Yeah I think so too.
The volume of work out there as far as guides seems to suggest ph up/down is safe to use in the amounts I'm using it.
I'm measuring how much I use with small dispensing syringes and only using JUST enough to get it to the right PH. I'm talking like ~1ml in the whole 5 gallon batch and I'm tweaking it .25ml at a time trying to get it right on the money.
I have some PH Up on hand already, I'll look around for potassium silicate as well, I've wanted to add some silica to the mix anyway.
Would you add the PH Up to the water before mixing nutrients in, get the water ppm up to ~75 by adding PH up and then add nutrients and additives and PH down to get it back to 5.5? I'm assuming for the buffer I should ignore the PH while adding it and focus on the PPM, then work to drop the PH once the nutrients have been added.
It's odd but I'd read in a couple places you should never use PH up/down at the same time.
Looking back to see where I read that I see articles talking about not mixing the concentrates together (duh) and then people going on to say any combination of the two in the res are death for your plants. Finally someone came along and pointed out what you did above, that many fertilizers include both the chemicals in PH up and PH down intended to be used together and they work well and do not kill plants...
I kinda suspected buffers we involved in PH somehow when I was trying to PH some water to soak media in. It's SOOO easy to overshoot your intended PH when there's no nutrients in the water. By the same token I could run a gallon of plain tap water down to 4ph and then add it to a higher PPM nutrient solution and the PH of the nutrients barely flinches! However if I PH a gallon of nutrients at 200ppm and add it to a bucket of similar ppm nutrients it will predictably drop the PH
Anyway I really appreciate you taking the time to teach me a few things here. I'm planning to try out adding a buffer to my next refill +
great white. Do a serious cleaning of my res and all tools again, run new air hoses and use the new pump and air stones.