coco pH

[leafminer]

My runoff is 5.9 from coco.
After studying the pH/nute charts, I see that I am about right for hydro but way out for soil. What about coco? I know that it's regarded in general as more a form of hydro than soil. I generally find that a dose of lime improves growth so I can only guess that my runoff should perhaps be basically hydro but maybe skewed slightly towards soil?

 

[rotten_socks420]

I would think that it would be around what soil is at... i dunno tho I use soil not coco sorry man

 

[OGKushman]

Good Question!

What are you ladies telling you??? Id think 5.9 is about perfect.


Share some pics if u got em.

 

[leafminer]

Good Question!

What are you ladies telling you??? Id think 5.9 is about perfect.


Share some pics if u got em.

Well, the plants as usual have no problems. I usually add some slaked lime and MgSO4 and they like that, so I think I'll do that now and observe the runoff again in a few days time. The pics are in my grow journal, the plants at the moment are under an ambient temp of about 45C - it's an exceptionally hot day and even with the big fan blowing straight through the GH is still 5C more than ambient.
(Yeah it is 40C today)

 

[OGKushman]

Whats that in Yankee temp? NVM ill google it lol.


113! JESUS THC DEGRADES PAST 96 degrees!

Oh buddy u need to cool it down....do u have a swamp cooler in ur GH?

 

[leafminer]

No, the swamp cooler is pointed into the house!
Today it is back down to about 32C. More reasonable . . .
This is why I gave up using my grow room. It was only useful for 3 months of the year. The rest of the time it was like an oven. Imagine a shade temp of 40C and then you add 500 watts of discharge lamps!

 

[leafminer]

For reference, I added a heaped dessertpoon of slaked lime, watered in, to each pot.
PH is now exactly 7. I expect it to gradually move back toward acidic. There has been no real visible effect on the plants. If anything, growth has improved slightly.

 

[Hushpuppy]

Hi...I have been using cocodan in a hydro setup for about 6 months now and I found that my babies like to stay right at 6.0ph with 45-50% humidity at 73*f. It may sound stupid but does your growhouse have a dark colored roof? those dark colors really soak up the sunlight. mine is whithe roofed and insulated as much as possible, then I pull fresh air from beneath my growhouse where it is the coolest, to feed my lights. sometimes, if its really hot, i will redirect air from my AC directly to my air intake for the lights. I hope this info helps.

 

[leafminer]

Coco is an inert substrate and should never be treated in the same manner as soil.

pH 5.8 is what you want to be aiming at

some very useful stickies here

hgb://www.mjp.com/ic/forumdisplay.php?f=65577

that may help you understand coco and its properties

Thanks for that. I added some lime because I found that I always need to do that for my tomatoes and bell peppers. The plants are really going well, the pH 7 seems fine with them; I'll let it gradually return to slightly acidic.

 

[leafminer]

Hi...I have been using cocodan in a hydro setup for about 6 months now and I found that my babies like to stay right at 6.0ph with 45-50% humidity at 73*f. It may sound stupid but does your growhouse have a dark colored roof? those dark colors really soak up the sunlight. mine is whithe roofed and insulated as much as possible, then I pull fresh air from beneath my growhouse where it is the coolest, to feed my lights. sometimes, if its really hot, i will redirect air from my AC directly to my air intake for the lights. I hope this info helps.

The grow room roof is shaded completely by trees. The reason I only use it from Nov-Feb is that the shade temp can be up to 40C or even more in the rest of the year. Not all the time - 30-35C is more normal - but it's impossible to run lamps in the grow room because the heat kills everything. I lost a whole crop of Aurora a few years ago, that's when I decided to build the greenhouse.
My daylight hours are never less than 11.5 and never more than 13.5 so I'm either going to 12-12 direct from seed, or during late spring-summer, veg veg veg then flower.
So, I am planning to use AK48 for the long day period say May-August, and the rest of the time, Cheese and Aurora. I would have been running some Thai haze but it seems to have bloody well disappeared in the postal sytem . . .

 

[Super Silver Haze]

leafminer

i run coco and i feed or water @ 5.8 but alot of people use the reagent ph drops and PH to 6.0 with the same results.

i do not test run off and never have b/c i do not recirculate my nutes, im DTW.


Hushpuppy

good suggestion on pulling air from beneath the greenhouse.

i believe there is an Arabic design of cooling houses by using clay pipes to draw fresh air from the roof and then the pipe goes underground to a depth to where the ground is a constant cool temperature, cooling the air and venting into the house.

 

[leafminer]

Yes, I don't recirculate - just in at the top and out at the bottom.

It has crossed my mind to hire an earth mover to excavate the garden and build a room amongst the earthworms...