nft ukcheese terra aquatica bioponics

Terra Aquatica, Uk Cheese, Theoldtimer,,, And The Hunt For The Stable Ph ! ( like a unicorn she will never be found.. or will she? ) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ hi guys, my names the old timer and im new around here, i just stumbled across the site, 2 hrs later im making my first diary post, so welcome! The story of my ukcheese is the stuff of legends, Cheese was originally a clone-only pheno-type of Skunk #1 that was discovered by a rogue english grower who was breeding out packs to find a mum of super high strength, he made cuttings and passed them on to a cannabis collective near Luton, north of London. Their members shared this cutting across the uk and europe using online forums much like this one and across england to their friends. With 60% indica genetics it was lauded due to its combination of powerful stone and its intense earthy, musky flavour with notes of mature hard cheese. since then professional growers and breeders such as greenhouse seeds, and big buddha and many more , have crossed this cutting only variety with other fathers, producing cheese crosses that have gone on to win many cannabis cups around the world, but few people still have the original cutting only variety. To use ghe organic nutes you need a medium size fish tank filter, or bio filter, that you put trikologic s into, once that collonates with bacteria, you add the biothrive, and that feeds the bacteria in the filter,,, the bacteria then excrete the nutrients that the plants uptake. Normally with non organic products, the nutrient salts are suspended in the solution, and you up the concentration as the grow progresses. That doesnt happen with organic nutrients, its the bacterias in the filter that produce the nutrient, so if you dont have the filter then your going to run into huge issues i believe. ( i did last time lol ) the bio nutes go in at 2ml per l, from early veg all the way to end of bud, leaving you with a final max ec of 0.9. You wait until the ec drops under 0.8 before adding nute, but if the ph drops then either the nutes to high or its going to be to low,, if you can keep it on 0.9 that seems the best. i am using fish tank bio filter, nutrient fridge, power head to mix soultion 24/7, medo septic tank pump +4 stones for airation , and a bluelabs pro controller to control nutes, EcoTechnics Evolution Digital Fan Speed Controller to control environment ghe has changed their name in europe to terra aquatica and then helpfully they changed all their product names ( but thats another story) but its all the same stuff as gh america, and ghe used to be, to make this easy for the reader i have included terra aquaticas new grow shedule that i am following, but i have edited black lines over the items i wont be using, also i am using the american names for ghe products eg,.. biothrive bloom in ta is now called pro organic bloom. As you can see my roots dont like the light, and for that reason i keep the cubes in my nft trays, with cubecaps on, under corex, covered in wbw, and then i have made little wbw collers to go round the stem so theres no way light can get in at all, but air could still vent out. waters on 24/7. ive noticed:- as i have my res with a float auto top up, that adds fresh calmaged water, unatended the concentrate will weaken,,, when this happens the ph stop rising and will go down,, similarly if you over nute it the, ph will stop rising and drop, but if you keep it about 1.0 then the ph rises as intended, so i could set my autodoser up with bloom nute and ph down, and it should control it. if any of you viewers have any sudgestion, or u can see that ive done something wrong or i dont understand something, please send me a message, or pop a comment underneath, im still learning ! and if anyones got any questions i can help with about nft feel free to fire away, many thanks guys oldtimer😁👌

This week was a pain in the bum,,, i accidently put liquid oxygen in thinking it was silicon ( also not something i should be using in bioponics) this will teach me not to decant chemicals into smaller bottles, not loads only 10 ml in 70l, and i did an immediate tank change ect...but sadly the damage was done. i got a really frothy tank... looked like capachino, and the roots stopped being white, the ph plummeted, daily going from 6.0, to 5.0... and eventually after 3 days the ph started to rise on its own..... joyfully when the ec lowered i topped it back up to 1.0ec... 😱😭the ph plummeted again, and i knew i had gone to strong with the nutes... so i did a water change brought everything to 0.9 again, and i re added the 7g of trikologic ( should really be added once every 6 weeks) but i felt that a restock of beneficial bacteria would be for the best. i looked back at the ghe bioponics information page and found the following extract "Keep your conductivity under 1.0 and above 0.8" so i set the controller to 0.9 and left it for the night. to start with ph went up, then it went down...so i let it eat out to 0.8 and the ph was still going down... at this point im thinking the ph is going down because the bacteria dont have enough nute... i brought the ec up by hand to 1.0 and the ph rose from 5.4 to 5.8 in about 2 hours. so now i think they want to be on 1.0 ec, i will set the controller to 1.0 and see if the ph continues to rise. so now i know where i have gone wrong... the plants have still grown about 8 inches this week, and consumed over 100 litres of water, so im happy that i havent gone so far wrong its going to be a problem, and im gonna hang on and see what happens in the end. ( sometimes id be tempted to tear everything down and start again, but it does look quite nice so..meh we shall see ! !) many thanks for looking guys and please anyone comment i beg you !! many thanks oldtimer👌

to try and prevent ph drop i loaded up nutes and let the ph swing,,, within about 5 hours it had gone from 5.5 to 7.0,,, so i set the machine to 6.8 and we will see what happens by morning. in the morning the machine had dosed ph down twice, and the nutrient had dosed 11 times, leaving me on 0.9 and 6.5... aparently this is perfect according to the ir grow sheet, so maybe my ph issues were caused by me trying to keep the ph at 5.8 ( common ph for hydro), instead of keeping it between 5.5 and 7 im thinking maybe the nutes got its own buffering ability and maybe ive been ruining that by putting in too much ph down,,,, in essence fighting the buffer with my ph down instead of letting it do its job, and raise for a few days before it swings down naturally. time will tell lol. ok so what time told me is that the ph will swing up for a day then start to drop.. im assuming as the plant pull nutes out and excrete into the water.. and after about 48 hours the ph will only drop unless its just been dosed with nutes... but then the upswing in ph is only by 0.3 in 5 hours,, then it sstarts to drop again... meaning you either need to constantly feeed it ph up.... instead of ph down... but this isnt what ghe / terra aquatica say should happen... they say ec goes down, and ph goes up...the problem is if i tried to stabilise the ph by drip feeding it nutrient, its would still end up ph 5.0 after 3 days, and the ec would be well over 0.9 so that isnt a solution to my problem. sooooooo i thought ive got some ta silicate powder... it does say on the pack:- Silicate works in synergy with all our products. However alongside beneficial micro-organisms (TrikoLogic®️, TrikoLogic®️ S) use only in foliar application, or localized at the level of the collar (dry application), not to slow down the installation of beneficial populations of microorganisms in the substrate. Conversely in open soil growing, Silicate’s composition stimulates the growth of helpful microorganisms and helps create a beneficial natural environment for extremely healthy plants. ... im thinking as my bacteria should be reasonably well established by now then hopefully it wont affect them too much, so i put it in at half dose stated... they said 4g in 10l , i used 2 g in 10 l . this didnt seem to affect the ec, but did bring the ph from 5.6, to 6.5,,,,,,, as it moved its way round the system it had stabilised to about 6.2. the next morning ph was at 5.9 and the machine had dosed nutrients...meaning the bacteria were still eating, this is much less of a ph swing than if i had used ph up alone, so im thinking if i only add silicate at half strength or less... and i only use it in the final 6 weeks of bud giving the bacteria 3 weeks to establish silicate free. .. maybe i can add this in weekly and use this to stabilise the ph, and use less ph up daily. it took about 3 days for the silica to loose its buffering power... at which point i put another 2g per 10l in ( half dose), so that over the week i had put in the full 4g per 10l that gh recommend, just in 2 doses. I viewed some other peoples research and it showed me that in nft you should add silicate every 72 hours, but in a low concentration, because in nft u get build up, but i believe if you have a float top up on your res, and its supplied with unbuffered calmag adjusted ro water, then its going to dilute your stable res mix and over the week your ph is going to swing down . imagine my 70l res, auto tops itself up with 180l of water over a 7 day period, its nearly used tripple its original res size in unstable top up water... i can only imagine thats going destabilise things. over the coming weeks i may try up to stabilise using the ph up and down method ( depends if i can find a distributer for gh ph down ), and document my trials on here. if i were to do this, then the water that tops up would be pre buffered meaning the entire system should be more stable. an alternative would be to load up the machine with ph up, then get it to dose ph up, but i know too much ph up raises the ec.. and im keen not to go over 0.9/1.0. i included the pic of the dosing machine to give you an idea of what its using over the course of 13 hours, and this is after using silica that turns into silic acid in the tank and that harms the bacteria,,, with that being said, its uptaking loads so maybe where i am only putting in half doses twice a week maybe its not damaging the biocolony so much.. next week i will add the silica when i do the change not mid week, and see if it stabilises things for longer... check next weeks comment to find out what happens !

hi guys, welcome back to another week ! i awoke to the sound of rattling, it was 6 am, and my hangover was pounding.... i went to my tent and found the biofilter had somehow run out of water? i took it apart, and found that it was quite severly blocked,,, i cleaned out the foam compartments in a bucket of its own filth,, and noticed that the foams felt really solid, maybe they sucked in some of my silicate and got blocked.. who knows. top tips, ill probably clean my bio filter every 3 weeeks or so now,, ill deffo keep an eye on flow rates through it after 3 weeks, and for next time when i clean it out, mine has 6 foam sections, i would clean 5 and leave one well alone, so that its still fully collonated with bio film. so after cleaning the filter, my ec didnt go down anywhere near as quickly, i imagine it needs to recolonise itself a bit before it can eat lots of nute again. after 2 more days of not much movement, i added 5g of trikologic into the pump,, just mixed it into a litre or water then sucked it up with the filter intake. other than that, my pc stability test with silica is a bit broken now, because i put the silica in and the next day the pump blocked lol ,,, coincidence? maybe. as im new to this bioponics thing, maybe some of this info you guys know, but i certainly didnt and im finding out as i go,, with that being said ive learnt something about biofilters and id like to share here for later referance:- ive got a canister filter for an aquarium its a fluval 306, they're avalable worldwide on the web (other manufacturers are avalable). In it are various compartments for ceramic bio rings(the only bit we care about), foam (cleans sedement), activated carbon (filters fine impurities), and a thin white filter (to polish the water). Different high quality filters of varying grades are wonderful for aquariums, but in bioponics we dont care about water condition because we arent interested in looking at fish so its clarity doesnt matter to us, only thing we care about is having as big a space for our ceramic bio rings as possible. these bio rings are the home for the trikologic bacteria that produce the nutes that our plants then uptake. infact its possible all the filters would filter some of the "good stuff" out of your nutes before it got to the bio rings. Inside my filter ive got a flat panel filter with foam up both sides, and then 3 small stackable buckets on the other, the stackable buckets are meant to have foam in the bottom section,, i have taken those bottom 2 foams out, and replaced them with extra bio rings bought seperately, and also filled the rest of the buckets up with as many bio rings as they will comfortably take instead of foam , also the more i thought about my remaining 4 foams in the panel, the more ive come to realise, they just strain sedement out... their very corse foam with big holes, so im going to leave them in there but clean them regularly, to prevent any blockages in my pump, but in all the buckets, just bio rings. Now i can open my canister pump very easily, and access the panel filter and im thinking im gonna clean that foam part every 2 weeks. i wondered if not cleaning them for 3 weeks infact built up dead matter in the foam filter parts and then this may have casued issues with my water stability.....heres what a quick google tells me :- Dead plants actually can produce a strong effect on pH. Dead plants will rot in aquarium, which releases ammonia and other nitrogen compounds into the water, thus lowering the pH either way. now i know ill clean the panel regularly , but leave the buckets of bio rings alone. i also noticed online they sell cylindrical foams for aquarium filter intakes , so im gonna stick one of them on, and i can clean that weekly too, and its alot more visable to me on the outside of the cansiter in the res. Each foam measures 120mm long, 60mm total diameter and internal hole 15mm diameter. so this week is week 4, and im a bit late doing my "under the net removal" which does what it says on the tin...... i take anything and everything, because the more i leave.......... the more low grade bud grows thats never seen light and i have to put in the binlater, but if i cut it all off then it grows up the top of the plant fattening my colas instead.

hi guys, what fun we have had this week!, i noticed that my ec hasnt been going down much this week, so i added more trikologic s... this is quite expensive, and maybe next time i will buy the normaly trikologic which is much cheaper . essentially if i had been doing the right things then i wouldnt have used as much. my fan controller broke, and because these things never happen one at a time, when i put in the replacement that broke too. i have had them a while and components break, when i opened up one i found what looked like a busted capacitor, i replaced that, and it worked fine again... by this time i already had ordered a new replacement so now i got another spare i guess. the other controller looks like a resistor has burned out, and ive put that on order, hopefully it will be an ez fix. i took a few shots from inside my bottom res for u guys, while i was doing the water change and it doesnt look too sad, and im still tryin to prune bud that isnt getting light from the bottom of the plant upwards. the top canopy is quite thick now, and very three dimentional. ive noticed a few things about terra aquatica and their product info vs my findings that i would like to address here :- pro organics and reverse osmosis :- if you add probio at 1.5 ml per l of pure ro water it gives you an ec of 0.5 if you add probio at 2ml per l of pure ro water, it gives you an ec of 0.7. if you add calg at 1ml per l of pure ro water it gives you an ec of 0.3 if you add calmag at 1.5ml per l of pure ro water it gives you an ec of 0.5 if you add calmag at 2.0ml per l of pure ro water it gives you an ec of 0.6 so at max strength of 2ml per l of probio, then you would only be able to add 1ml per l of calmag for the ec to be 1.0. if you were to add 1.5 ml of calmag the ec would be 1.2 the ph up and down way:- if you add 3ml per l of pure ro water , then add 0.5ml per l of ph down, it gives you a ph of around 7 and an ec of 0.6. but then would you get calmag deficiency? ta says:- Conductivity This is the most different part of the bioponic process because organic molecules don’t carry electric charges and so aren’t shown by EC meters. And when you dilute Pro Organic in water, only a small fraction is immediately dissolved and transformed into ions, resulting in very little conductivity. On day one, with a dose of 1.5 ml/L added to normal tap water, you will obtain an EC reading of around 0.6 to 0.7 mS. This low conductivity is generally enough. After this period, only add nutrient when your EC goes under 0.8. and respect the dosages indicated on the feed charts. Keep your conductivity under 1.0 and above 0.8 my conclusions:- if you read ta's own guidance they contradict themseve's all the time,, eg,, they say keep the ec under 1.0,,, then above it they have a chart saying keep the ec under 1.2ec .( catalogue2020) they say add 2ml per l of calmag to ro water.. this gives you an ec of 0.6, if you were then to add max strength of probio at 2ml per l, this would end up with an ec of 1.3, this is 0.3 over what they recomend. they say up to 11 down to 7... that gives you an ec of 0.6 with no calcium in it. if you were then to add max strength of probio at 2ml per l, this would end up with an ec of 1.3, this is 0.3 over what they recomend. even if you add 1.5 ml perl of calmag and max strength it would end up at 1.2.... you guessed it, over what they recommend. but this might be an option. according to their latest info they say this is too strong. so maybe........... start on 0.4 ec of calmag and 0.5 of probio in veg total ec 0.9, then when you switch the lights to 12/12, switch the nutes to bloom instead of first 2 weeks grow, lower the calmag to 0.3 and raise to 0.7 of pro biobloom total ec 1.0. this would give you what they say is full strength nute. im thinking the plants will use less calcium in bud? with this mix,,, the ph went up to 7.0, then back down to 6.5 on its own, and ill update this thread as more info develops, but it is eating down. thanks for viewing guys, take care!

ok we are in week 6-7 and we have another 3 - 3 weeks to go, i can see there has been some defficencys through out this grow, and im thinking that maybe more bio media would be beneficial next time.