Need advice from some pro's on brown slime.

ok. so i'm alittle new to growing but i have been reading and learning for alittle over a year now. My current setup is 3 5gallon lowes gray buckets with 6in net pots on them, hydroton, 45 lt per min air pump and 2 6in air stones per bucket. i'm currently growing under clf's (a big boy light is coming soon) but i know that's not the problem. I have all 3 buckets covered with panda poly to help with the heat. I have thermometers in each bucket and the water temps don't get above 67-68. The temps 3in the tent are 68-72.

at every res change i rinse out each bucket, wipe them down with alchohol and rinse again. i use RO water, ph perfect AN sensi ab grow, magi-cal, a pinch of great white and Heisenburg's tea.

on sunday i changed the res. i had alittle bit of brown gunk on the roots from 2 weeks ago but i have been putting bennies in the water all week and that was curbing the problem. i could tell the tea was working and i was getting new, fresh white root growth everywhere. every 2 days they get a splash of tea. so i thought everything was fine. changed the res, put in more tea, and placed them back in the tent. i noticed more growth yesterday so i thought everything was ok.

i checked on them this morning and it seemed like they grew alittle over night, so good. then i checked the water to make sure the brown shit was under control, expecting to see white roots. nope. all brown and crappy. i'm so frustrated. i was using the recipe for sucess from BC in my previous grow and it didn't seem as bad as it is.

could it be from the AN nutes? I'm not being a hater on AN, i really like them and the ph perfect works great for me. i'm pretty much willing to try anything at this point. I have SM-90 and H2O2 as well, but i know i can't use them with the tea. one or the other.

i thought great white was going to be the fix, it wasn't. then i brewed the tea, it helped but it's still here. i'm going to get brand new air stones today and change them with the res next time.

i'm lost and need help. any advice?

thanks.

-Sterner

there are a lot of different tactics that people use to combat this problem. what has worked well for me is 3-4 ml per gallon of 35% h202 and 4-5 ml per gallon of hygrozyme with my nutrient mix. i then top off every day or as needed with ph'd water and h202 at 3-4 ml per gallon. now if your roots have brown slime and shit clinging onto them, take them to the sink before your change out and rinse them off best as you can. a garden hose with sprayer is my favorite method for more severe problems. in my experience one good spray off then routine maintenance with the h202 yields smooth sailing. (i also do change outs every 7-8 days which im sure helps)

can/should i cut the infected roots out or just rinse them? i was thinking h202 with ph'd water in a spray bottle.

if it has gotten to the point where you have sections of your root mass that are soft/mushy, brown, slimy etc... definitely cut those off. never cut off more than 1/3 the total root system. if the roots are still firm, but with brown slime attached, just rinse them thoroughly as you are able. if they are a manageable size i take them to the sink and run water through them, gently pulling the roots apart to get the shit off of them. if they are too big, i run a garden hose with sprayer and blast the shit outta them, then change to a fresh container. i have the fresh solution (with h202 and hygrozyme added to my mix) ready so i can put them straight into it. i have never lost a plant to root issues. changing the air stones is a good idea too. i use sweet water airstones and soak them in a 20/80 h202/water mix between grows.

h2o2 soaks as discussed works amazingly well. I do this until I pull my screen over. After that, I just add about .5ml per litre / 2ml per gallon of 50% H2o2 into my DWC res every 3 days.

Never seen any gains in quality/yield from bene's (apart from increased growing costs!) so I just use H202 without organics. Even if no light leaks and a chiller I still get brown slime algae with any bene
s so I ditched them after experimenting with them for a year and went back to peroxide.

Using h2o2 means you can be incredibly lazy with your grows in my experience. I never buy new airstones or buckets between grows like many do .

ok. after doing more research and talking to the hydro store guy, i'm going to switch over to H2O2 treatments and stop the beanies. just dosed the buckets last night with 2ml/gallon of 29% H2O2. we'll see how this goes.

hygrozyme will help break down the funky parts of your root system along with regenerating new growth and its completely safe to use with h202.

thanks Guerrilla. I'll pick up some of that.

Just checked on them and i have noticable improvement since last night. I thought about the dosing amount today and realized that i didnt give them enough so i shot another 14/ml in each bucket tonight. That should be the same as a 50% per ml dosage. Going to pickup Hydrozyme asap. -Sterner

carefull with the hygrozyme it can make the shit explode in nasty slime. also Any hydrogen peroxide is going to kill all bacteria so hygrozyme with it is a huge waist of money in a personal opinion. If the H202 is working then keep it that way.

hygrozyme is an enzyme product. there is absolutely no bacteria in it. it is 100% safe to run with h202. spreading disinformation is a service to no one.

Don't use Hygrozyme! If you have brown slime this will only increase your problem. There is another enzymatic product out there that is not sugar based, 100% organic and bacteria free - SLF-100 by South Cascade Organics. If you use it it will fix your slime problem without having to use H202 and without having to cut your roots. I have seen it take care of this problem every time perfectly. It is the answer to slime build up but it does so much more than that. Paradise Supply in Grants Pass, Oregon will tell you give them a call.

Generally when we see slime occurring even with good res maintenance (as you appear to have) combined with tea use, it's almost always due to some organic additive which is giving the slime an edge.

Some people who were using completely synthetic nutes noticed slime occur when they did a foliar feed and allowed it to drip into the res. Wet Betty is a popular 'wetting' agent to use with sprays, and is organic.

I noticed this blurb about the PH perfect sensi formula.

Some of the improvements include the addition of Wet Betty, an organic surfactant which increases uptake of nutrients into your plants. Humic and fulvic acids have also been added for growing faster, stronger, and bigger plants, with less stress.

Click to expand...

Perhaps it's time for a test bucket using something other than AN.

thanks Heisenberg! that makes complete sense. it seemed like the outbreak would happen right after i would do a fresh soup change out. i'm currently brewing a fresh batch of tea and on my next nute change i am going to use the BC line that i had before. the plants didn't grow much at all this week and it seems that the slime is hurting them bad. i may do a change over tonight instead of sunday and just throw some great white in there with the BC nutes until the tea is done on sunday.

ok, so i did i a change out on Sunday. all 3 got new air stones, fresh soup from technaflora BC line (just boost, grow and magi-cal) and a good dose of tea. I cleaned as much off of the roots as i could. the tahoe og was worst then the other 2. need to cut some roots off off my cheese bc they were just falling off and dead. i checked on them Monday night and they seemed ok but no real change. i checked on them today before work and i can already see the roots getting better. not much but some new white growth on all 3. i think my tahoe will be stunted for alittle bc of this but it seems like she will recover.

thanks everyone who tried to help and thanks most of all to Heisenberg for figuring it out! I knew h2o2 was not the complete fix for this and just a band-aid but i always believed in the beanies. i am now a tea brewer for life.
I am also looking into the Dyna-grow line of nutes since i've been reading alot ppl have really good luck with them. I'll be starting a progress thread soon and i love pics.
here's a shot of all 3 of my ladies. left to right- Cali connection Buddha Tahoe OG, Dinafem Cheese, Barney's Utopia Haze. the tahoe had a 1.5 week late start too. i will be cloning all of them this sunday.



thanks
-Sterner

guerrilla medic said:

hygrozyme will help break down the funky parts of your root system along with regenerating new growth and its completely safe to use with h202.

Click to expand...

my question is can hydrozyme be used with teas and microbes as long as h2o2 isnt being used? i would like to try it but if its guna kill those idk, an is AN sensizyme like hydrozyme? or completely different?

If you're doing dwc, don't use anything organic. The point of dwc is high aeration. Any hydro system that has high aeration ( that would also include aeroponic 4" pipeworks) never reaches it's full potential with organics. Using pure blend organic nutes, I harassed my total system ( 450 gallons spread through 9 reservoirs) to the point of root loss and hair loss (my own!) Switched to my generic GH micro/bloom and I will never look back.

E Doh907 said:

my question is can hydrozyme be used with teas and microbes as long as h2o2 isnt being used? i would like to try it but if its guna kill those idk, an is AN sensizyme like hydrozyme? or completely different?

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i would not use hydrozyme with the tea's. i've read to many contradicting things about it. but i can tell you is the tea absolutely works!! i've been using the tea, BC Boost, BC Grow and Magical. that's it and to say i've had a explosion in growth is a understatement with zero slime and super clean buckets!!

Have you tried straight up chemical part a/b mixes on this system before? If you're saying the aforementioned tea works better than straight up chemicals and gives you healthier roots than a non-organic part a/b then congrats. Have you done a side by side to see the differences? In my experience , the organics almost always gave me root/growth problems in dwc and the chems never ever gave me a problem under any circumstances. If you go to the riu thread titled " how to dwc" you will find corroboration to this claim. Although, I do love to use molasses, only in the end for a 3 day flush ( 300 ppm Sweet/75 ppm of any one of the three from the foxfarm tripack). This way I need not worry about bacteria growth because they're going to get chopped anyway 3 days from the start of the partially organic flush. .02

problemsolver said:

Have you tried straight up chemical part a/b mixes on this system before? If you're saying the aforementioned tea works better than straight up chemicals and gives you healthier roots than a non-organic part a/b then congrats. Have you done a side by side to see the differences?

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I believe hes talking about a microbe tea not meant to have nutritional value, but simply to provide microlife that can live in the roots. Looks like hes using synthetics for his actual food.