Enter your source-water test and get a clear read on whether it's good for irrigation: salinity, alkalinity, sodium hazard, hardness, and ion toxicities, turned into a treatment plan.
About this tool: reading an irrigation water testpH is how acidic the water is right now. Alkalinity is how much acid it takes to change that, and it is what shifts your substrate pH over a season. Water at pH 8.0 with 30 ppm alkalinity is easy to correct; pH 7.2 with 300 ppm drives your medium alkaline anyway. 1 meq/L = 50 ppm CaCO3.
Depends on the buffer between water and root. Field soil is enormous, a plug tray is almost none.
| Situation | Target alkalinity |
|---|---|
| Lawn and turf on field soil | under about 180 ppm |
| General irrigation, in-ground | under about 120 ppm |
| Greenhouse, containers, seedlings | under about 80 ppm |
| Hydroponics and sensitive crops | under about 50 ppm |
Sulphuric adds sulphur, phosphoric adds a lot of phosphorus, nitric adds nitrate. Subtract it from your feed. Acid into water, never the reverse. Leave some alkalinity: zero means no buffer and a pH that swings.
SAR compares sodium against the calcium and magnesium that hold soil aggregates together. High-SAR water disperses clay and seals the surface, so the ground stops taking water. Above about 3 warrants attention. Gypsum supplies calcium to displace the sodium.
Boron has the narrowest safe range on the report: about 0.75 ppm for sensitive crops. And softeners swap calcium for sodium, which makes softened water worse for irrigation than the hard water it replaced.