Using City Water

I recently have made the switch to using city water instead of distilled water in my dwc, and all seems to be working well except that I have no idea how much calmag to be adding.

I cannot tell if my plants are absorbing up all the nutes causing the ph to go up, but I'm struggling to keep it down.. I'll balance it out to 5.9 for example and head off to work. When I come back from work 8 hours later it's at 6.7 and I have to bring it back down. First thing in morning.. 6.4-6.7 again.. not sure what could be the issue here. Is this something that I will just have to get use to, or is there something I could be doing to make it easier on myself?

Do you have a ppm tester?

Connoisseurus Rex said:

Do you have a ppm tester?

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Probably should have mentioned that.. after letting the water run 24 hours with an airstone and nothing more the ppm came to 120 and the ph was 8.4

I tell how the plants are doing by how much water is gone from the res after every shift.

Start the res at 5.5ph and swap it out when it crawls up to 6.3ph.

You shouldn't need to add cal/mag using city water.

I use dolomite lime as a ph stabilizer in my F&D tables.

Excessive chlorine could be your problem. The problem is, you don't know what's in those ppm. Could be a hell of a lot of fluoride (you don't want to know what they can legally allow into city water) or iron. Best to run a filter setup and then bubble the hell of it. Ceramic filter into a charcoal filter. I have well water and it keeps my ppm at 24.

Moving on, feeding will raise ph... But not by that much unless you have 3 4ft plants in a 10 gal res lol.

What it sounds like is what's in those ppm. Mineral content can knock a ph way out of balance. Iron is a big culprit for that. Switch back to distilled after a flush and see if it's still doing it. If so, your nutrients are the culprit. Some nutes don't stabilize as well as others. You are using hydro nutes, right?

I was under the assumption that letting the water sit for 24 hours that the chlorine would dissipate..is that not correct? I found this information on my city website.. all of these are approximate values

Total Hardness: 110 mg/L
Chloride: 15 mg/L
Turbidity: less than 0.1 ntu
Free Chlorine: 1.0-1.3 mg/L
Fluoride: 1.0 mg/L
Conductance: 250-325 umho/cm

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Does that help at all?

Your ph can't balance because of your mineral content. It's too hard to stabilize.

Your plants aren't showing any signs?

Connoisseurus Rex said:

Your ph can't balance because of your mineral content. It's too hard to stabilize.

Your plants aren't showing any signs?

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I just started 2-3 days ago, but they were pretty sick to begin with so I was hoping to get them into some 5gal buckets to save them. They were in horrible shape and I actually ended up tossing one of them, but 4 survived and seem to be recovering well.

Got any pics? It might help dial in the problems.

ONLY rain water for me!

RO filters are cheap. RO Buddy is a good one for $50. Get it on Amazon.

I recently had the idea of using my water purification tablets from my most recent trip to mexico. 1 tablet per liter of tap water. Could plants benefit from this any more than regular tap water?

Try mixing your nutes adjusting your ph and letting it sit with no plants, then check it after work. Might help figure it out