I wish I would have come across a thread like this before I chose to start using vinegar. I will try to include as many pertinent words as possible in this post so that it hopefully comes up in google searches for people.
I was trying to avoid having to spend lots of money every month on an acid, so I began researching what other acids I could use. I was running both an ebb and flow (flood and drain) system and a DWC (deep water culture), and GH's pH down ain't cheap. The most obvious choices to me were ascorbic acid (vitamin C) and acetic acid (vinegar). Vitamin C really isn't all that cheap either, when you take into account how much of it needs to be used to affect pH, so vinegar became the obvious choice.
I began looking online and found tons of anecdotal information about using vinegar. Arguably, the most prevalent mentions of this topic on almost every forum out there all seemed to agree that vinegar is safe to use, but that it doesn't work well, or it only works for a brief duration then the pH will rise again. But overwhelmingly the consensus was that vinegar is safe to use, and many people recommend it over the GH stuff.
Well, I began using regular distilled white vinegar in my reservoirs, and the pH was definitely stabilizing. I was having no problems keeping the pH down where it needed to be, and I was certainly not experiencing it rising faster than it should have. So I thought to myself that I found a well-hidden secret, and I left it at that... I continued to use the vinegar.
Well, fast forward a few weeks and I began noticing I was having a slime buildup in my reservoirs. I have never had this happen to me before, ever, in over 10 years of hydroponic indoor gardening. But I was in a relatively "dirty" environment, having been relegated to the spare bedroom where the cats' litter box is located. I just assumed it was growing some bacteria that came from the cats feces, even though I noted that the slime had a faint mycelial smell to it, or in other words, it smelled like mushrooms! So I began innoculating my reservoirs with beneficial bacteria, in the form of Aquashield.
That definitely seemed to make the water get "clearer" but after a week went by the snot was back, and this time it seemed to be only colonizing specific areas, instead of the entire volume of the reservoir. I figure this means that the bennies from the Aquashield were doing their thing, but the snot was still present, and was being segregated, so to speak, by the other species present. So the slime was still there, and I began freaking out, because I don't have the time to deal with this shit. But I had no choice other than to figure it out, so I began researching some more. And some more. And some more.
I then came across a reference to using vinegar in hydroponics from GardenWeb, of all places. In this post, someone mentioned how they actually make their own vinegar, and the way they do this is by using something known as "mother of vinegar" which is bubbled in an aerated water solution (sounds like a hydroponic res to me, right?), which then grows into a slimy mass that can be separated and used to innoculate more batches of the stuff.
Mother of vinegar? What is that?
So I went to Wikipedia:
Well holy crap! That sounds a lot like what I've been dealing with, and I had forgotten that I was using vinegar instead of "actual" pH down. I then had to look at a picture of it:
Eeeewwwwwww! Yep, that's what I got in my res.
So I wanted to start this thread in the hopes that if anyone is using hydroponics, and is also experiencing slime in the res, and also knows that the res is 100% lightproof, and all other things are in check... that they could ask themselves...
"Are you using vinegar in your res?"
So, yeah, for what it's worth, vinegar should not be used in your res. Not because it won't adjust the pH, because it WILL. The reason is because you will end up inadvertently becoming a vinegar manufacturer. I wish this relatively well-known process of science was a bit more well known in the hydroponics and gardening communities.
Cheers to all!
I was trying to avoid having to spend lots of money every month on an acid, so I began researching what other acids I could use. I was running both an ebb and flow (flood and drain) system and a DWC (deep water culture), and GH's pH down ain't cheap. The most obvious choices to me were ascorbic acid (vitamin C) and acetic acid (vinegar). Vitamin C really isn't all that cheap either, when you take into account how much of it needs to be used to affect pH, so vinegar became the obvious choice.
I began looking online and found tons of anecdotal information about using vinegar. Arguably, the most prevalent mentions of this topic on almost every forum out there all seemed to agree that vinegar is safe to use, but that it doesn't work well, or it only works for a brief duration then the pH will rise again. But overwhelmingly the consensus was that vinegar is safe to use, and many people recommend it over the GH stuff.
Well, I began using regular distilled white vinegar in my reservoirs, and the pH was definitely stabilizing. I was having no problems keeping the pH down where it needed to be, and I was certainly not experiencing it rising faster than it should have. So I thought to myself that I found a well-hidden secret, and I left it at that... I continued to use the vinegar.
Well, fast forward a few weeks and I began noticing I was having a slime buildup in my reservoirs. I have never had this happen to me before, ever, in over 10 years of hydroponic indoor gardening. But I was in a relatively "dirty" environment, having been relegated to the spare bedroom where the cats' litter box is located. I just assumed it was growing some bacteria that came from the cats feces, even though I noted that the slime had a faint mycelial smell to it, or in other words, it smelled like mushrooms! So I began innoculating my reservoirs with beneficial bacteria, in the form of Aquashield.
That definitely seemed to make the water get "clearer" but after a week went by the snot was back, and this time it seemed to be only colonizing specific areas, instead of the entire volume of the reservoir. I figure this means that the bennies from the Aquashield were doing their thing, but the snot was still present, and was being segregated, so to speak, by the other species present. So the slime was still there, and I began freaking out, because I don't have the time to deal with this shit. But I had no choice other than to figure it out, so I began researching some more. And some more. And some more.
I then came across a reference to using vinegar in hydroponics from GardenWeb, of all places. In this post, someone mentioned how they actually make their own vinegar, and the way they do this is by using something known as "mother of vinegar" which is bubbled in an aerated water solution (sounds like a hydroponic res to me, right?), which then grows into a slimy mass that can be separated and used to innoculate more batches of the stuff.
Mother of vinegar? What is that?
So I went to Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_of_vinegar said:
Well holy crap! That sounds a lot like what I've been dealing with, and I had forgotten that I was using vinegar instead of "actual" pH down. I then had to look at a picture of it:
Eeeewwwwwww! Yep, that's what I got in my res.
So I wanted to start this thread in the hopes that if anyone is using hydroponics, and is also experiencing slime in the res, and also knows that the res is 100% lightproof, and all other things are in check... that they could ask themselves...
"Are you using vinegar in your res?"
So, yeah, for what it's worth, vinegar should not be used in your res. Not because it won't adjust the pH, because it WILL. The reason is because you will end up inadvertently becoming a vinegar manufacturer. I wish this relatively well-known process of science was a bit more well known in the hydroponics and gardening communities.
Cheers to all!
