DWC Root Slime Cure aka How to Breed Beneficial Microbes

fartoblue

fartoblue

Well-Known Member
This root rot really is a bugger. I have brand new system (modular flood and drain) and my roots are black, no slime. I don't understand it I have kept my temps very low below 65f/18c. Flooded every 2 hours lights on and once during lights off. Roots were pure white before they went into the new system, has me beat.

I flood, let it sit for 2 minutes then drain. Flood height is about 2 inches from the top of the media.
 
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voxultrasonic

Member
fartoblue said:
This root rot really is a bugger. I have brand new system (modular flood and drain) and my roots are black, no slime. I don't understand it I have kept my temps very low below 65f/18c. Flooded every 2 hours lights on and once during lights off. Roots were pure white before they went into the new system, has me beat.
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I’ll try paying it forward since I’ve been neck deep in literature and forum posts on this topic for the last month.
  • what nutrients are you using?
  • Is your reservoir well aerated w/ air stones and/or waterfalls
  • How low are your temps? Apparently too low during lights off can invite mold (which could be the black stuff)
  • Are you using any additives aside from basic nutrients?
  • Is your reservoir completely light proof?
  • Are you ensuring your hands and tools are super clean before touching anything?
  • What substrate are you using?
 
fartoblue

fartoblue

Well-Known Member
  • what nutrients are you using? Botanicare Kind-Tea-Silica
  • Is your reservoir well aerated w/ air stones and/or waterfalls Waterfall 200 litre res
  • How low are your temps? Apparently too low during lights off can invite mold (which could be the black stuff) Mmm quite low as low as low as 14/57 on some occasions
  • Are you using any additives aside from basic nutrients? Botanicare Tea-Silica- Yellow bottle Roots (until week 3)- Photosynthesis Plus
  • Is your reservoir completely light proof? Yes
  • Are you ensuring your hands and tools are super clean before touching anything? I don't wash them more than usual.
  • What substrate are you using? They are started in a small pot of 60/40 maybe a litre, then potted up into clay balls 6.5 litre Aquapot
 
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voxultrasonic

Member
The original small pot - what medium? I used peat plugs for a DWC setup and it introduced algae almost off the bat because the peat doesn’t drain.
Think about maintaining a more stable temp at night.
 
zem

zem

Well-Known Member
fartoblue said:
This root rot really is a bugger. I have brand new system (modular flood and drain) and my roots are black, no slime. I don't understand it I have kept my temps very low below 65f/18c. Flooded every 2 hours lights on and once during lights off. Roots were pure white before they went into the new system, has me beat.

I flood, let it sit for 2 minutes then drain. Flood height is about 2 inches from the top of the media.
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What is your source water? Tap, well, RO? what ppm? That's way too much flooding at these temps. I flood just at lights on, then every 4 hours then just when lights shuts and keep it 12 hours without flooding while lights are off. I do that with temps higher than yours. You don't want the roots saturated all of the time. You might want to run some H2O2 or poolshock periodically to help them recover.
 
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Tuptup

Member
hi i have a full starter kit from biotabs and voodoo juice and rhizotonic, can i make this tea out of it? The biotabs in the set have mycorrhiza, bacteria and here I'm not sure but I think there is also something to feed the microbes because it resembles caramel, I also have voodoo juice which has a bacterial strain and rhizotonic or vitamins ... will I do something about it for DWC?
 
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sven_lordy

Active Member
Heisenberg said:
When a clear snot forms on roots in a DWC, and the normal course of treatment for root disease doesn't work, you probably have something called brown slime algae, which actually isn't algae at all, but a cyanobacteria. It loves oxygen and doesn't need light to grow. It doesn't care if your res is chilled or not.

...

You are not teaching us how to breed microbes, only multiply them.

Correct.
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I've posted in this forum multiple times about maintaining a perfect environment, but still ending up with root rot. If this last attempt failed I was going to give up on dwc.

Been brewing a tea for 48 hours, with orca, ewc and organic honey. Had the tell-tale foam which settled down a bit after 24hrs.

When I took my plant out of the res and started to drain it I couldn't believe the amount of root matter floating around and sludge on the base. I've fully sterilised my res, left the plant roots in h202 for 4 hours, gently pulling the roots, many of which came away. There was practically nothing left vs what should have been there for my stage of growth.

I added 4 gallons RO to the res and aerated it while waiting for the aquarium heater to reach 22c. PH was 4.4, but given the tea was reading 3.6 I decided to wait till I add nutes to pH. I added the 4 cups of tea and used a pump to cover all roots above the water line, soak through the hydroton etc, and even gave the foliage a light drench from the trees water. Am now waiting (9 hours left) before reintroducing nutes.

I'm staggered by what I'm seeing so far. The brown roots are whitening slightly and I can already see small new pure white shoots coming through what was once a brown matted mess.

All this time I thought I was fighting pythium, but now I know it was cyanobacteria.

Obviously this is very early days but I'm already truly excited! It looks like your tea was the magic bullet I'd been waiting for. Will update again in 24hrs, but it looks like you've rescued my grow! And if so, I don't have enough words to express my gratitude. Thank you!
 
Lenin1917

Lenin1917

Well-Known Member
I've been using bleach at 0.25ml/gal in standalone dwc buckets with pretty good results. Now that it's flower and my climates dialed in I'm dropping to .1ml/gal, might cut it completely since my res stay at 68° now. I'm beginning to think sterilization measures really only needed to be taken till I had a canopy covering my buckets. Biggest difference was adding an AC. Had so many problems before I got room temps down.
 

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Heisenberg

Heisenberg

Well-Known Member
I'm glad to see this thread is still helping people. I'm sorry I cannot be around to answer questions as much anymore.

These days I just use Kangaroots for maintenance. IMO it's an incredible product. I do occasionally get slime outbreaks, and it's always when I x-fer plants from veg to bud tent. I believe it's to do with the higher temps, though who knows why it only happens once in a while. In these cases I break out the tea and treat and forget.

I hope everyone grows tons
 
B

BaconSF

Active Member
Heisenberg said:
I'm glad to see this thread is still helping people. I'm sorry I cannot be around to answer questions as much anymore.

These days I just use Kangaroots for maintenance. IMO it's an incredible product. I do occasionally get slime outbreaks, and it's always when I x-fer plants from veg to bud tent. I believe it's to do with the higher temps, though who knows why it only happens once in a while. In these cases I break out the tea and treat and forget.

I hope everyone grows tons
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Is the General Organics EWC discontinued? I can’t find it for sale
 
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cannafield22

New Member
Heisenberg said:
Ancient Forest is Alaskan humus combined with EWC and marketed by Gen Hydroponics/Organics. Without the ZHO you still have an excellent chance at beating the slime. The ZHO simply ensures you have disease fighting trichoderma. Your local shop should have something with trichoderma, ask them.

Meanwhile the tea I was hesitant to use because of the mucus covered air stone is working just fine. In fact I stuck the air stone, mucus and all, into one of my budding buckets and the next day it was clean again. Looks like although the tea was really thick with microorganisms, none of them were harmful, and by the time it's diluted in the res things are fine.
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So after reading all the way up to this point, do you think something like Recharge would work well in the scenario of keeping roots clean and uptaking properly.
 
ProPheT 216

ProPheT 216

Well-Known Member
I wanted to chime in and say everything here is great info. I currently just use bulletproof si and +life and have great results.

What I really don't think people are understanding enough and read right over is that more is not better with these plants. I have come to find most root rot that evolves into these extreme cases is not actually from light leaks, lack of bubbles, or from other issues, but rather over feeding. Feed a lil less and use beneficial bacteria guys

Edit: if you have made sure you have bubbles, you know your Temps are ok, you are as clean as you can be, and your using beneficial bacteria and can't beat the slime even with fresh res and plants your probably just overfeeding and killing your plants. You shouldn't do that
 
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Wastei

Wastei

Well-Known Member
ProPheT 216 said:
I wanted to chime in and say everything here is great info. I currently just use bulletproof si and +life and have great results.

What I really don't think people are understanding enough and read right over is that more is not better with these plants. I have come to find most root rot that evolves into these extreme cases is not actually from light leaks, lack of bubbles, or from other issues, but rather over feeding. Feed a lil less and use beneficial bacteria guys

Edit: if you have made sure you have bubbles, you know your Temps are ok, you are as clean as you can be, and your using beneficial bacteria and can't beat the slime even with fresh res and plants your probably just overfeeding and killing your plants. You shouldn't do that
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Well that's a lot of assumptions without any actual data. You can still get root rot with either bennies or oxidizers regardless of nutrient strength.

Water temp is more important to control than feeding strength and oxidizers are way more effective and have wider range of applications. Really hard to use bennies with water temps above 75F but not a problem with oxidizers.

No benefits with running bennies over oxidizers since there's no medium to inoculate and all you're really doing is keeping more good bacteria than bad by them combating each other in the reservoir.
 
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Trichome Rx

New Member
This is wild this thread has gone on for 12 years. So is the tea an actual solution for the brown slime? Sure seems that way. I'm about to pick up the Ancient Forest iv had the other ingredients this entire time. I believe Aquasheild is now Hydrogaurd, is that correct?
 
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Jwr1880420

New Member
Nightmare is right. Started with 16 down to 2 more like 1 and a quarter. Water temp 63 no more than 68. Hydroguard, 2 air stones each, 1350 gph pump, tried h202 and have just recently tried bleach. Talk about a money pit. 2 months of wasted nutes and electric bills. If you see it, do yourself a favor and start over.
 

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