How to Prepare Water For Hydroponics [Updated]

Ooh, it is hot here in San Diego. What is up guys? Kevin from Epic Gardening here. Today we are remaking the first video I ever made on this channel, which is how to prepare water for a hydroponic garden. So today what we're going to look at is the tower garden. This is about a 20 gallon tank. So there's going to be some cool stuff. I will not make the mistakes I made in the first video. I will correct them and I will explain where I went wrong. So stay tuned. Let's get into it. So here we are speeding up the filling of the 20 gallon tank. Now a lot of people worry about chlorine and chloramine in the water. And so if you have just chlorine in your water, you can let it sit for 24 hours and all the chlorine will off gas and it'll be out of there. But if you want that process to go a bit faster or you have chloramine in your water, you have to use something called a Campton tablet. So one Campton tablet, which I'll leave in the link description below, will take all the chlorine and chloramine out of about a 20 gallon tank. So if I wanted to, I could have tossed that in here, but I let it sit. So what I'm doing here is I'm taking my Canna Grow line. This is the HI9814 and I am just going to check. I want to know what my baseline pH and my baseline parts per million is of just standard tap water. I find it's always good to have that baseline. And so this thing's nice. What it'll do is it'll tell me both parts per million. It'll tell me the pH and it'll also tell me the water temperature because of course in hydroponics, that's pretty important. So I'm just taking off the sensor cap here and I'm going to plop it in my water in just a second here. So what I'm looking for is just, Hey, what am I working with right now? So it looks like straight out of the tap here in San Diego, water can spit hard. It's at 330 parts per million. And then the pH will rise. You can see on this meter, it says not stable. Um, and if I was really letting this go, I would let this go until it said stable or until that, that notification disappeared. But I know it's about an 8.1. And so I'm just going to keep that in mind. So now I'm looking at my General Hydroponics Flora series. This is the most classic basic hydroponic nutrient you can use. And what I want to do is I want to go for mild vegetative growth because I'm doing leafy greens. And when you do General Hydroponics, you always put in the micro first. So I'm putting in a hundred milliliters because it's five milliliters for a gallon. It's a 20 gallon tank. Then I'm putting in vegetative and I'm putting in a little bit extra here because again, I'm growing leafy greens. I just want to jump up on that vegetative growth and I'm putting a bit of the bloom nutrients in as well. So here we go. We've mixed all those in. And I know, you know, I probably should have used a mixing stick or something like that, but my hands were really clean and it's really not a big deal for something that grows just to vegetative like leafy greens. So here is the effect on the pH. We went from 8.1 to 6.7 just by adding the nutrients. And what I'm going to do now is add one half ounce of pH down and see how one half ounce affects a 20 gallon tank. And then once I know that number, I can just do it by eye from then on. I don't have to use the pH meter. So here I am mixing it and we've gone from 6.7 to 6.43. And you're going to see this drop again. It's going to go down to about 6.1. And so it looks like a half ounce of pH down will drop the pH by 0.3. So now I know that offhand, which is a good thing to know. So all I'm doing here is I'm just making sure that I take care of this meter. And if you have whatever meter you have, just make sure you take care of it because those sensors are very sensitive. And just popping the top on and wrapping it up. So hopefully that was a much clearer explanation on how to prepare water for a hydroponic grow, a bit more best practices, a bit more information. And you know, if I missed anything, if I made a couple of mistakes, definitely let me know. I'm always learning. But if you liked the video, definitely give me a little like, a little comment, a little subscribe. I respond to all comments and I will see you on the next video.