Drooping leaves and plant stop taking in water

A friend has a plant that is having a major problem. It started a couple days ago and he has been unable to fix it. Started out with the leaves drooping. He realized that he had over watered the plant, because the every other day top off filled the entire 5 gal bucket and started to come out the top. Once he realized the bucket was full he took out about half the water. This is a DWC setup, by the way. After a day with less water in the reservoir, the plant had not improved at all. So he took out even more water so that there was only a couple inch in the bottom. So today he checks and that plant is the same and hasn't taken in any water at all. This plant has been having issues with gnats, but he has been doing a SM-90 treatment once a week, for the past couple weeks. The SM-90 don't seem to be fixing the gnat problem, so he is considering trying something else. This is a 6 month old plant that has been growing under flouros, so its a pretty large plant, and he is a bit freaked out that he might loss the plant.

A good amount of leaves have died but there is enough still in good enough shape that if he can fix the problem, he should be able to save the plant.

He thinks it is either a root rot issue or something to do with the gnats. The root ball that he can see, looks heathy so he is not sure if the problem might be inside of the containter, 8" sqare container, where he can not see.

Anyone have any ideas as to why the plant would just stop taking in water?

I'm a soiler but I think you should have just given them time to dry up and exfoliate what they took in, but that's just a noob's point of view

thechoroid said:

I'm a soiler but I think you should have just given them time to dry up and exfoliate what they took in, but that's just a noob's point of view

Click to expand...

Lowering the water level to the point of only having an inch or so in the bottom, where there is about 6" or so of root exposed inside of the reservoir and another 8" inside the container, not having water on it for over 24hours, should be enough time for the root system to dry out. It just seemed like it stopped taking in water completely.

Does anyone have any real ideas as to what would cause this issue?

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