I just use h202.
Now to figure out what you are doing to cause root rot on your seedlings.
I wish I could justify the cost. H2O2 was the only thing that limped me through my first run, I loved it and it worked extremely well but ... it's too expensive and hard to get large quantities of. Trust me, I wish I could definatively figure out what is causing this root rot to set in ever single time. I feel like if I could figure that out and fix it, I'd be good, but it continues to plague me.
I just use chlorine bleach. Any bleaching agent will do; some you just want to rinse more thoroughly.
Next time around (if there is a next time) I'm going to just try a strong solution of pH down... some preliminary reading suggests that just lowering intracellular pH is effective in killing oomycetes and I know for sure it's the best way to kill fungi, even more so than bleaches... so I bet phosphoric acid will be quite effective. Even just cleaning vinegar would probably be enough.
I just went through rot treatment for live systems
over here.
It seems to be going well. I'll have 1-week progress pics up once my lights go on this evening.
Thanks - I'll check out your treatment link here. Appreciate it.
Funny enough - I did use cholorine this time, with a chiller, and root rot still set in and got me. As far as what kind to use - 'pool shock', 'bleach', etc - it's very close to the same thing, at least for these purposes - when all we're really after is the HOCL at the end of the day regardless of which method you use to get there.
My main problem right now with chlorine based sterile is two fold:
#1 - I have seen so many conflicting posts sprawled all over the net saying 'just use x% calcium hypochlorite or x% of sodium hypochlorite - mix with 1 gal of RO water, and then add X amount of this solution to your res, per gallon, every Y days'.
The problem here is, not only can no one agree on percentages or amounts to add (they're seriously all over the place from 1g all the way to 6g per gal of water) - but perhaps worse is that no one seems to have done any sort of definitive testing on exactly how much is actually needed to generate and maintain proper free chlorine levels in their res, at least from what I've been able to find. It all seems to be guess work combined with pure speculation followed with tons of "it worked for me, bro!" posts.
#2 - Both ammonia in nutes and also phosphoric acid can react with/cause chlorine gas to form and thus leave your system. Again, without actually testing for both total chlorine and free chlorine levels - this is nothing more than a guessing game. I haven't seen any sort of actual testing of this anywhere showing how long sufficient levels of free chlorine are maintained in the system after adding/mixing nutes/ph down, etc.
I realize a lot of this is dependent upon individual setups, type/brand of nutes, how many air stones/waterfalls, etc - so I'm going to go about this next attempt a bit more scientifically. I've picked up a total / free chlorine tester here, and I want to actually spend some time sitting down and taking some notes on how much of what percentage and amounts are added, and see exactly how long sufficnent levels of free chlorine are maintained in my system with some proper testing done to verify levels daily, before/after adding nutes, phing, etc. I want to be able to actually determine and know for sure if I've been adding too much, not enough, and also how often I need to add more - to maintain sufficient amounts in the system without these guessing games.
*If* I can manage to find a way to maintain sufficient levels (around 4ppm) of free chlorine in my system, I will do one more attempt with it (doing additional top feeding) throughout the grow to try to keep the netpot sterile (which is where I *always* encounter issues - every time it's up in the netpot).
However.... if I find that it's converting to chlorine gas and not sufficiently keeping up adequate amounts of free chlorine levels due to either the ammonia in the nutes or the phosphoric acid in my ph down - then, I will either give up on running chlorine and try to see how feasible/expensive it would be to get and use H2O2 ... or give up running sterile and go back to trying bennies/a live system and hope I don't end up sliming my entire system again (like what happened to my first system).