using bleach

Thanks for the info 1itsme. I got some DM Zone on the way so hopefully I can stop using the sodium hypochlorite soon. Do those chlorine meters work for this? The ones that read cl2? There are some cheap ones on eBay but I'm not sure if they're what I need or want.

well Fuckit I decided last night I wasn't gonna wait three weeks for a big storebought tray for veg. So I tore my homemade flood tray down emptied it out and put in my 2x4 storeboughts. Everything worked out great. I was able to reuse my fill manifold and only had to do some minor drainwork. Zero dollars out of pocket My babies be gettin great drainage now.

Since drenching with imid I have found significantly fewer root aphids, although a few are still hanging on. I'm gonna give it a few more days as it is systemic and maybe do one more drench. I need to get some gnatrol on em cuz these damn gnats are outta control. I'm more worried about the aphids tho. With better drainage the gnats will have less food. I'm going through sticky traps like crazy.

Drenched my flower tables last night with azaguard. Prolly gonna do my flowering moms tonite.

Fuck I'm tired.

Does anyone know if the imidacloprid interferes with gnatrol?

Or how long to wait after drenching with imid to drench with gnatrol?

Edit: I also got my flower rez's changed today treated first rez with 4oz bleach solution/50 gallons and final rez with 4 oz/h202

the tests ive used are all chem. the common one is for available chlorine, theres a second one for total chlorine (including chloramines). in a res i wouldnt think it would be that big an issue as you change the water frequently. ub (i thnk was ub i cant find the thread) said that most of the comercial hydro ops (crops) use a chlorine product for pyth prevention. my guess would be that its cal hypo or another pool shock rebranded for the greenhouse industry. if youre having success with cal-hypo i would just go with that, but def store it outside away from anything flamable and other chems ( its a pretty strong oxidizer) ill try to find out the product he was talking about and whats in it. hth

Pythoff is the only one I've come across so far and it is Chloramine based.

maybe they use chloramine bc it wont react with urea or ammonim?

1itsme said:

maybe they use chloramine bc it wont react with urea or ammonim?

Click to expand...

I'm not knowledgeable enough to comment on that but I'm sure one reason is because it doesn't decompose like sodium hypochlorite

OK, I did something drastic. After 2 days since flushing out the bennies and returning to the bleach treatment the plants have yet to recover or put out new roots. I took one of the plants and hacked most all of it's roots away down to the rapid rooter plug. Most of the roots looked like shit, anyway. I mixed up a foliar spray to 300ppm using fish and seaweed fert, GH RapidStart, cal/mag, superthrive, pure blend compost tea, and a sprinkle of great white powder. I sprayed all the plants down with this and I'm curious to see what is going to happen! Will the plant that received a buzz cut recover and put new roots out? Will the other plants recover from the foliar feeding alone? Who knows! Let's find out!

*I transplanted a bare root clone from soil to the hydro system 2 days ago... It's looking OK, but if it doesn't start showing some new growth by tomorrow then I think I may need to actually flush out some of the water and replace with bottled water. Perhaps there is something in my tap water that is causing a nute lock out? I've had DWC plants growing fine in it before, though... However, I know that my tap water is "hard" and always leaves water stains, perhaps it is too much calcium causing a lock out? Mmmmm, now I'm really tempted to go buy a couple bottles of distilled water and do a 1/2 flush.

Rapid rooters huh? I started using the root riot brand a few years ago and had phenomenal results. 90%+ success ratio. A few months ago my success ratio started dropping. Nothing major down to maybe 75% or so. A month or so ago I opened a new bag and noticed a strong musty smell. Smelled like mold to me. Even though there was no visible mold. I took the bag back to the store and they had several other ppl. Come in complaining of the same thing. The guy at the store called the supplier and they said the manufacturing process had been changed but the musty smell was ok. Now the bags have a perforation hole in the top corner.

I do not like this new composition of the r/r's I still am only getting 70% or so to live so I am currently trying a few in rockwool cubes.
I ripped a few rr cubes open with some of the clones that were lagging and found fungus gnat larvae in almost everyone that failed to root.

Now I don't know if it is just gnats from my room laying eggs in em which is possible. Or if they are coming contaminated either way I am trying to get away from the rr's and go rockwool for cloning. The way I figure it the hole in the bags is only providing entry for gnats while they are laying in some warehouse and shit, and that musty smell is like a homing beacon for gnats.

One piece of advice I can give you is to try to cut some of the excess cube away without cutting your roots. This will allow the cube to dry out some. I cut the top corners off at a 45 and this helped to dry the stem out which was leading to damping off a while ago for me. Also make sure you pot the cube above the flood line. The roots will find their way down into the water. You may have to hand water for a few days until they do. Those cubes absorb so much water it is not good to have that on the stem all the time.

Another thing if you decide to cut roots later is to leave the taproots if possible. They will regrow fibrous roots later even if they look a little brown now. Any fibrous roots that were dead/brown you probably did well getting rid of.

When I treated heavy with bleach it took almost a week to see healthy new root growth.

Dwc is a recipe for disaster when it comes to root problems. IMO
I know lots of ppl. use it successfully it just seems more finicky to me. Also I can see how it is harder to get rid of root rot cuz you cannot let your roots dry out. Which is the most effective means to clear up rot problems.

Anyways good luck brother. I hope thing start going better for ya.

Finally after a couple of weeks of nonstop rez. changes and shit things are looking soooooooooo much better over here. Words can't describe how good I feel right now. I checked thoroughly last nite and couldn't find a single live aphid so I went ahead and drenched all my moms with azaguard for the gnats.
I have Great new root growth and lush foliage.

happpy happpy happy

I am also really liking running the dyna gro for the first 4 wks of flower so far. Far less leaf drop and overall they just look better. Still run dynabloom from5 wks on though. I may mix it 50/50 with the grow next rez change.

I can already tell with the mats and new trays I will be able to go back to 1xday flood if not more

Enjoy your last few moments on this earth gnats and aphids...... Soon you will all be dead


sorry for the super long post

Edit: I have never been a fan of foliar feeding. It seems I am always battling high humidity as it is. I don't like to give mold spores any more help to thrive.

I've always had to be weary of moisture issues with RR plugs and rockwool. Never had an issue with them smelling bad. I get at really good seed germination rates with them once I learned to keep them from getting too wet. I germ in a paper towel first and then go to RRs. My last set of clones (my first time cloning) I did bare root style. I secured them in a piece of foam and the stems hung bare into the bubbler container. Wasn't a great success but I got 6 out of 12 to root and I only needed at most 4 for my grow.

The tap water here was reading around 250ppm but now it's coming out at 350ppm. We don't even drink it unless we run out of bottled water and we're desperate lol.

Glad to hear you got your problems resolved! I really hope I get mine fixed up a lot faster than a few weeks or else I'm just gonna throw them into dirt and say fuck it. In fact I am going to wait till next weekend and if they haven't turned around they're going in to dirt pots. We're moving out of this apartment in September and I'll need 8-9wks for flower time and I want that to be done by the first week of September.

All my hydro grows before were with distilled bottled water and I feed my soil plants bottled water so I'm really starting to believe now that my issues now are with the tap water here. It is delivered to the tap through copper pipes from 1960... meh.

Anyway, I just flushed out 12g of water (half of the total system) and replaced it with bottled distilled. I'm not going to adjust the nutes or add anything other than for pH'ing the solution and I added 15mL of bleach which I'm letting settle through the system now before I pH. IF I start to see a turn around over the next day or two in the plant health then I will probably flush another 12g out and replace with distilled and I won't use the tap water here again.

The DM Zone I ordered yesterday should be here Tuesday or Wednesday this week, I'm excited to get that and stop using the sodium hypochlorite. The 2 local hydro stores didn't have it in stock

I hacked most all the roots off the plants, removing all of the rot and then I soaked them one by one in a strong h2o2 solution... Seeing bubbles come up was a good sign that bacteria was suffering the ultimate consequence. I gently squeezed the RR cubes to remove excess moisture and I lowered the water level in the DWC tanks to promote a slightly drier RR plug. I cleaned all the net pots, soaking them in a strong solution of bleach water and then rinsed them off. I added an additional quantity of bleach to the rdwc system to ensure whatever was floating around would be greatly decimated. Removing the rotted roots and soaking in h2o2 should have greatly helped in reducing spore count and then treating the water with more bleach to remove whatever was in circulation should have greatly helped... Only time will tell now.

it's not unusual for my tapwater to swing 100 ppm or so let me know how the dmzone works.

well I went three days without dosing with anything and the rez. last dosed with bleach is still clean but the rez last dosed with h202 had a massive slime bloom overnite. So I dosed it with 5 oz. of the pool shock solution.

The bugs are almost gone. Drenched entire veg w/gnatrol today Prolly gonna do a few more gnatrol drenches over the next week. also did another sulfur burn in flower. I'm gonna wait a few more days and prob. do one more imid drench in veg to ensure no aphids are hanging on.

I am really liking this dynagro foliage pro. So far.

The bleach solution cleared all infection out of the system through and through. I've had no signs of anything for like a week now. Unfortunately after hacking the roots on them there plants they are mighty pissed off and don't seem to want to pop out new roots. I flushed the system and re-filled with bottled distilled h2o, chiller set to 65f, lights raised up, around a 1000ppm floranova Grow nutes with Superthrive.... It may be another week before they decide to root again, I'm not sure but I'm starting to wonder if I shouldn't just cut my losses and start over with some fast growing autoflower ak-47 seeds I have. Even the one fully rooted clone I have, which I transplanted into hydro from soil - hence my pythium infection (I swear I'm so fucking stupid sometimes), has stopped growing and it looks like it is in a state of suspended animation. The leaves aren't yellowing, but it ain't growing. The leaves on another plant are actually standing up and looking happy but, still no new roots.

I started the DM Gold Zone yesterday... It's the only thing in the tank now. No bleach or h2o2 or sm-90.

So, what do you think? Should I start over? The plants are at a vegetative size that once new roots do emerge they will have pretty rapid growth but, I'll only be able to veg them till around the end of the month. If they don't put out roots for another week, then I'd have like 1 week to veg before having to go to flower. I'm worried that a proper-sized root system will not form quick enough to support even a modest yield. I've grown the auto ak47s before and it only took 6wks from seed to harvest and two weeks to dry and cure to get a really nice smoke. Seems like a really short time, but it was a really rocking smoke. They're not fem seeds, though. I was thinking I would start a bunch and the extras I would pot in some pure sand or vermiculite (or a mix or some other inert/easy to remove medium like hydroton) so I'd have extras ready and easily transplanted in the dwc system... Keep a male separate to collect pollen, too.

OK, sorry about the long post but what ya think? At this point I'd be happy with some yield than no yield and my window of opportunity is dwindling.

Well any new roots yet steve?

joe macclennan said:

Well any new roots yet steve?

Click to expand...

I scrapped 4 of the 6 white russians. I found one that by some miracle sprouted a bounty of new roots from the RR plug over the course of maybe 12hrs. I was shocked as none of the others had yet to root.
I took another white russian, short one with very dense mostly healthy vegetation, and planted it into a pot of sphagnum peat moss. It had no new roots showing, though. I sprinkled the RR plug with great white powder and buried the bitch. I know it'll recover and pull through in soil. Soil is the Plan B for me... I always get acceptable results and it's easy.

Yesterday I was getting ready to do a quick half flush on the hydro system to lower the PPMs and as the water drained out of the molasses colored water (Floranova grow) I could see the 2 5" air stones... Covered.... Thick... In brown algae cyanobacteria shit!!!!

The one air stone had a good 1/2"+ thick jello consistency colony covering the entire porous surface! There was very little free floaters, surprisingly... This is with DM Gold Zone in the h2o. I did a whole flush and clean with bleach, blah blah, 2 shitty hours later I had flushed, refilled and flushed again, installed 2 new filter pads in the canister, installed another inline 9w UV sterilizer, refilled and added: distilled h2o, DM Gold Zone, SM-90 and after a quick trip to wal-mart (and following the instructions on the first page for mixing up Pool Shock - Thanks Joe) I added 17oz of diluted calcium hypochlorite.

I tossed 4 of the white russians... Then I potted the newly sprouted autoflower ak47s (5 of them) and added the one rooted white russian. Ran just pH'd distilled h2o with the above mentioned sterilizers and a dosing of cal-mag for a little N + cal/mag/iron. Today I added in FloraNova (about 300ppm). I figure that I'll run 18/6 for the next 2-3wks until the autos begin to flower, giving the white russian time to re-gain a root mass and veg out more. Then I'll switch to 12/12 to flower the WR and the autos will probably suffer a little bit of yield but that'll be easily made up by the extra veg time on the WR.

All that said my RDWC is now like this; Cultivation tanks > canister filter/internal 9w uv > chiller > inline 9w uv lamp > cultivation tanks. Sterilized with a total of 18w UV, SM-90, DM Zone, CaClO2. Maintained at 65f +-1f.... Nothing in there has been transplanted from soil so it's all clean. I sterilized the RR plugs I used for the autoflowers with a long dip in DM Zone treated water and then rinsed with bottled distilled water. If I have any more pathogen related root problems I am going to flip shit and get soil pots out and toss the fuckin hydro shit lol.


**I'm wondering if this cyanobacteria is being introduced through the air pump. I plan to turn the pump off a few times a week for just a few minutes to allow the h2o with the added sterilizers to come in full contact with the air stone and even back up the air hose a bit.

Too bad ya had to scrap em but at least you saved a few.

As far as the bleach goes. I am running waaaaay lower levels than initially.

You said you added 17 oz of the diluted solution? This sounds like way too much based on what I have learned over the last couple of weeks. How many gallons are you running?

I am down to dosing a 50 gallon rez. with two oz. of the cal hypo solution upon rez. change and I have not had to redose after for up to a week. I tried running a fresh rez with no cal hypo and developed pretty bad slime at three days.

I would mix up a fresh batch of nutes with less bleach. Around 1 oz/25 gallons of rez seems to be working for me.

I read on the deff. thread that excessive chlorine levels start locking out nutes, as well as frying roots.

As far as turning your air pump off I would not. Esp since you are dwc. If you pull the stone out and clean it well with bleach upon fresh rez. change w/ bleach added you should be good.

good luck man, you'll get it. My shit is finally under control(for now anyway)

2 oz of the pool shock (2 grams/gallon) solution and rez still crystal clear @ 5-7 days

yeah the cal hypo is super strong, i'd be careful with that. otoh joe's exp with it sounds realy promising. you get rid of the root aphids yet? i'm suprised that whatever you were using for the root aphids didn't knock out the fungus gnats. the time i got root aphids last year i used evergreen 2 ml per gal as a dunk for the roots and 2 ml per in the res after + sprayed everything with it. seemed to knock them out for me. otoh fungus gnats seem pretty easy to kill. root aphids do get wings in their last stage tho. i thought they were just super tough fungus gnats for a while. their a pita on one thread about them someone was saying that their born pregnant and the larva can make it even if the mom is killed =/. gl guys

http://readynutrition.com/resources/better-than-bleach-use-calcium-hypochlorite-to-disinfect-water_19062010/

They're using 3.5g per gallon to make a solution and treating it at 1oz per 100oz to sterilize drinking water... We're doing 2g per gallon and only 1:128. Also, their using high strength CaClO2, the pool shock I got is only like 45% chlorine.

I'm doing 1oz per gallon initially, so if you're getting good results with lower dosage than I'll cut back and see how it goes.

As the CaClO2 breaks down it degrades in to h2o and calcium... The fact that pathogens are constantly being introduced from air pump, metering tools, etc that you place in the water, the chlorine should degrade fairly quickly. Wish I knew exactly how fast so maybe I'll buy a test kit in the near future to check for total chlorine and free chlorine concentrations.

Turning the air pump off for a few minutes (2-3) will not cause harm. If it means getting CaClO2 in contact with the stones then it's worth it. May be it's entirely unnecessary, not sure. I seem to only get the brown slime at high nute concentrations.

nice link ty

1itsme said:

. you get rid of the root aphids yet?

Click to expand...

Yessssssssssssssss..........................so far anyways That imidacloprid is some bad shit. Didn't touch the gnats tho.

Fungus gnats are almost completely irradicated in veg. after several drenches w/gnatrol.

A few gnats hanging on in flower after several drenches with azaguard. I am thinking about drenching flower 1x more with azaguard and switching it up to some evergreen next time.

I finally got to flood my flower tables 2x today for the first time in months I think I am going to do 2x every other day for a while and see how things go.

I am almost a week into this rez change and no slime with only the two oz initial cal hypo treatment. Rez. temps as high as 74

I will check and see what %the pool shock is