First Grow Room - A Couple ?'s

Hey all,

I've been reading up on this forum a lot in the last month and it has really helped me in setting up my grow. Currently, I have 12 Snocap clones in my veg room under a 1000W MH bulb. I just purchased them yesterday and planted them last night. I'll have pics up of everything later today. We're planning on doing a SCROG grow as we only have about 5' to work with. I have a couple quick questions though:

1. I've heard that you should use r/o H20 to water your plants, how about water from a Pur water faucet? I replace the filter regularly, but the water is tap water and therefore has a lot of bad stuff in it.

2. One of the intakes in my room is just a vent in the wall, and therefore some light leaks in when my plants are supposed to be in the nighttime stage. What can I use to filter out the light, but still let air flow through?

3. Can someone please tell me a little bit about flushing soil and how/why we should do that?

Thanks a lot, I would like to put up a grow log so I'll do that later today.

Smoke good-good,

Dan K.:rasta:

1. yeah I'd say that filtered water will be okay.

2. Try putting a black screen in the middle of the vent or even a carbon filter I beleive that would block off the light and remove some of the stank.

I tried a Pur water filter when I first started growing hydro and was not happy with it at all. Originally the problem I had was that I could not stablilize the ph--it would go down etc but not stay there; no matter what. The filter took the ppms in my tapwater from 250 to about 100-150 which was fine but the ph remained a huge problem (ph in my tap water was 8--a Pur water filter actually took the ph to 10 which was NOT the answer I wanted) so I only use r/o water and I love it. We have a well by the way so it probably plays a pretty good role in the ph instability. (had the problem in my fishtanks too so I knew it would be a problem with growing). Good luck.

OK, here are some pics of the current set-up:

When I was up there, I noticed that the ends of a couple of buds are turning black!?:confused: i tried to get pictures, but my camera isn't good enough to catch the detail.

RO water is great for hydro and if you dont mind adding back the elements that R/O water removes. You need to add CalMag (calcium and magnesium) to your R/O water or youll find deficiencies. I use just filtered water (faucet filter) and around here it gives a 150 ppm reading and 7.0 pH and keeps the calcium and magnesium. Perfect for soil. For hydro, R/O water is a neccessity to control ppm and bacteria growth.

i used tap water and just adjusted the PH. seemed to work fine.

As for the vent, use a light trap. basically anything with a 90 degree bend. You may be able to use a 4" PVC elbow or metal venting from the AC dept at home depot.