mixing your nutrients

hey there guys and girls. so i have been having problems mixing and ph balancing my watter to be added to the hydro tank (DWC) usualy i take a 20L/ 5ga bucket of watter, after it has aired out for a day and then mix my nutrients and ph up or down strait into the bucket. i have noticed many times that the watter seems to almost reject the additives. for example lets say the watter comes out of the tap with a ph of 7.5 then i try to bring it down to 6- 6.5. often over night the watter in the bucket will fog up white and then a thin layer of white crystalized dust will settle on the bottom after another day or so. by this time the ph has returned to 7.5. some times this will even happen right as im mixing it. this also happens with the nutrients that i add though not as commonly. i thought that maby i was just trying to mix in too much in at once or i wasn't mixing it well enought but cutting back dosn't seem to help as much as i was hoping. i would be interested to know how you mix your nutrients, please feel free to leave any comments as i havn't heard much talk of this sort of problem.

 

just a shot in the dark here...do you have 'hard water' in your taps...heavy mineral content in water can mess with the system...if it can make soap ineffective i would think it would also affect nutrients..the white residue might be calcium....the opposite is true of soft water..you have to add magnesium and calcium...

 

i do have hard watter. thats an interesting point, i wonder how much a R/O filter would help with that. im just not sure if it would be cost effective to be changing the filters all the time

 

well i found one thing that wasnt helping any, my bluelab ec wand was reading between 400 and 800 ppm low. the guy at the store didnt believe me till he tried it out himself and was very shocked lol. it was over warranty date but he gave me a new one anyway. il be going back there again

 

A ph of 7.5 is.nt that high but sounds like to me you have a high gh and kh which will tend to buffer the ph toward alkaline. Think of ph as balancing on a scale with gh and kh on the other side of the scale when you add an adjuster it lowers the ph instantly but its out of balance so over time it will re balance its self hence you get the ph down only for it to return also an acid adjust is what it says an acid so it wear off over time anyway. Have you got or access to a reverse osmosis filter.