Too bad on the bottles as I would like to have more than the 12 glass ones I have now.
Where in Walmart were the plastic ones?
Your mesh may not be clogged but because it is so fine it sometimes doesn't allow water to flow easy, right off the bat.
I usually run warm tap water over the bottom and run my fingers over the mesh to "tin" it. This allows water to make better contact with the fine mesh so that it will flow through better.
It won't take much large particle phyto to plug it up though, and running your finger over the bottom of the mesh when it slows up, can help to get it flowing a little better again. Finger has to be clean and sterile if you're doing it with phyto that you intend to continue culturing, but not if you are just harvesting to use.
I do a ten minute bleach every once in a while if I can see a build up on the mesh.
I use the cheap bleach I buy at Walmart in the 5L container, with no additives or perfumes.
To sterilize the equipment, I use IO pails with tap water and about a cup of bleach in them, and let the equipment sit in it at least overnight.
As for culture water, that depends on who is doing it, the quality of the water or just personal preference.
I use tap water and no longer sterilize the culture water but grow more of it to compensate for the crashes. (it's a hassle to sterilize very large volumes)
However, I keep 4 two litre bottles of culture stock solution that I do sterilize the water as I described earlier, with 8 to 10 drops of bleach in a two litre bottle and let sit for a day before neutralizing the bleach with ClorAm-X.
For both my stock and my using cultures, I like now to only harvest one half the culture and replace half new water as I find fewer crashes which makes up for not harvesting as much.
There are a lot of ways people grow phyto and my way works for me but I don't say it's the best or that it is the right way for you.
It started much different but over the years I change methods as I increased the volumes and got older and lazier.
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