Ph

When I fill my water butt up which is only 25 litre I ph the water acordingly give it a few minutes steer it a few times and it will change
Check it ten minutes later nothing will have changed from the last reading

Then I check it the next day and it's changed

I've just bought a new bluelab oh pen which is working fine??

Using tap water? Minerals in tap water will cause that to happen.

Check the ppm of your tap water and I bet it's high. Don't have a ppm pen then contact your town or water supplier and ask for a water analysis report. Should be free and can likely be e-mailed to you. Tell 'em you want to make beer and were told you should find out about the water quality if they ask.

If it is hard water then start using RO water or mixing your tap water with RO to dilute the minerals in it.

You do have calibration solution for your pH pen I hope. Should get some storage sol'n too to keep it in when not using. Check your pen's website for directions on the care and feeding of your pen to get the most life and accurate results with it. Treat it badly and buy a new one every year instead of 5 - 7 years. PPM pens last a lot longer and need way less care.

Good luck.

OldMedUser said:

Using tap water? Minerals in tap water will cause that to happen.

Check the ppm of your tap water and I bet it's high. Don't have a ppm pen then contact your town or water supplier and ask for a water analysis report. Should be free and can likely be e-mailed to you. Tell 'em you want to make beer and were told you should find out about the water quality if they ask.

If it is hard water then start using RO water or mixing your tap water with RO to dilute the minerals in it.

You do have calibration solution for your pH pen I hope. Should get some storage sol'n too to keep it in when not using. Check your pen's website for directions on the care and feeding of your pen to get the most life and accurate results with it. Treat it badly and buy a new one every year instead of 5 - 7 years. PPM pens last a lot longer and need way less care.

Good luck.

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Thanks for the reply I do t use a ec pen but I have a blue lab ph pen did a test last night if I leave the water out the night before it doesn't fluctuate if I a just the next day pretty sure you are correct in what you are saying tho my ph is 7.1 out the tap

What happens with harder water is that when you first add your pH down it knocks the pH down like it's supposed to but the carbonates in the water keep reacting with the acid until the acid is used up then the pH goes back to what is was or just slightly less than original.

When towns or cities get water from lakes it is usually below pH 7 so they add calcium carbonate to raise the pH above 7 as acidic water will corrode any metal components in their systems like pipes, pumps etc. Ground water sources are almost always higher than 7 and can be loaded with all sorts of mineral salts/carbonates that mess with plant growth.

For people that grow in pots these carbonates are left behind after the plant has drank the water so each time you water the plants more carbonates build up in the pots so pHing your water to say 6 has little effect on the carbonates in the pots and the root zone stays too high in pH. Regular flushing helps to remove the excess carbonates but flushing is such a PITA.

The same thing happens with hydro systems so once you have added back the same amount of water that it would take to fill your system then it should be drained and refilled with a fresh batch. When the plants are little and not using much water you can go a few weeks maybe before you've had to add back that much but when they get big you might add back a full batch every week so weekly refills are needed.

With RO or distilled water I have gone a full grow without ever changing the water in my DWC tubs or in my soilless potted plants without problems. I once did a side-by-side grow with two tubs and didn't change the water in one the whole grow and it performed as well or better than the one I did two changes on. Now I just do a change after the plants have finished stretching and that seems to work really good.

We don't have town water here and get our house water from a large dugout, 80x50 meters/yds, on my property. We buy RO water for drinking and for my plants in town. The ppm of the town water is over 400 so wouldn't want to use it for my plants anyway. My dugout water is about the same plus has minute bits of algae and likely all sorts of other living things in it. The few times I've used real soil to grow my plants I water once with it so to inoculate the soil with beneficial bacteria.

@Yesdog gave me a lot of help with understanding ph maybe check him out he might can shed some light on it too. Not disagreeing with @OldMedUser , just saying he helped me a lot.

Bareback said:

@Yesdog gave me a lot of help with understanding ph maybe check him out he might can shed some light on it too. Not disagreeing with @OldMedUser , just saying he helped me a lot.

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Old meds on the money as far as carbonate 'bounce'. Carbonates and phosphates are really tricky as far as precipitating nutrients out and buffering. At least for tap water I'm trying to 'break' some of the carbonate buffer ahead of time, sulfuric acid works, nitric acid is supposed to be even better for that (keeps the cal/mag soluble and available). This also makes the existing calcium into a more available and useful form for your plant.

The standard phosphoric acid used in pH down is not great for dealing with carbonates- the phosphates start to run into solubility issues easily (calcium and magensium phosphate) and will stop working as well, plus starts interfering with CalMag availability. Basically the standard ph down probably shouldnt be used in the amounts youd probably need to deal with tap water.

Just condition your water a few days in advance- I bubble with airstones to help gas off CO2 and chlorine, both of those can fiddle with your ph, and trapped CO2 will slow down the carbonate decomp. Take the ph after its gassed off for half a day or something, it'll be a little different. Aim to get the ph maybe... 0.2 points below that (keep bubbling). Don't use phosphoric based ph down for this... trying to use battery acid (diluted) or technaflora ph down. Adjust maybe twice a day as needed. After a few days of that, the ph should stop moving as much, and you should be able to mix your nutes and everything in, ph to desired, and should be more stable.

EDIT: and if you go the sulfuric acid route... make sure to dilute it, and be safe. its pretty strong stuff on its own, can blind you.

Many thanks to the both of you makes a lot of sense now going to fill my water butt up and leave it 36 hours with my air stone on

And also buy some RO water to try out to

Cheers again

I wouldn't recommend battery acid as it is contaminated with all sorts of heavy metals etc. Doesn't have to be very pure to be fine for batteries.

I've always used concentrated sulphuric acid to drop my pH in my tubs in the past. 4 or 5 drops would knock it down to 5.4 from 6.2 in a 50L tub. Then when the tub needed topping up with RO a few days later it would be back up to around 6.2. Always only ever used RO water so didn't have to deal with carbonates and other crap in my water. I used to be a chemist in a hazardous waste facility and brought home quite a few things from there. Still have most of a 9lb bottle of 95.9% analytical grade sulphuric acid and a quart size bottle of nitric acid of the same strength. Made my own calcium nitrate with it for fun using lab grade marble chips. lol

Bubbling any water is a good thing to do whether doing hydro or soil growing. Charges the water good with oxygen before it's used and gets the chlorine out at least. For soil grows it's really a good idea as the O2 content of tap or RO water is no where's near as saturated with O2 as it could be. Often wondered it running pure O2 from say a welding tank would give noticeable results because when you bubble air thru the water you are also adding nitrogen gas which is about 78% of the air we breathe.

I went back to school in my early 30s and spent 3 years getting a diploma in environmental chemistry. Never could make much money doing that stuff but it sure comes in handy when messing with nutes etc. Built my own still so I can recover the solvents I use to make oils. Hard to get things like ISO or naphtha here so I can really stretch out what I can get. ISO is about $25/gal and even the Coleman Camp Stove fuel I buy to distill for the naphtha is $20 a can. Using a couple of flat-bottom boiling balls and some copper tubing I've even distilled my 9x filtered butane so it can be reused. That stuff ain't cheap either.

Without that diploma and all the industrial training I've had in hazardous waste disposal I'm sure I would have blown myself up by now.

OldMedUser said:

I wouldn't recommend battery acid as it is contaminated with all sorts of heavy metals etc. Doesn't have to be very pure to be fine for batteries.

I've always used concentrated sulphuric acid to drop my pH in my tubs in the past. 4 or 5 drops would knock it down to 5.4 from 6.2 in a 50L tub. Then when the tub needed topping up with RO a few days later it would be back up to around 6.2. Always only ever used RO water so didn't have to deal with carbonates and other crap in my water. I used to be a chemist in a hazardous waste facility and brought home quite a few things from there. Still have most of a 9lb bottle of 95.9% analytical grade sulphuric acid and a quart size bottle of nitric acid of the same strength. Made my own calcium nitrate with it for fun using lab grade marble chips. lol

Bubbling any water is a good thing to do whether doing hydro or soil growing. Charges the water good with oxygen before it's used and gets the chlorine out at least. For soil grows it's really a good idea as the O2 content of tap or RO water is no where's near as saturated with O2 as it could be. Often wondered it running pure O2 from say a welding tank would give noticeable results because when you bubble air thru the water you are also adding nitrogen gas which is about 78% of the air we breathe.

I went back to school in my early 30s and spent 3 years getting a diploma in environmental chemistry. Never could make much money doing that stuff but it sure comes in handy when messing with nutes etc. Built my own still so I can recover the solvents I use to make oils. Hard to get things like ISO or naphtha here so I can really stretch out what I can get. ISO is about $25/gal and even the Coleman Camp Stove fuel I buy to distill for the naphtha is $20 a can. Using a couple of flat-bottom boiling balls and some copper tubing I've even distilled my 9x filtered butane so it can be reused. That stuff ain't cheap either.

Without that diploma and all the industrial training I've had in hazardous waste disposal I'm sure I would have blown myself up by now.

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Very cool! I often wish I kept with chemistry throughout school, always loved the stuff and it made a lot of sense to me, but besides hydro haven't really had opportunities to use any of what I learned.

Yea, as far as battery acid I actually ended up just buying dilute reagent grade stuff from Denver lol. If I had an even remotely safe place to store and work on this kinda stuff, I would have just gotten some concentrated nitric and sulfuric. The shit is pretty useful, thought about trying to play around with mineral recovery at some point (gold or whatnot). Jealous of your spoils

The pure O2 is interesting- I've heard dissolved gasses compete with each other in water (CO2 vs o2 vs n2). Could possibly increase your dissolved oxygen. I've got a sealed tent with CO2 injection, it's cool to see the ph drop with the added co2 (can also see CO2 from carbonates when i add acid to the water). I think O2 raises the ORP, might work kinda like H2O2 at high concentrations.

Cant wait until I have enough space to do things right (and hopefully not blow myself up).

OldMedUser said:

I wouldn't recommend battery acid as it is contaminated with all sorts of heavy metals etc. Doesn't have to be very pure to be fine for batteries.

I've always used concentrated sulphuric acid to drop my pH in my tubs in the past. 4 or 5 drops would knock it down to 5.4 from 6.2 in a 50L tub. Then when the tub needed topping up with RO a few days later it would be back up to around 6.2. Always only ever used RO water so didn't have to deal with carbonates and other crap in my water. I used to be a chemist in a hazardous waste facility and brought home quite a few things from there. Still have most of a 9lb bottle of 95.9% analytical grade sulphuric acid and a quart size bottle of nitric acid of the same strength. Made my own calcium nitrate with it for fun using lab grade marble chips. lol

Bubbling any water is a good thing to do whether doing hydro or soil growing. Charges the water good with oxygen before it's used and gets the chlorine out at least. For soil grows it's really a good idea as the O2 content of tap or RO water is no where's near as saturated with O2 as it could be. Often wondered it running pure O2 from say a welding tank would give noticeable results because when you bubble air thru the water you are also adding nitrogen gas which is about 78% of the air we breathe.

I went back to school in my early 30s and spent 3 years getting a diploma in environmental chemistry. Never could make much money doing that stuff but it sure comes in handy when messing with nutes etc. Built my own still so I can recover the solvents I use to make oils. Hard to get things like ISO or naphtha here so I can really stretch out what I can get. ISO is about $25/gal and even the Coleman Camp Stove fuel I buy to distill for the naphtha is $20 a can. Using a couple of flat-bottom boiling balls and some copper tubing I've even distilled my 9x filtered butane so it can be reused. That stuff ain't cheap either.

Without that diploma and all the industrial training I've had in hazardous waste disposal I'm sure I would have blown myself up by now.

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Thanks pal I've filled my water but up with 30 litres put my pump and heater in as well can only see what happens now


Made a mix this morning ph'd to 5.8 came home after work it had risen to 6.2

danzibar1234 said:

Thanks pal I've filled my water but up with 30 litres put my pump and heater in as well can only see what happens now


Made a mix this morning ph'd to 5.8 came home after work it had risen to 6.2

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Problem 99% solved

Pre heated water with air stone 16 hours or so

Make mix, ph to 5.8 check 4 or 5 hours later and has risen to 6.1 slowly bring it down again and it is now stable

Although in the future I am going to buy ro water or buy a system myself in order to make my own

Cheers again

I think you'll find things easier with RO. You can still expect the pH to rise slightly each day but at a much slower rate. Allow it to go from say pH 5.4 - 6.4 if it wants and maybe even see how high it will rise and then remain stable. Always top up with just water then test the ppm and pH after an hour. I use syringes to measure out small amounts of nutes to keep the ppm at the level I want as I rarely change my nutes. After bumping up my ppm I wait an hour or more before checking pH then usually would drop it back down with a few drops of sulphuric acid. If I overshot and it was down to 5.2 or something I just left it and it would back up to 5.6 maybe by morning and 5.8 by that evening. Two days later it might be up to 6.3 and the process gets repeated.

The complexities of how all the different minerals in tap water and your nutes react to each other are mind boggling. With RO it just acts as a medium to transport the nutes to your plants and in and of itself has no real reaction with anything. I read of people testing the pH of RO water and getting funny readings then trying to use pH up or down to get it to where they think it should be. RO water has no pH of it's own other than neutral because there are no minerals in it to affect the pH one way or another. Put one drop pH up in a gallon of good RO water and the pH could read 8. That would lead you to think that it's wildly alkaline when all you'll need is one drop of pH down to make it neutral again. Do the same with tap water and it likely won't change at all until many drops or even mils are added because it's working against the minerals in the water and they are too strong to be affected by a small amount of pH up or down. The amount needed to change it and make it stay at the level you want depends on the amount of minerals in your water. They are slow to react to the weak acids and bases used in pH up and down formulas and that's why you can adjust to the level you want and by the next day it's back up to what it started at or just a little lower. Very frustrating when you don't know what's going on.

Now with pH Perfect nutes and RO I can relax and just watch the plants grow.

I did buy some no-name concentrated potassium silicate that will raise the pH of RO water up to around 10 and needs to be adjusted back down to at least 7 before adding nutes so I guess I'll have to dust off my pH pen and see if it will still work after sitting on the shelf for about 2 years. Was only a few months old when I retired it.