hi RD - seems this got missed in traffic lol
with the handle i am assuming you are hydro - have a look
@farside05 's journal for using silica and cal-mag in balance with MC in hydro.
@multiVortex is following the recipe and i see he's hanging about.
they can set you on the right path. strongly suggest you look at farside's schedule and adopt it. additives with MC can blow stuff up like nothing you've seen.
I missed it, yep. Thanks for the heads up.
Wow, this thread grows faster than my plants!
I was battling PH dropping. Has kinda tapered off, not dropping near as fast. Have noticed that when I add the Heisenberg tea it aids in keeping the PH stable for a day or so. Think today I’m gonna take some time to learn what I can about managing my NPK levels, understanding the math behind what I’m adding. I understand that silica is a natural PH buffer, was thinking of adding silica blast to help with my PH, not wanting to throw off my NPK ratio.
I’m not seeing any drop in ppm levels as I would with flora nova bloom. I upped my ppm from 540-650 since I last posted here. I’m use to seeing a drop of 10-30 ppm (plants eating food) is that not going to happen with MC?
With my RDWC, I am seeing a drop in ppm. I just flipped them yesterday. My setup is 50gal, and over the course of a week I'll see my ppm drop about that (on a 700 scale.) Now I don't feed by ppm or anything like that, but it's on my monitoring setup (Blue Lab Guardian) along with temp and pH. I can just as easily switch it to read the EC or TDS (500 scale.) With MegaCrop, you're not really concerned about the ppm in terms of it needs to be here or there. But I do understand tracking it to see progression and whether or not it's going down, steady, etc.
Managing NPK levels seems pretty perplexing from the start. Really though, it's just a little math. Somewhere in farside's journal he explains it. He may have even done so in this thread. Can't recall specifically where, but it was in the last month or so IIRC. The biggest thing to remember is to keep your N:K ratio under the 1:3 mark. (1 part nitrogen to 3 parts potassium.)
As was pointed out earlier, farside's schedule was based around his desire to add a little more silica to his grow. To balance that addition (which the product is labeled 0-0-3, but actually closer to 0-0-4) he uses calmag that is labeled as 2-0-0. If you have equal parts of each, the combined ratio becomes 2-0-4 (effectively, although by the bottle it would be 2-0-3) which then can be expressed as a ratio of 1:2 that is 1 part N to 2 parts K. (Technically 1.9 K, since IIRC the value is like 3.8 or something.) Either way, close enough for this purpose.
Silica will raise your pH. For my RDWC I've cut back the amount of silica (Dyna Grow Pro-TeKt, but there are others like Armor Si, etc) by half. So for every gram of MC, I add 1ml of calmag, and 0.5ml of protekt. This make the ratio closer to 1:1, which is fine for me. This lets me use less pH down, and causes less of a rise in my pH over the first 48 hours of a fresh mix. I will note that with silica, it will fight pH down a bit. You'll get it set right, and then the pH will rise a bit over the next day or two. Not a big deal. I pop 5ml of pH down when it gets to 6.2 and let it mix. Check again later, and do another 5ml if needed. As long as it's 5.8 to 6.2, I'm ok with that. On a full feed of MC at 6g/gal (I think I was closer to 6.1g/gal, but whatever), with 2ml/gal of protekt (100ml total), I initially used about 30ml of pH down (recommended dose on the bottle is 1ml per gal for every full point) to get it down to 5.7 from it's 7.3 starting point. The next day I added 5ml twice when it hit 6.1 to get it down to 5.8. Now it's sitting stable two days later at 6.0 which is fine.
When I tried using the full amount (per the schedule, not the bottle) I was using almost twice as much pH down, but still less than the pH down bottle said I would need. This is with RO water, for reference. When I first tried it with hydro, it wasn't good. Between my water source and the silica, it took an 8oz bottle to get it down and keep it there.
So if you're having issues with your pH dropping, silica may help.
The bigger concern is
why is your pH dropping. It will naturally drift a bit, depending on if your plants are eating more and drinking less, or drinking more and eating less. There is a really good chart floating around that lists all the conditions and what is happening, along with pointing you where to look for a fix. Covers water level steady or falling, pH and ppm steady, rising, or falling.
Here's the chart:
According to this chart, if your ppm is not changing (static) and your pH is falling, you have 2 possibilities based on if your water level is going down or staying the same.
If your water level is staying the same, it says to look at media being rinsed at a lower pH (doubt it) or that too much CO2 is in the air being pumped into your water.
If your water level is falling, then it recommends for a static EC and falling pH to change your res. If your EC is above 1.4 (or 980 ppm) then lower your nutrient level. If your EC is under 1.0 (700 ppm) then add more nutrients.
But I like paroosing a few regularly
Translation: He likes laughing at me when I screw up.
)
please expand this 
