hydrolyzed
Active Member
Again, thanks for the advice and don't take this as me arguing with you.hydrolyzed......I don't care how much air you have in the rez......The problem is in each bucket. You need a 4" - 6" disk type air stone in the bottom of each bucket on its own 20 watt air pump. This shit were up against love's stagnant water or air. I know a 4 " disk air stone on its own pump seems completely overkill but that's what I did and after 3 1/2 years of battling this thing ...I finally had a batch without the slime and it looks like I'm actually going to be able to get a harvest.
The water in the bottom of the buckets need to constantly recirculate back to the rez. Water left standing in the bottom of each bucket better be bubbling huge amounts of air. Water left in the drain lines had better be moving with a quickness to stay oxygenated. Failure to do any of these rules will result in slime.
Forget what you used to do ....forget what you used to get away with. We are battling some kind of new Alien Superbug. I have never seen anything like it. This thing wants pythium to take over because the pythium is producing something that this superbug likes to eat and this alien superbug likes to suck out all the oxygen out of the water so the pythium can flourish. The only thing that wins is massive amounts of air and tea.
I have, in each tote (my plants sit in the totes, two plants to each), 96 inches of airstone with about 3x the recommended air... I also have a 20 GPM external mag drive pump which recirculates the 100 gallons per system every 5 minutes. Both of those, IMO, are already a lot more than the average RDWC setup.
I really don't think it's my setup. I am focusing now on the actual bacteria and where it's coming from. As I said above it appears even endospores can't pass an RO filter, and with the amont of UV light I have they would not survive that even if they did. I am focusing on areas where residual spores could be hiding. At this point I'm speculating that the type of bacteria is just an extremely fast colonizer and can recolonize a system from only a few spores germinating. I am going to set up a whole new system with absolutely nothing that my old water has touched, and only use water fresh from the sterilizer, along with my old dose of aquashield, and brand new seedlings from sealed packs of seeds I just got......with no random spores to germinate anymore I am thinking I won't see the slime. It is possible everyone fighting this slime, at least the version I have, might just have to replace every piece of equipment in order to be totally slime free. I'm going to give a fresh system a try along with all my now coco plants to test the theory that the spores are just so ravenous that even just a few hanging out in the little 3/4" elbows are enough to reslime the entire system.
I feel this is a likely theory also because my Veg system as I said above has never had a slime problem and use the same water, nutrients, meters etc as the other systems. A attached some pics of the veg system right before I transplanted them into coco to show the health of the plants and the root system...the Tea definitely works...just didn't work in my flower systems.
Good luck to all battling the slime.
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