 Hey guys, this is Matt with 4Hyderponics.com and today I'm going to be talking a little bit about medium pH, soil pH, how to raise and lower it, and one way to test for it. What I'm going to be using today to test is going to be the Digital Soil pH Pen by Blue Labs, one of my favorite devices to test pH of soil and solution. First thing we want to make sure we have a saturated medium. You will not get an accurate reading if this medium is bone dry or relatively dry. So first thing we're going to do is take some filtered water. I have a pH to about 6.5 and then we're going to go ahead and add it in there. So once you've added your water, depending on the container, make sure you add enough to get the entire medium wet, we're going to go ahead and punch a test hole so that this meter comes with a nice big spike that encases the actual meter itself. So you're going to use this to punch your test holes. You can see it's pretty long so you'll get a nice accurate reading for midway down into your container. So first thing you'll do is just shove it down in there and it's not much different than a bamboo stake. Don't be afraid to go ahead and stick it in there. Plants will handle this no problem. And then as you pull it out, try to be somewhat gentle so that the soil doesn't backfill in the hole. Then we're going to go ahead and take off the spike which shows you the actual probe itself. We're going to turn the probe on and then we're going to stick this probe down into the actual test hole. Get that down there all the way. Make contact with the actual soil and then we're going to let it do its thing and stabilize. I'll take a couple of seconds or so. And while that's going on, we'll go ahead and talk about how to move the pH of the soil up and down. So one easy way to do it is your garden line and your soil acidifier. So if I found that this was extremely low or lower than I wanted it to be, I would just apply my garden line by top dressing which is just scratching the surface of the medium and sprinkling it on there. The dose of the amounts are actually right on here. You can do large amounts, small amounts. They have you have actually cubic foot and stuff like that. So then on top of that, see what that's at, that point seven. And then if it ends up being too high, we're going to go to our soil acidifier. So if you have a test of 9.0 or 8.0 or something and you want to bring it down relatively quickly, the soil acidifier would be this great idea for you. Same thing, just scratching the surface, sprinkling it on there and over the course of a couple of weeks, it'll lower your pH. Obviously you want to keep monitoring it and making sure that it's dropping and don't over apply a little bit of time and continue to test. This is still dropping down. We're down to five, seven now, five, six. Depending on the species of plant, this could be go to or bad. But most people are trying to stay between five, five and seven. And make sure you're performing all these tests with a calibrated meter. Obviously, if you don't have a calibrated meter, you might do the wrong thing. I had a line acidifier at the wrong time. So if you have any questions about how to calibrate an actual meter, we have a video on it that shows you how to do all the calibration stuff. Go ahead and check that out. At the moment, it seems like it's stabilized about 5.4. And once it's stabilized, what I'm going to do is I'm not going to stop the test there. I'm going to go ahead and perform about two or three more punch holes in this conceitment container. And I'm going to take an average of this medium. I'm not going to just make one test hole and say the whole thing is exactly that medium. We'll do a couple tests. I'll take an average in my head and then we'll apply accordingly. So I hope this helped you guys out. If you have a pH issues or you're wondering about how to test or how to move it around, the last thing I can say is that if you want to do it without anything like this and you're just trying to bump it a little bit, you can water in a little high or a little bit low. So if my pH is lower than I wanted, I might water in at 6.5 to 6.8. For the next week or two, I'd try to bring it up. And if I was too high, my first time, I might water in at 5.2 to 5.5 for a couple of weeks to try and to bring it down. That's the way you can move it around by just a gentle nudge with your actual solution. Testing to be test to run off of this. If you add 6.5 water in and it's coming out at 5.2, that's another indication that your medium is really low and that could be part of the problems that you're having. This does test solution so you can test this and then take it out until it's test to run off right afterwards, which is another reason I really like this pen. So I hope this video helped you out. We have all this stuff at 400Paint.com. Please come check us out. We'll see you next time.