White slime

Innov8tr · Sep 14, 2011

shakey said:
mrdizzle said:

sadly, from my experience, that is the start of brown algae, it will be brown in a few days

I know this to be true from experience. You had the beginning stage of brown algae. Zone and pithoff are only temporary fixes, and you have to re introduce these products every 3 days or the slime starts to take over again. The best thing I found was physan20 but you can't use it with plants in the system or it will mess them up. Where you using Dutch master fertilizer? That's when I got the slime in my system and the water starts to get funky... Bad funky! Can you tell us more about cch2o roots? What's the ingredients in it?

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Sounds like you had something similiar but I'm 110% positive that its fallout from the ph up reaction, even GH agreed with me on this which I was surprised about. There were even small crystals forming where the water splashed up on the sides of the buckets which really odd. I put in freshwater and ran it for days with no problems at all, within 24 hrs after adding GH ph up the slime started building up, twice. I setup some side experiments with clean water, ph up, and nutrients and it did the same thing. Now that I've switched to technaflora ph up and no more slime buildup. To be honest having slime in my system would be very surprising since I run everything so sterile. This slime appeared with pythoff, UCRoots, and zone in sterilized RO. Luckily it is easy to get it off everything, just a high pressure water hose sprayer knocks it right off.

BTW you have to add pythoff daily to keep the level high enough to constantly kill, I used the test kit to find out. I used physan in my system once and it was like a washing machine with too much soap in it, foam all across my floor! I've been using GH 3 part for a while, just wont be using the ph up anymore.

UCRoots is some kind of acid is what CC told me, that was about it. I blindly trusted them and it worked really well. Maybe CC will jump in here and let us know.

Innov8tr · Sep 20, 2011

Well slime came back but I've narrowed it down finally, it was the f-ing gh ph down not ph up causing the problem. I cleaned out and put in fresh water over a week ago in my veg system. I added no ph up or down b/c the ph was at 6.3 at this time. A few days later I added h&g nutrients (instead of gh just in case) and added techna flora ph up to get back around 6.2. Still no problems at all, clear as can be. On Saturday I bleached and cleaned the clone machine and filled it with sterilized water with nothing else...no problems at all. The ph in both systems were slowly climbing so last night I added some gh ph down to get them to around 6.3. I checked the systems this morning and both of them are covered in slime. There was so much slime on the lid of the epi I had used a shop vac to get it off.

I've been researching this online and have found others were having the same problem, pics looked exactly the same. What sucks about reading these forums where people were asking for help no one pin pointed the problem with the ph down. All posts that I found about it they all stated they were using gh brand ph down. One guy even stated he had no problems in his system for 3 weeks while using vinegar to bring his ph down, then started using gh ph down and had slime just like me. Even with posting that he didn't put 2 and 2 together, and no one else did on that forum either. If you google "gh ph down slime" you will find several threads. Even someone gave it a bad review on amazon saying it cause massive slime.

I'm switching brands on my ph down right away, I'm pretty sure this is the problem and I'm still very sure its not bacteria. BTW there is no smell to this stuff whatsoever and it wipes off easily, its not attached to the plastic, more like coating it. Also overnight the veg system water is a little milky but the brown tint from the nutrient is gone. There is a light brown film across the bottom of the buckets, I'm assuming that the nutrient fell out of the solution and settle on the bottom but the ppms still read the same. This was not the case less than 12 hrs before. The brown isn't slimy at all, more dusty. I can swish my hand around in there and it starts mixing up again.

If this turns out not to be my problem I should know soon.

White slime

White slime

Innov8tr

Innov8tr

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