Another Newbie Question: Is it OK to make up a weeks worth of water with nutes?

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for the great discussion. Last night I did a res change. I emptied, scrubbed and rinsed the res, air stone and pump before adding new water. The water looked cloudy, but i wouldn't say it smelled rotten, but it did have an "organic" smell to it. There were some loose roots floating around in there as well. I used BlackMesa's advice and targeted 6.0 pH with my Nute/water mix. I added the minimum level of AquaShield prior to pH-ing the water. Prior to pH, my ppm was 575 ppm (water is 415 ppm, lite nutes are 160 ppm). After pH to 6.0, ppm increased to 715 ppm (GH pH down powder is 140 ppm). This morning I checked ppm again and it was at 840, which was about 10 hours later. I was running behind, so I did not check pH or adjust it. Visually, it did not appear that the water level had dropped, which isn't surprising since I only have one plant, and she's still kind of small.

Is there anything else that causes ppm increase, such as root rot? From my novice perspective, since ppm is just a ratio of water to TDS, I can't see how ppm would increase if water level wasn't decreasing unless there was some outside contributor.

Check tonight to see if it has increased any and in a worse case scenario you can be safe by never adding nutes to top off and only at the beginning of a fresh weekly rez change. If by tonight it rises again I would dump the Aquashield as to rule it out. Only other culpret I can think of is if you are using rockwool and pumps are shooting water through it but that usually only results in affecting PH. If it doesn't rise anymore you may be good to go and the PH down took longer to fully disolve of something, I use liquid GH PH down so there might be a difference there.

On a final note I would experiment on a 1 gallon jug ruling things out as you go, maybe skip the aquashield on the jug and see from there. I have never used Aquashild or anything like that so no clue if that would be it or not.

If ur water starts at 415ppm look.for better water. That is very very high.