EC PPM

Hi, I have just purchased a BlueLab EC Monitor for use in my Dripper system, I am a fairly experienced grower and don't have any nutrient probs with my plants, I am using Canna Flores and dilute 40Mls Part A and 40Mls Part B with one litre of water, My tank holds 160 Liters, so that works out at around 600Mls of each part to fill my tank, and I have never had any problems with this. However According to Canna this should give me a reading of around 1.5 - 2.0 EC (thier Website gives different strength mix to the bottle!) However the BlueLab Monitor gives me a reading of 6.9, which according to the Bluelab instructions should be times by 500 to give the PPM, which in this case = 3450 which is extremely High! So my question is, should I take a background reading of the fresh water (no nutes) and subtract this from my nutrient reading? or does my tank need a good clean out?

By the way I am in week 4 of 12/12 and all 22 Plants are budding nicely, and the foliage is not showing any signs of nute difficiency or over fertilization.

Perhaps it's out of whack.

No the meter is pre calibrated and brand new out of the box, also has a hand writen calibration certificate with it.

Yes Your right. You should read your water before you add nutes 200 PPM and over is hard water and needs nutes for hard water. If you use RO or distilled water I can tell you it's vary low in PPM's. I'm not familar with bluelab. Can you calibrate it ? It may need it. You and your plants are doing the right thing. No signs of over or under feeding is good. I would check the meter. I have a Hana now That reads EC , PPT and PH. PPT is PPM in the thousands. I can read as low as 10 PPM to 10 thousand PPT. Let us know what it is or if you need more help. I can tell you what mine are in both PPM and EC later when my light comes on. Show use a pic if you can.

I have a blue lab truncheon. High quality. It's right. Look at your plants. Do they look bad? I've heard of people running ppm's really high and their plants are fine. So as long as the plants look ok, don't worry. That's a great meter. I paid $99 for mine. How much did you pay for yours?

blue lab truncheon is the best...short of going digital hard wired...I believe blue lab has those too!

Do they sell calibration solutions for those? If they do then you are going to need them. I have a sharp TDS pen and I calibrate it at least once a week. Without the calibration solution how do you know your meter is accurate?

H

No Herbus. It is already hard-wired calibrated. Whatever that means. You cannot adjust it. It's either works or not. The truncheon is very cool. Looks like a giant thermometer(sp?) with blue and white stipes and red lights every interval. Kind of like those test your strength meters at the carnival. The lights lite up the instant you put it in solution and blinks. There is no on/off button.

Gen, I did not know that thank you mucho.

Herbus

FatBud do you know anyone else that has a meter you can compare with or they have calibration solution to test just to make shure. Mine can get to 2000 PPM's sometimes but you start to see tips of leaves burning.

I cleaned out my tank today, and did a background reading on fresh water, the meter read 0.1EC so thats 50ppm, after filling up with fresh nutes, it rose to 3.EC which is 1700ppm after around four hours its up to 4.4EC which is 2200ppm so I guess the meter is working fine! Plants are doing extremely well, gettin a little bit big though but they've slowed down loads in the last week so shouldn;t get much bigger.

Those readings sound good FatBud. Keep them on the high side till you see tips of leaves burn. The plants give off waste, next time you do a clean flush check it after 4 hours and see what you got. My readings can get A little high depending on Addtives. Everything you put in there adds up. Good to see you got it figured out. I have run half nutes and full nutes now, And if the plants like it give em all they can take. Much more potent.

Well I have been checking this daily and have noticed that the EC has been creeping up, its now up to 5.0 (2500ppm) which would indicate that the plants are using more water than nutes, the PH is around 6.2 today but this has varied from around 5.8 to 6.5 over the same period, the plants are still looking great with no signs of burning, but I have noticed that the buds seem to filling out with nore leaf than pistills, some of the buds seem to look like a mass of little leaves as opposed to proper buds! I have checked sex and there are no Male flowers anywhere. this is the third grow of AK47, and I remember the buds last time seemed to get a bit leafy, but the first grow was in soil and the buds then where huge with allmost no leaf between the buds. The first pistils showed on Xmas eve so they are only about 3 weeks into flower, but 5 weeks from 12/12 if you know what I mean, I will post some pics later.