'Went to do a weekly res. change today in my F&D system & learned a very valuable lesson: Keeping things clean & sanitised is just as important as when brewing.
The res. had developed pale yellow floaty sludge that was blocking the pump inlets. I was too shocked & embarrassed to take/post a photo of that.
After a physical clean (dismantled all the pump components & scrubbed them with a toothbrush), I dumped the pumps, tubing & inlet air filter into a bucket of hot tap water with Sodium Percarbonate & turned the pumps on. After 15 minutes, the water looked like this:
Absolutely putrid! Goes to show you that it's the stuff you can't see that does the damage.
The plants have been drinking/transpiring, but the EC hasn't changed in the res. over the past few days (pH increased slightly). They were basically in stasis.
I've also given the res. & flood table a good seeing-to with bleach gel cleaner, a thorough rinsing & will now hit them with H2O2 before reassembling & re-filling.
I reckon the fact that the res. hasn't had aeration stones running in the past week (I dropped/broke the ones I had last week & couldn't get replacements until yesterday) is the culprit & developed anaerobic bacteria in the process.
From now on, I'll also be adding a small H2O2 dose to the res. every couple of days to stop this happening again.
GRRRRRR!!!!!!
They’re a complete waste of money. Wouldn’t touch them with a 10 foot pole. They go ok for lettuce and other leafy greens but even than they aren’t great. If your going to go led spend the money and buy quality, if you want cheap stick to hps.
I made that mistake a couple of years ago before I had a clue & ended-up with a couple of Viparspectra lights that I just use for raising clones/seeds & maintaining a Mother plant - works fine for those applications, but definitely useless for flowering.