Help Me Understand Ph?

I am curently still on my first grow in about 2 weeks from harvest.. I am having a hard time understanding ph .. I've tried asking 4 advice at my local hydro shop, but they don't seem to know too much about ph and what they are talking about.

my question is when you water your plant with plain water that reads 6.5 or so .. I assume that this is fine and you do not you need to use ph up or down. but when watering with nutrients I have never come across needing to use my ph down. it reads really low around the 5.0 range .. I then add ph up.. to bring it as close as possible to 6.5 or 7..

when watered I haven't tested the run off lately , but it seems to read out low , which I would assume that the nutrients are going into the roots ??? I also have a soil meter u stick and twist in the dirt and it has a readout to read the ph. I did this the other day and it was around 6.0 ....

my main question is what would I do chase balance this all out and get my soils ph to read out at a correct level... and what should my run off be if everything is correct..

I would really want to be able to understand ph and what it does for the plant.. and any information on nute lock would really help

this is the chart i use.

general rule of thumb, if your ph is below 6, add PH up, it its above 7, add PH down
or, buy a bag of prilled dolomite lime (5$) and dont worry about PH.

pH stands for potential Hydrogen, it's a logarithmic measure of the acidity/basicity of a solution. H+ ions are essentially acid and OH- base, and if there was just as many H+ as OH- ions the solution would be 7/neutral (as in freshly distilled water). Because it is logarithmic it means that for example pH 6 is 10 times more acidic than pH 7 and 100 times more acidic than pH 8.

All you need to keep in mind is that pH affects nutrient availability as CD pointed out. However, other things affect nutrient availability as well and if you are growing in soil using pH Up in all your fertigation mixtures isn't the best option. Lime works over time to neutralize H+ in the soil, and it supplies Ca and also Mg (depending on if it is calcitic or dolomitic lime). With the help of lime and a healthy soil it doesn't really matter if your fertigation solution is 4.8 or 6.9 or anything in between.

Thanks clam .. Thanks null .. Case closed , I understand now .. Happy growing

As long as your plants are healthy dont worry about the runoff,Ive never checked my runoff and Ive grown for allmost 10 years indoors nonstop.If you ph balance your nutes you dont have to worry about your runnoff if your plants are healthy

Thanks therapy .. One of my 4 girls isnt doing so well.. if you have a minute your opinion would be greatly appreciated.. I just put a new thread in plant problems. I have going in 9wks flower .. Unknown bud bagseed , smells like some dank sour diesel or jack herer.. 2wks flowering exodus cheese , was a freebie from thesingleseedcenter .. And a hammerhead (white rhino x medicine man) and a ghs king's kush (og kush x grape ape) .. Planted on 4/25 & 4/20

ClamDigger said:

View attachment 1592940

this is the chart i use.

general rule of thumb, if your ph is below 6, add PH up, it its above 7, add PH down
or, buy a bag of prilled dolomite lime (5$) and dont worry about PH.

Click to expand...

Wow. That is a nice chart.

I ascribe to the rule of the sweet spot being between 5.6 and 6.3.

I've found that the pH problems have pretty much been nonexistent since using Advacned Nutrients. While I'm not sure about the whole pH perfect promise, I definitely don't have to move the pH up and down like I used to when I first begining.

OF course, I might have also just been an idiot when I was first growing. LOL