Your hydroponics marijuana plants need water and lots of it, but almost all municipal and well water in North America is polluted, and the pollution can harm or kill your marijuana plants, not just affect taste and aroma.
Most water contains materials (and sometimes organisms) that harm your plants. E. Coli and other pathogenic bacteria and fungi can travel in water into your hydroponics marijuana root zone. And if you use this water as a foliar spray, it can pollute your flowers. I’m sure you’re aware that E. Coli and other microbes can cause you serious illness.
Some pathogenic water-borne organisms attack your hydroponics roots, decreasing plant health, growth, and yield size. In extreme cases, harmful root zone microbes can kill your crops.
Heavy metals, runoff from pesticides and herbicides, runoff from streets, industrial pollution, coal-burning mercury pollution, and anti-bacterial chemicals placed in water by water suppliers are all bad for your hydroponics plants.
Water suppliers add chlorine and chloramine to water to kill harmful microbes. Unfortunately, these materials are not good for your plants because they also kill beneficial microbes that you should install in your hydroponics marijuana root zone because beneficial microbes protect roots, enhance them, and increase yield and THC potency.
Some growers believe if you let water sit out for a day or two that it will evaporate the chlorine and chloramine away. This is only half true. Chlorine evaporates easily; chloramine doesn’t. And you will also find that water suppliers are adding fluoride, another potentially toxic element.
Your raw water can also have elements in it that are plant nutrients, such as calcium. In fact, hydroponics nutrients manufacturers rely on water having onboard calcium and magnesium, and they deliberately go short on those elements in some base nutrients formula so you don’t overdose your marijuana on calcium and magnesium.
If you purify water using methods I suggest in this article, or if you use rainwater, your water lacks onboard calcium and you have to add it back into your water after it’s purified.
Do that by using a marijuana-specific, phase-specific Cal-Mag product and raise your purified water ppm from zero ppm to 100 parts per million (ppm) by adding the Cal-Mag product to your purified water before you mix the rest of your hydroponics nutrients into your water.
The most effective method for purifying your hydroponics water is reverse osmosis (RO). This process uses multiple filtration passes to get your water down to zero or almost-zero ppm.
Of course, not all reverse osmosis units are created equal. Many reverse osmosis units are not engineered to produce a high volume of pure water while minimizing water waste. Some reverse osmosis units are tricky to operate, or require frequent replacement of expensive filtration membranes.
If you get inferior reverse osmosis systems, you could end up with increased costs, low flow and production rates, water waste, and not enough RO water to meet your needs.
Hydroponics marijuana growers get the most effectiveness from reverse units engineered specifically for high-value hydroponics crops and high-production grow rooms. Companies like Growonix have figured out how to give you efficient, cost-effective and professional RO filtration without the glitches and costs that used to be associated with RO units.
Feeding pure water to your marijuana plants is all part of the “neutral palette” strategy that gives marijuana growers their biggest yields of delicious buds loaded with THC. Here’s what I mean by “neutral palette.” It’s like if you are an artist wanting to paint a picture. You start out with a blank piece of canvas: it’s neutral and you don’t have to paint over any existing colors.
Similarly, when you use a hydroponics neutral grow media such as rockwool, or a neutral system such as aeroponics, and also use zero ppm reverse osmosis water, you are able to use professional hydroponics nutrients to totally control every nutritional element your marijuana plants get.
When you have that kind of control (and it is only available using neutral media and pure water), you have the godlike ability to tap directly into the metabolic and genetic features of your marijuana plants and stimulate those features to get the absolute best from your marijuana. What I mean is: faster growth, bigger yields, more THC!
To sum up, most water is polluted and can harm you and/or your plants. Unfiltered water contains materials that interfere with your ability to use nutrition to control your cannabis plants’ output and THC potency.
You need to filter your water, and reverse osmosis is the most useful method. Companies like Growonix engineer RO systems for high-value hydroponics marijuana growers. When you use RO water, you better control plant outcomes and protect your plants from disease and other problems. Your crops will taste and smell better, they’ll be healthier for you, and they’ll grow better.
I like it that Growonix and other progressive hydroponics reverse osmosis manufacturers have solved problems that hydroponics RO equipment used to have. Now you have good options for reverse osmosis equipment that provides you the neutral water you need to fuel your marijuana crops towards bigger yields of cleaner-tasting buds.
