Alright so I had a eureka moment just now drinking some wine, I could of course be dead wrong in my assumption but does this make sense:
The PH and the EC were BOTH going down in my hugo blocks with good dryback between feedings, and good dryback overnight. I thought this was unusual to see both numbers go down but I made a decision that it's because I was letting them dryback TOO much, so I increased irrigation length..this helped the ph stay stable and the EC would still go down. I thought this was an improvement and maybe I just needed to feed stronger.
Then today I started to see a progression of what looks like a calcium deficiency, that I thought was light burn at first. Some brown dead spots on leaves and the newer growths being pale and burnt on the edges, as well as some tip burn.
So my a-ha moment was remembering calcium is a cation, so if the plant is uptaking all the available calcium in my nutrient mix it would lower the ph in the root zone as well as the EC (is this correct?). And since I wasn't feeding ENOUGH calcium, it showed deficiencies. Am I on the right track here?
@Anthem got my brain jogging because he runs the same lights and saw a correlation between the light and calcium
Would also love your 2 cents @Aqua Man and @sshz since you guys are more studied in the way of plant science. And one of you also has the gavitas. Or anyones 2 cents for that matter.