for my sensor, it was dramatically different from the BlueLab. Blue Lab would say 5.9 PH and mine would be 5.35. Figuring my code was bad, I worked on this for a few weeks until ultimately I decided to buy some more PH testing equipment...just to be sure as I had no way to know if BlueLab was actually measuring correct or not. To my surprise, the PH Pen I bought measured exactly what my device was and it seemed BlueLab was way off. Calibrating devices fixed nothing for me. Since then, I've been using both BlueLab and the PH Pen. Sometimes they are the same, sometimes they are close and sometimes they are way off. Like this morning...Pen says 5.98 and Blue Lab says 5.2. When you're trying to be very precise, there is nothing more frustrating than not being able to trust your tools.
Yesterday, I switched from using DIY nutes to bottle nutes. I'm going to finish this grow with bottled nutes and I know exactly how to feed with these because I used them for years. This will remove one variable (my feeding my own salts) and I can hopefully pinpoint the PH situation.
If anyone can look at these pictures and provide insight, I'm all ears. It is curious how many of the plants show no, or very little, signs yet some are pretty sick.
Plant health is suffering. I no longer think it has much of anything to do with my feeding strategies and I now believe it is PH related. I don't remember if I shared this information or not, but a few months ago I began messing around with building my own PH/EC sensor, among other things. At the time, I used a BlueLab Guardian for PH and EC monitoring. It has served me well over the years but as I was writing code for my sensor, it was dramatically different from the BlueLab. Blue Lab would say 5.9 PH and mine would be 5.35. Figuring my code was bad, I worked on this for a few weeks until ultimately I decided to buy some more PH testing equipment...just to be sure as I had no way to know if BlueLab was actually measuring correct or not. To my surprise, the PH Pen I bought measured exactly what my device was and it seemed BlueLab was way off. Calibrating devices fixed nothing for me. Since then, I've been using both BlueLab and the PH Pen. Sometimes they are the same, sometimes they are close and sometimes they are way off. Like this morning...Pen says 5.98 and Blue Lab says 5.2. When you're trying to be very precise, there is nothing more frustrating than not being able to trust your tools.
Yesterday, I switched from using DIY nutes to bottle nutes. I'm going to finish this grow with bottled nutes and I know exactly how to feed with these because I used them for years. This will remove one variable (my feeding my own salts) and I can hopefully pinpoint the PH situation.
If anyone can look at these pictures and provide insight, I'm all ears. It is curious how many of the plants show no, or very little, signs yet some are pretty sick.
