anybody flush with clearex?

I had 4 strains in 1 aero setup with 1 res. They all are finishing at different times, so what I'm doing to keep from having to harvest them all at the same time, is I'm pulling them out one by one and putting them in a dwc with pH'd water and clearex.

I did this with my purple wreck, and only flushed it for 3-4 days so I could go ahead and crop one out. The second plant to go in the dwc was a blue dream, and its doing something weird; the leaves are all starting to lose their water pressure, and they're all dropping.



The buds are looking/doing fine, and the leaves aren't getting necrotic or anything. Is the clearex possibly doing this? I know it helps clear the salts out, and I know that salts control where water goes. But based off of that logic, there should be more salts in the water outside of the root zone in the dwc, causing the water to get pulled from the plant.

Does anyone know how clearex works exactly? Maybe the concentration is too high? I used the same concentration on the smaller purple wreck and it did fine. My biggest concern is that the salts are not being flushed out of the plant properly.

Thanks for any advice.

I think clearex works by lowering the osmotic pressure of the reservoir with sugar instead of using salts. The theory is that when you use just plain water, the osmotic gradient between the reservoir and the plant will be high causing the cells' water pressure to get high, and maybe rupture.

I figure if you use too much clearex, you will create a negative osmotic pressure and thus suck water out of the plant.

If it was salt instead of sugar, the plant would suck up the salt to balance things out, but because it's sugar, it can't do that.

Check out this article. It's written by the guy who writes the hydrobuddy software:

[h=2]Making Isotonic Solutions For Draining : Preparing Your Own – and better – Clearex[/h]

http://scienceinhydroponics.com/2010/09/making-isotonic-solutions-for-draining-preparing-your-own-and-better-clearex.html

You don't run clearex for extended periods. It's meant to cleanse medium of salt buildups.

End of harvest "flush" is just water no nutes. I don't do this as I personally believe in a low nitrogen / high phosphorous feed in late flower.

I also wanna add this picture I stole from google images:

Sweet, thanks for the replies guys. A lot of good info. And Snaps- on my feed schedule it basically works it's way up to around 2000 ppm, then the second week from harvest it drops to like 1250 and then the last week is listed as a "flush" with 0 ppm, and 10 mils/gallon of the clearex.

I definitely think I'm going to switch out the res in the little 2 gallon dwc and put just straight Ph'd water. There's no way the plant is flushing properly like this, although maybe having everything sucked out of it real quick like that helped with the flush lol.

This is technically my 3rd harvest, but they've all kind of ran together and they're the 1st plants I've done in an aero/hydro system. My buds been turning out absolutely phenomenal, but I'm working on finished product quality in terms of smoothness and whatnot. I'd like to also put these guys in 48 hours of dark at the end, I think I read somewhere that it helps the plant burn starches up and lends to a better flavor. I've done it with a couple of my plants, and it does seem to help a little with smoothness/flavor.

Also, Snaps-- so you don't think that the bud is really harsh without the final flush? All of my soil grows have been organic, or mostly organic with some hydro flower nutes and I just stop using those a week or 2 before harvest and haven't really had any problems.

But I would really like to chop this blue dream asap if not flushing won't ruin all the work. The plant has turned out really well, and I would hate for this problem to get worse or not be able to be fixed bc its been one of the best phenos I've gotten yet. It sucks, I had to lollipop really high bc my tent was full of plants when I put them in flower, so I'm thinking I'm only gonna get 9-10 o's of off these 4 plants, bc the purple wreck only had 1 ounce.

Okay, so I changed the res out with ph'd water right before the light turned out, so we'll see how it does. If it hasn't gotten better by the morning then I'm just going to go ahead and chop it, but I'm almost positive that the clearex was causing it to get so hypertonic.

It was sucking the water out of it so badly that the buds were starting to get soft and everything, like it had been chopped and hanging for a day. Like you know how the buds on the cola start to space out and separate as it dries? That was happening to the buds on the colas with this one. We'll see what happens.