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By Panman
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#356705
Back when I first started with this hobby, almost 40 years ago now, the conversation about water was all about ph and chlorine. Now it is tds in the water. My question is, does a low tds indicate water that is less likely to be alkali? I could see how that would be the case.
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By Greenthumbs Garden
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#356706
yes, soft water tends to be more acidic. soft water meaning low TDS or ppm. That's what I got from my fish keeping days anyways, lol.
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By Shadowtski
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#356707
This is only my guess but I think water with a TDS of 0 has a balanced PH of 7.
Anything you add to the water will increase the TDS and drive the PH towards 0 or 14, depending on the acidity or alkalinity of the addition.
Back in the misty ancient days of CP culture, there was no such thing as a small inexpensive TDS meter.
You had litmus paper and horribly inaccurate PH meters.

Back then, I used Milwaukee tap water.
That was a horrible thing to do to CPs.
I had to repot them almost every year.

Good growing,
Mike
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By Greenthumbs Garden
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#356709
just ran a quick ph test out of curiosity, the top is my RO water which is about 30ppm at the moment, and the bottom is ur tap water which registers about 260ppm. I don't know how accurate these strips are but the RO looks to be about 6 where our tap water is at 8.
ph test.jpg
ph test.jpg (197.08 KiB) Viewed 4973 times
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By Panman
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#356711
Shadowtski wrote: Sat Jun 13, 2020 10:17 pm This is only my guess but I think water with a TDS of 0 has a balanced PH of 7.
Anything you add to the water will increase the TDS and drive the PH towards 0 or 14, depending on the acidity or alkalinity of the addition.
Back in the misty ancient days of CP culture, there was no such thing as a small inexpensive TDS meter.
You had litmus paper and horribly inaccurate PH meters.

Back then, I used Milwaukee tap water.
That was a horrible thing to do to CPs.
I had to repot them almost every year.

Good growing,
Mike
And finding information about CP was next to impossible. There were a couple of decent books and the CP newsletter. If you had a question, you mailed it in and maybe heard something back after a month.
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By Panman
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Joined:  Wed Mar 04, 2020 8:41 pm
#356712
Dr GreenThumb wrote:just ran a quick ph test out of curiosity, the top is my RO water which is about 30ppm at the moment, and the bottom is ur tap water which registers about 260ppm. I don't know how accurate these strips are but the RO looks to be about 6 where our tap water is at 8.
ph test.jpg
That is much of what I would expect. My tap is 72ppm and the ph runs around 6. If I let it sit for 24 hours it is up closer to 7. That is because I have a lot of dissolved carbon dioxide in it.
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By Greenthumbs Garden
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#356714
Panman wrote:That is much of what I would expect. My tap is 72ppm and the ph runs around 6. If I let it sit for 24 hours it is up closer to 7. That is because I have a lot of dissolved carbon dioxide in it.
Yes, I read that rainwater can be lower still about 5.5 due to gasses dissolved in the water.
Shadowtski wrote: Sat Jun 13, 2020 10:17 pm Back in the misty ancient days of CP culture, there was no such thing as a small inexpensive TDS meter.
You had litmus paper and horribly inaccurate PH meters.
Panman wrote: And finding information about CP was next to impossible. There were a couple of decent books and the CP newsletter. If you had a question, you mailed it in and maybe heard something back after a month.
Sounds brutal! I tried many times to grow VFTs, I would buy them in the garden center, they would last a month slowly looking worse then die... used to really get me mad. Then stealing my neighbor's wifi one day on my laptop I'm surfing the net and found this forum... my plant at the time died, but now I had a resource. I couldn't believe there was a community of people out there that had the same interest. I never thought before to buy a book, I did not even think there would be a book on the subject. Finding the forum was a gem, I would not be growing these plants today without it.
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By Panman
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#356721
For a little context, we didn't get a computer until I was about 3 years into the hobby. That was an Apple II. IBM PCs hadn't come to market yet. The internet would wait for another 10 years or so.
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