Ph Spikes Up and Down

Hey everybody, not sure if this is the right place to say this, but I'm having my ph drop steadily fast. I just recently tried the Seachem line of Alk buffer. Seems to brought me up. Small small grow with a tall girl who is LST TO THE MAX LOL to save her from burning. Anyway, is buffering the same as using Ph up from GH?

ph should normally go up slowly.

your nutes should have buffers in them. GH ph up and down work fine.

If I don't have a ppm meter. How can I tell if my plants are in a nutrient lock? I'm stuck on what should be my next move.
I also think my led is burning my leaves even though it doesn't seem to be very hot.

you can get pH drops. not nearly as accurate but cheap. i'd save your pennies and buy a meter at some point.

you sure you don't have any root rot going on? roots are white not brown and slimy?

light burn turns the top leaves white. if they are yellowing at just the tips, that's nute burn. too strong nutes

They (the roots) seem to have started getting darker. Should I try to flush them. If so, can I just fix the ph on the distilled water I use for the flush? I'm trying not to get upset and scrap my two months worth of hard work.

My plan of attack.
I drain two third of my nutrients good, but ph bad water. (it was barely 5.3) I was testing buffers. It became much worse. 4.9 was the lowest.
Filled it back with nutrients for and ph high water (6.5) borderline high.
I just played the averages game.
5.3+6.5+6.5=18.3/3= 6.1
Think it worked. The Seachem buffers are holding it at 6.0. I believe they are eating. Water levels dropped over the 24 hours. They were not moving for a couple days. Any other suggestions to look out for?

are you using anything to prevent root rot? hydroguard seems to be popular and works. pics would help.

i personally wouldn't mess with any buffers. are they safe for plants? fish? almost all nutes have buffers in them.

I hope you're running a chiller. As far as PH dropping, are they drinking like crazy when this happens? A lot of times you can have too high of PPMs to start with and as they drink more water than nutes plus some evaporation you get a big drop in PH as fresh water goes out and nutes become too concentrated. I know when my RDWC get's going we have some days where we have to add water daily due to the heavy drinking and like I said, sometimes they are drinking mostly water so it's gets highly concentrated fast lowing the PH. Hope this helps.