Growing with RO water

[touringfunkband]

I use RO water with the lucas formula in canna coco. Running Bogglegum with no cal/mag. First run of bogglegum I used cal/mag and got clawing and deficiencies. Second run with clones I skipped the cal/mag and got no clawing and the plants looked beautiful. I do also use .5ml of drip clean and water with no runoff.

 

[MiMedicineMan]

I like coco.

I started off using 100% pro mix. I started amending the promix with coco because the promix dried out too fast. I liked the cocoa so much, I kept adding more until I was using 100% coco. I didn't like it because the pots would stay too heavy too long.

i have found that the best mix for me is 1 bail pro mix to 1 bail coco. It's about 2/3 promix and 1/3 coco. I use ro merlin if using well water. I don't change my nutrients at all.

I use dutch master all the way through and i find i don't notice a difference between using ro with well water, and using a charcoal filter on my city water. If anything 2 charcoal filters inline works just as good and doesnt take out what you need for about 10% of the cost.

And not to mention I'm not a fan of RO in the first place because of how much water it wastes. For those who don't know, ro wastes 2x what it produces. Meaning to make 100 gallons you waste 200 of "dirty" water.

Ionic and presumably others make a nutrient specially for well water. does anybody have any experience with this? I know a couple people who have used it with mixed results...

 

[TheCatsMeow]

I use RO water with the lucas formula in canna coco. Running Bogglegum with no cal/mag. First run of bogglegum I used cal/mag and got clawing and deficiencies. Second run with clones I skipped the cal/mag and got no clawing and the plants looked beautiful. I do also use .5ml of drip clean and water with no runoff.

i wouldnt doubt that would work with a indica dom plants but try running a chem cut in coco with ro and no calmag+ and i assure you, you will have problems

 

[TheCatsMeow]

And not to mention I'm not a fan of RO in the first place because of how much water it wastes. For those who don't know, ro wastes 2x what it produces. Meaning to make 100 gallons you waste 200 of "dirty" water.

i didnt think about that....
that is kind of a shame.

im about to order an r/o unit and youve got me rethinking but ill probably keep on with it. i drink water and cook at home too much to not want fresh water all the time

 

[truecannabliss]

Run waste into a water butt outside for your outdoor garden, that way it all gets used.
Peace

 

[~Shhh~]

id assume this would be based on what was in your tap to start with. my tap in the city jumped from 70 to 210ppm in the last 6months. i dont know why but id assume at this point im better off using calmag+ and r/o.

Good point mate... tbh though it's rare that anybody has an EC of over 0.7 in the city. Most hard water nutes are designed for water uptp 0.6EC.... Hence my remarks.... I still feel it's a lot easier to 50/50 or 70/30 to achieve the desired results I hate having to add more than what I need to the res.

I've ran tap water and achieved 1gpw of some dank ass bud (4800w's) too. Tap water had an EC of 0.6 no RO and things went well.

Just a lil food 4 thought

 

[TheCatsMeow]

Good point mate... tbh though it's rare that anybody has an EC of over 0.7 in the city. Most hard water nutes are designed for water uptp 0.6EC.... Hence my remarks.... I still feel it's a lot easier to 50/50 or 70/30 to achieve the desired results I hate having to add more than what I need to the res.

I've ran tap water and achieved 1gpw of some dank ass bud (4800w's) too. Tap water had an EC of 0.6 no RO and things went well.

Just a lil food 4 thought

ive only done complete grows using tap water. infact all the pics in my albums are weed that was grown with tap and canna coco a+b.

i never would aerate my water to help off-gas the chlorine and what not but i never seemed to have problems.

i think the r/o water is starting to become more appealing to me just based on the fact i can know exactly whats in the water -no assumptions necessary.

it really freaked me out when like i said, my tap jumped from the 70ppm range to just over 200ppms. who know what was the casue of the spike?

 

[MiMedicineMan]

im about to order an r/o unit and youve got me rethinking but ill probably keep on with it. i drink water and cook at home too much to not want fresh water all the time

IMO the ones with expanstion tanks are junk. You gotta get one with 2 ro filters and 1 sediment filters to be able to get "as much as you want" and that is still not nearly enough. I have the merlin which gets about 30 gallons per hour if you get the booster pump to take it to 60 psi. I hear they have a little bit more expensive one that is better thats triangle shaped like.

One note about the wastewater is they make an adapter of sorts that cuts in half the amount waste but I haven't tried it and I don't know what it will do to the production rates.

And would it be okay to water the outside plants with wastewater with 3x higher ppms than normal tap? wouldn't it make their leaves turn yellow also or outside its not as crucial?

 

[truecannabliss]

When i say water outdoor plant i mean non cannabis plants such as flowers of the lawn.
Peace

 

[OPT]

I have extremly hard water that reads around 450 PPM out of the tap. I have a small boy RO filter for when I was using organics. This go around I'm using Canna Coco that has been resused, with basically the whole H & G line.

All over the H and G site they say the nutes are designed for tap water. So I usually just fill my bucket 3/4 of a way up, then add tap till i get a ppm reading of around 100-120. It seems to be helping out a lot since I've changed from straight R0.

OPT

 

[Purplestuffed]

H and G's drip clean and Calmag for the win, i never ph.

 

[Hydro-Soil]

Cal-Mag loves you people.... *sigh*

Only a few growers in this thread have actually done any personal research and are all just adding Cal-Mag because "EVERYONE SAYS SO"... so dumb.

1. You don't need to add buffers back to your water so it's more like 'tap' before you add nutes. That's what the F'ng nutes do... just about every commercial nutrient has buffers in it. Seriously.

2. R/O is the only water you can use in every location and get the same results. EVERY TIME!

3. Using any nutrient profile that's close to Lucas does fine without any additives at all. Mag hungry strains can use a pinch of epsom salts per gallon but that's it.

4. Nitrogen and calcium are elements you want to eliminate in the last couple weeks before the plain water finish.

5. The 2 gallons of waste to 1 gallon of useable water is such crap. You only reach that in areas with REALLY bad water... and believe me you REALLY want to use only R/O in locations like that. Most places have a much lower ratio of waste water.

6. The nitrogen in Cal-Mag can mess with your nutrients when used in coco... read the H3ad thread that's stickied at the top of the coco forum here.

7. I really wish that people would get their water and hydroponic information from outside the prohibition realm of cannabis. Sure would cut down on a lot of these old wives tales about Cal-Mag.

8. I can tell the difference between tap water meds and R/O water meds... unless the ppm of the tap is below 100ppm or so. Disgusting.

9. Smile and have a most fantabulous day... and make the switch to R/O water today!

Stay Safe!

 

[serious6]

if i could be so blunt to ask what is your R/O setting? you can set it manually to neutral = pH 7.0 or up or down a few points either way creating filtered hard or soft water.

if it is in the 6.0 pH range then away you go, needing only organic nutes which have all the trace elements, primary and secondary. but if you buy your R/O water; this is not the case.

you really should state this SMALL fact or be convicted of misleading the forum membership. growing in pH 7.0 with the lucas formula only will NOT give you good results. try it and see.

 

[MiMedicineMan]

it really freaked me out when like i said, my tap jumped from the 70ppm range to just over 200ppms. who know what was the casue of the spike?

If it jumped that high, you should be able to find out why. They may have been purging the system or cleaning it or who knows...

Call the department of water and sewerage or whatever you have that cleans the water and ask them. Say your ro filter just went through the roof and you wanna know why.

Also if you take your water into sears or such they have a testing procedure. They will send it out to a lab and tell you what is in it for free. You just have to act like you want to buy a filter from them...

 

[MiMedicineMan]

if i could be so blunt to ask what is your R/O setting? you can set it manually to neutral = pH 7.0 or up or down a few points either way creating filtered hard or soft water.

I have had a few different ro medels and I have never had one with settings. Definitly never had one I plug in...

Are you talking about one of those "living water" things that will give you alkaline or acidic water depending on what you need? Those are super expensive from what i hear and don't produce much per hour. Maybe you could shed some light onto my brain

 

[HighBurn8]

Hey all...just thought i'd share. posted this in h3ad's thread yestaerday but thought it might be helpful here.

per gal of 0 ppm RO water

1.5ml protekt
3ml mag i cal
3.75ml micro
7ml bloom
4ml hygrozyme
1ml root excel
(organic unsulphered blackstrap molasses every now and again)

in that order ...Respectively

comes out to a PH of 5.8 and an EC of 1.1

 

[d3cryption]

just wondering how many people are using a ro filter from purewaterclub??/ been thinking about getting one from them...

 

[Lammy]

I use dutch master all the way through and i find i don't notice a difference between using ro with well water, and using a charcoal filter on my city water. If anything 2 charcoal filters inline works just as good and doesnt take out what you need for about 10% of the cost.

And not to mention I'm not a fan of RO in the first place because of how much water it wastes. For those who don't know, ro wastes 2x what it produces. Meaning to make 100 gallons you waste 200 of "dirty" water.

Ionic and presumably others make a nutrient specially for well water. does anybody have any experience with this? I know a couple people who have used it with mixed results...

Hi MiMedicanMan, what carbon filters do you use? Ive been planning on installing them. I'm with you on the RO.

My stealth RO puts 3 times as much water down the drain as you get out of it and it doesn't even clean for shit. It's enough waste in fact that the city came a knocking to warn me about the usage spike. Plus I needed to make a heater to get the city water up to 67 degrees so the unit could put out more than 20 gallons a day. They want me to change filters every 1000 gallons and I'm sick of flushing money down the drain.

"R/O is the only water you can use in every location and get the same results. EVERY TIME!"

Saying pure water instead of RO water would be more acturate. My stealth RO water comes with 120ppms and a Ph of 6.5. Plus stealth RO does not remove choloromine which is used instead of cholorine now a days. The choloromine does not evaporate.

" The 2 gallons of waste to 1 gallon of useable water is such crap. You only reach that in areas with REALLY bad water... and believe me you REALLY want to use only R/O in locations like that. Most places have a much lower ratio of waste water."

The stealth RO says it wastes 3:1 on water. My city water is 140ppms the RO unit used so much water the city came banging on my door.

 

[Lammy]

Whoops I forgot to comment on the main thread question. With my limited experience.
I was using a drip system with hydroton I switched out the hydroton for coco and did not change up the nut's at all (although they were AN and suppose to be coco safe). Also I used city water for most of that run.

 

[MiMedicineMan]

Hi MiMedicanMan, what carbon filters do you use? Ive been planning on installing them. I'm with you on the RO.

My stealth RO puts 3 times as much water down the drain as you get out of it and it doesn't even clean for shit. It's enough waste in fact that the city came a knocking to warn me about the usage spike. Plus I needed to make a heater to get the city water up to 67 degrees so the unit could put out more than 20 gallons a day. They want me to change filters every 1000 gallons and I'm sick of flushing money down the drain.

A couple points here. One is my merlin says while using hard water you HAVE to have a water softener. It makes it work better and if you don't use one it voids the warranty. (maybe you don't have hard water, I don't...)

two is call the company and ask them WTF? if you buy a ro filter, why is it not RO'ing? Maybe its broke? I had to get a 200$+ booster pump for mine because they said anybody elses booster pump would also "void the warranty" gotta love that... All it did was made more water per day, not get the ppms down. which brings me to

point 3: don't ever do what they tell you to do. The manufacturers guidleines are for one thing, to cover their ass (while giving you a general vague idea of where to start.) Somebody using 1000 gal of hard water is gonna clog up their filter faster than somebody using tap from clean source?? I've been suing the same merlin for over 1 year and I've bought new filters, but I've never changed them because my stick has never even so much as blinked once in the "pure" RO'd water. I stopped using it now because I moved from the place with the well water. I'm gonna return the filters I guess... Anyways, not to get off point, don't change it at a certain time.

ooh the carbon filters. I use the ge brand (cuz its from depot and its cheaper that the whirlpool they sell at lowes) and they sell matching charcoal inserts for like $10/ 2 pack. You have to get a "whole house" system otherwise you won't get 3/4" ins and outs. They're about 19 bucks empty so you buy 2 and a pack of filters, get a couple brass hose fittings and you have a hook up there. Now i will go for the green coco husk filters they sell in the hydro store because they fit the same and last waaay longer than the black depot ones. The whole hookup will cost between 60 and 100 bucks depending on what you do but it will be infinitly more effective than the hydro logic thing of the same price. I would even do a sediment then 2 charcoals to be extra safe for a total of 3 white filter housings inline of your water system whether it be solid pipe or garden hose