Welcome to the Grok Shop & part three in my series on compost tea. In this
video I'll discuss and test some possible ways you can prepare your water
to make compost tea. If you have collected rainwater or untreated well
water available to use, good for you; you don't need to watch this video; you might
want to move on to part 4 in the compost tea series. But if you're like me and
most other schmos, you're going to be on city water and water authorities will
add chlorine and chloramine to the water to eliminate human pathogens. They call
it "treating the water" and it does help kill a lot of nasty microorganisms.
Unfortunately, it also kills good microorganisms which is what we're
trying to grow and harvest with compost tea production. Now, you can see
I'm using a cheap pool test kit from Home Depot that they call it the HDX
brand that you can get many other versions of this but they work pretty
good for measuring chlorine: total chlorine and free chlorine. And as you
can see I start out with about two parts per million and try to work my way down
to zero. You can also use test strips. I'll show how to use those later in this
video. Whatever you use, it's a good idea to get a good understanding of where
you're starting at and once you get a process then you really don't have to
test any more; you just stick to your process because generally the water
authorities don't change their formulas too much. One big exception to that would
be the fact that a lot of water authorities are switching to chloramine
from chlorine and chloramine is basically when the chlorine molecule is
combined with other molecules like ammonia and that causes the chlorine to
be more stable in the water and last longer and they get more mileage out of
their chlorine that way.
So in this first test I'm just letting the water sit indoors and you can see
over a period of three days, it just barely drops tiny amounts each day and
I'm still sitting at about I think 1.7 parts per million here after three days
so this is pretty much a non-starter. I need you the water dechlorinated and
dechlorimated much faster than this. okay so now test two will be having the water
set outside in full Sun all day under the UV rays UV radiation is definitely a
catalyst for breaking down those chlorine and chloramine molecules so
we'll test it in the morning and in the evening after about three days and see
what happens here
so you up each test starting out is straight out of the tap and I asked the
mate it's around about two parts per million
so as you guys probably know carbon filters are great filters for chlorine
and chloramines definitely make sure you have one on your home water if you're
going to be drinking it a lot of Brewers beer brewers would use carbon filters in
the past and my understanding is a lot of them are switching over to UV
radiation because it's just so much more cost-effective for
you know a curious phenomenon I noticed during these tests --is the big drops
and chlorine and chloramine as measured with this tester occurred the following
morning after it been sitting out all day so my theory there is the bonds are
being broken down during the day by the UV radiation and then after they're
broken down they continue to gas off overnight and perhaps the majority of
the gassing off or evaporation is occurring after the bonds are broken
during the day but I'm not a chemist so if anybody knows that I'm wrong there on
that count let me know in the comments below
so one important question you're probably asking yourself is how much
chlorine is too much chlorine for making compost tea and the answer to that is
probably a little bit nebulous and depends on you know a number of factors
for me for now I Drive it all the way to zero or very close to zero as far as I
can tell from these cheap testers I use but it probably doesn't need to be all
the way to zero and the reason for that is because when you're dealing with
compost and humic acid and fulvic acid and all these organic molecules that are
found in and around compost tea you're going to have kind of like the wind to
your back so to speak the compost tea itself will work to break down some of
these chlorine molecules and so the answer is is I don't know I try to make
mine 0 for now and I have a process for that but if it's point 5 parts per
million or something it may not be a problem but for sure two parts per
million is a problem because that's what the Water Authority thinks is enough to
kill microorganisms so I know it needs to be way less than that
so after three days sitting outside the chlorines driven all the way to zero and
another thing I figured out a big advantage of doing it outside would be
you know all the gases that come off the ammonia the chlorine while not super
concentrated really harmful unless you have your head over the bucket all day
at least they're outside and they're out of the way but one disadvantage would be
I saw a lot of evaporation it's pretty hot here where I am right now and dry so
that probably increased it I reckoned about a couple liters of
water evaporated fortunately I had another can of water that's been sitting
outside and I'm testing here to make sure it's chlorine free which it is and
I can replenish my loss water that way but it's probably a good idea if you're
going to use the outside techniques to have an extra bucket and you might want
an extra bucket anyway for diluting your compost tea and whatnot
so here I'm going to go ahead and test the pH of the water the pH level
definitely affects chlorine and chloramine breakdown and the the
chemical reactions kind of go both ways depending on the pH levels of your water
I'm not really going to get into all that here just wanted to point out that
you can test it with this kit it's good to know your pH for producing compost as
well as for how to amend your soil and depending on what kind of plants you're
growing different plants you know may prefer more acidic or more alkaline
conditions and sometimes you can use your pH level of your water as a guide
on how to amend your growing medium your water and whatnot to get the results you
want
so yeah our waters pretty alkaline as well as the soil so we're constantly in
a bring the pH level down mode when we're trying to grow things one way to
get pH levels sort of under control and as well break down chloramines in
the water is to use humic acid and there's been some research done that
shows you can add 1tsp of humic acid to a hundred gallons to eliminate
chloramines from the water and presumably that's a hundred percent
humic acid and this is eight percent so if this was five percent it would be one
teaspoon per five gallon so this is eight percent a little stronger so I use
a little less than a teaspoon per five-gallon bucket now one thing to be
aware of is when you use compost compost will typically already have humic acid
in it it's hard to know the levels and whatnot so this is really sort of
optional sometimes I'll add it before I start my compost tea if I think the
chlorines not quite completely gone so
back to the testing this third and final test I'm doing an outside bubble and so
it's basically going to be the same as test two
except I'm adding the compost tea bubbler into the mix and to see if
this'll speed things up at all remember it took three days to go all the way
from two to zero in that test
so now one thing definitely to be aware of is you may or may not have core
amines in your water and if you have no chloramines but only chlorine and what
they call free or residual chlorine then you might be able to dechlorinate much
faster the chloramines are much stickier and difficult to get rid of than free
and residual chlorine you can usually tell this by looking at your water
report for your local Water Authority I definitely did that as well as calling
them and I know for sure that they're using chlorinated water where I live
so yeah here we go after 24 hours we can see the chlorine levels are all the way
to zero so this is definitely going to be the preferred technique for the
fastest dechlorination how it's a outside bubbling in the Sun for the win
okay so besides the chemical test kit like what I've been using you can also
use the strip's this one here tests total chlorine free chlorine pH and
total alkalinity and it's it's pretty accurate I find it as about as accurate
as the chemical test kit they're all based on a color decode wheel system and
the strips are pretty cheap they're cheaper than the chemical kit by by a
bit and I think I paid 11 or 12 bucks for this one I'll put some links to
these below and also to something similar to the pool test kit I've been
using this bottle contains a hundred test strips which is probably more than
you'll need because once you have your system down and you understand your
chlorine levels you really don't have to test it all that much and you can see it
agrees with the chemical test kit I got about two parts per million total
chlorine and pretty much zero free chlorine that is one advantage of the
test strips they break out the free in total whereas with chemicals at least
the one I have it's just based on time when you first put the drops in its
supposed to be free chlorine and then after a couple minutes is supposed to be
total chlorine now that sounds a little fuzzy to me they definitely do make more
accurate test kits that you can get which will really break down the levels
very accurately as far as free and total chlorine and other parameters but then
you got to decide you know how much do you really want to spend for making
composting right
so yeah as you can see the test strips show pretty much zero chlorine after 24
hours just like the chemical test did but just to be sure I'll go ahead and
run the chemical test on the same water
both tests agree it's time to make some tea so here's a summary bullet list of
some of the highlights you guys can check that out at your leisure that's
how it's done thanks for watching