Tax, The product name is Amquel. The amount that was instructed on the bottle was 10 drops per gallon. I did not think that Britta could remove all the ammonia. Good to know that it does work. Viki, The amount of chloramine does vary in various municipalities. Yes, water districts can change the chemicals in the water supply. You can get a report from your municipality, you might be able to find it on the city's or county's website. It is also possible to use vitamin c to reduce or neutralize chloramine, we had a thread on that recently. however, the amount needed was difficult to calculate and sounded miniscule. Vicki, You might want to switch to spring bottled water until you determine what the problem is. If it is a water problem, you might need to repot the plants, or be prepared to wait a long while to begin to see improvements. The damage caused by chloramine causes the edges of older leaves to turn black and wilt, it is called necrosis, I believe. Your plants seem to have some other type of damage other than chloramine. that one you posted does not look good. Joanne This post was edited by fortyseven on Wed, Nov 5, 14 at 13:50

As a point of clarification, hoods in general can be separated into two types: (a) self contained having an outside providing some level of acceptable appearance and an inside that contains filters or baffles, possibly a blower or fan; and (b) a liner or insert that is to be put into a hood supplied by someone else and generally made of wood to look like a cabinet; the liner/insert containing hood guts such as filters, blowers, etc. There is no performance difference between a liner having aperture area A and CFM B and a complete hood having aperture area A and CFM B, all else being equal. Liners vs. hoods is an aesthetic consideration. As for what the properties of a good liner or hood should be, you can read the material at my My Clippings for source material, and rummage through this forum reading hood and MUA posts until the basic concepts are clear. I'm not going to rate prices or devices I don't own. kas

If this is for a lawn, I would not worry about it. Grass can grow just fine at that pH level. If you decide to go through with it, this is not something that can be done over night without amending your soil. I'd figure out how much each zone covers, and add the proper amount for that square foot and run the zone until the tank is empty. If you use something like Ammonium sulfate that takes about 5 lbs to get 1 lb of n per 1000 sq/ft, you might want to set the tank on the fastest setting so you are not flooding your lawn with extra water, and having most of it run off. Michael

Yeah ... lots of critical things to consider such as initial and changing pH effects*, buffering, multivalent cations, anionic and cationic micronutrients, and zeolite like ion exchange surfaces on soil particles, which make it a play day for chemistry discussions. Then the attack and breakdown of plant and animal litter to slow release nutrients brings up neat microbiology and biochemistry aspects. Material science then decides to manipulate the situation with osmotic release and diffusion of encapsulated nutrients. And hydroponic principles try to partially play nature taking over the hydrology and lighting it up. Physics kicks ideas in there on this last aspect. For instance did you know that fluorescent light indeed glow when struck by energy (as you know), but much of the light intensity flashes through a series of distinct colors at 60 times a second? * Plants cheat neatly by manipulating ion exchange release of cationic nutrients. They knock off ammonium, potassium, magnesium, calcium and other positively charged ions by producing acid(s) to knock it off. H+ alone can cause the exchange but if the acid is on a small organic base (anion) like oxalate this organic can diffuse around and pull at the cations on soil that the plant wants and help knock it off, helping in the "weathering" breakdown of soil too. Chelators made by plants and microbes make it really interesting too. They diffuse around and hold certain critical nutrients so tightly that the plant has the choice of finding more, having a deficiency (specific nutrient starving), making a stronger chelator to take it back, and/or breaking the chelator down to free the nutrient. Now the fun parts ... the plant one might be considering is not be alone. A group of similar or different roots might be working together AND competing in that patch of soil, with different players at different depths Trees cheat and certain non woody plants cheat and go low. Moles, gophers and field mice run through this soil zone toox playing their games. No soil contact then no nutrient uptake, no root then no nutrient collection there for the plant, loss of stored nutrients and need to spend energy replacing the root. And there are smaller life forms co-inhabating the soil with the roots that are also directly or indirectly effected by soil pH. Let's put them into three classes as those that (1) don't generally effect a plant much, (2) can hurt the plant, or (3) can help the plant. Let's see ... hurting a plant is bad, unless it hurts a seriously competitive plant more. Helping a plant is good, unless it's again that serious competitor. Plants are not stand alone organisms in naturem. They live in community with microorganisms. So what if the soil pH helps support the growth of a microbe that can grow all over your plants roots? Sounds bad I know, but there are those three classes mentioned above. If your microbe is a pathogen that is bad. If it doesn't attack the plant but runs out and breaks down nearby leaf litter, great free food. It it doesn't hurt your plant but by being on root surfaces can compete with and stop pathogenic microbes from getting a foothold, great a free natural inoculation for immunity. There was a company called Eden Bioscience a couple decades ago here in the PNW that made an interesting observation. In large scale evergreen seedling production for forestry sometimes there were large scale fungal blights. Sadly alot of the seedlings all died at once in mass. However, sometimes there were a few seedlings near each other that did not succumb! In fact they looked totally healthy! When isolating bacteria, yeast and filamentous fungi from the surfaces of these plants they found that certain kinds could be grown in the lab that protected seedlings from attack, when sprayed onto them. These microbes grew best in their optimal pH range. They indeed colonized the plants, in this case leaf surfaces. And their presence did protect the leaves from pathogen attack. Obviously similar things must be happening in nature in the leaf canopy and also soil root zone of plants. So when a plant likes acidic pH 5 - 6 soil, is this just because nutrients are more available it? When I went to school, in what now seems like the dark ages, most plant physiology books focused almost solely on this. Or is it because beneficial microbes helping feed or protect the plant need that pH? My firm assumption is that both chemical and microbial pH dependent effects interact to make an optimum environment for that plant. And that some plants in the natural environment survive best, rather than grow best, at their optimal pH range. Why do many fungi sour (strongly acidify) what they are busy rotting? Niether competive microbes nor does the dieing plant tissue like it. The fungus gets more. This is exactly why you want to check the pH in the soil that you might be soon preparing for your new vegetable or herb garden this spring. Too basic, your plants starve. Too acidic, the pathogenic fungi don't starve. Then like the heirloom story of The Three Bears ... there's one pH that's just right.