RDWC Bubba Island Kush

BROWN ALGAE Holy crap what a pain in the ass this shit was. So I moved apartments before this grow, and had my water chiller sitting for a year or so and I never drained it so I guess the water sitting in there just bred a super gross ecosystem of doom. So when I assembled the system I ran a very light bleach concentration through it for a week or so but I didn't know about the brown algae I was just doing that as part of my normal process. So Im guessing that bleach concentration was way too low for the colony I had (check the pics). So I noticed a giant fuzzy doughnut growing on the inlet and outlet of my res that goes to the water chiller. Suspicious. That cant be good. So after a lot of stunted growth and very limited root growth I figured yeah this probably isnt good. I drained and cleaned it and it was disgusting. You can't really clean the inside lines of the water chiller so you just have to run some kind of cleaner in the water you pump through it. I filled the system up with 20 gallons of water and poured an entire gallon jug of 35% H2O2 in that bitch and ran it for a few days and just top watered the plants with a cup. Then I drained and refilled it up to the netpots and let it go for a few days and the fucking fuzzy donut came back. And also when I went to drain it I noticed a giant fuckin amber colored booger growing on the water outlet into one of the plant's buckets. what the fuck. So fuck it ill try physan20. Ran a super super super diluted amount in the system and it absolutely fuckin fried whatever little roots were there. shitttt. and on top of the the donut was growing unabated. fuckkkkkkkkkkk. So time to go nuclear. I took the plants out of the system, took everything apart, scrubbed the fuck out of it with like 50%bleach 50% water. Then I filled just the res up with like 5 gallons of water, poured an entire gallon of bleach into it, and ran that through the water chiller for a few hours. Then i drained it, stuck my shop vac up to the inlet of the water chiller, and it sucked a LOT of shit out of the chiller. The shopvac bucket was SWIMMING with chunks of random gooey fluffy fuzzy random colored shit. Absolutely disgusting. I filled the res up with 5 gallons of water, ran it through the water chiller for like an hour, and then drained and shopvacced the inlet and outlet again. I repeated that like 6 or 7 times till absolutely nothing but clear water was coming out of the chiller. Then I filled it with 5 gallons of water, another whole gallon of bleach, and ran it for a full day. Then I drained it (again everything coming out clear) and filled again, and this time dumped a bucket of vinegar in and ran that through the water chiller for a day (figuring it would remove any leftover bleach residue inside the chiller, and also some mineral deposits maybe??? good preventative maintenance anyway lol. Drained it, filled it with plain water, ran it for a bit, drained and refilled with plain water, ran it, then I started filling the whole system with water, letting it run for a couple hours, then draining (just trying to get any leftover bleach or vinegar residue OUT so the plants can go back in). I put the plants in and monitored nervously for weeks. (oh yeah this all started around week 2-3 and lasted until week 8) and they slowly but surely started to recover. At first I didn't see any real growth and I was top watering with a cup of resevoir water once a day. but after like 2 weeks they started sprouting roots out the side and I was like phew hopefully this nightmare is over. One thing im worried about is any brown algae that might've started growing on the leca rocks/pebbles that I wasnt able to wash in bleach water. Hopefully when I ran the Physan20(and it killed the roots of the plant) it also either killed all the brown algae or knocked it down enough that the Southern Agriculture Garden Friendly Fungicide (which is Hydroguard but like literally 10000 times more concentrated) would outcompete and kill the rest. i am updating the rest of the diary but its now week 14 so its been like a month and a half since the nuclear sterilization and i havent seen any kind of weird growth anywhere, and just extremely healthy plants. So I think this system is clean. lawdy dont store your water chiller with water in it.