Aerides significant dying tips

[Keysguy]

I have a number of Aerides plants and grow them amongst my vandas under 60% shade cloth.
There are some cultural "tweaks" I might have though depending on the species. What species is it?
My suspicion is that your lights were way too close and between the bright light and heat from the lights, you're essentially cooking them because you're closely replicating direct sun, not bright light.

[Longroots]

The lights aren't hot, they're Sansii 15w LEDs. But I'm going to update my regiment with them, more fertiliser and less light basically

[Shadeflower]

I think that is the wrong conclusion to take.
It's annoying because feeding more Rainmix will just make the problem worse.
Giving less light will ensure it flowers less. Yes the problem will not be as severe but it would be the equivalent of a mechanic having a look at your car and saying nothing wrong with it as long as you don't take it over 2000rpm.

Ok so there is no problem as long as I drive at 10mph and don't use the accelerator.

It's not really what you should be aiming for. You want your plant to grow, not slow down growth and load it up with even more Nitrogen.

I might not be able to explain things as well, I want others to get more flowers so we get to see more flowers. So giving less light, I've mentioned this too many times it would be like sending half your workforce home for the day. Your plant will consume less, grow less and thus not exhibit as much problems because if it grows less then it will not get a supply problem as easily.
If it s growing at max productivity then it can much easier get a supply issue and brown patches creep up.

So yes reducing the light will reduce demand for nutrients and reduce the problem but it's not a fix I believe in long term.

You could consider just getting potash, it's only potassium ,no phosphorus so half as good a product imo (since you want to add both together ideally, too much of any macronutrient long term causes problems, all 3 should be supplied in a rough ratio of 2:1:3 - always at least 3 times as much potassium as phosphorus with nitrogen somewhere in between (either more or less) - calcium should always be the same as the nitrogen and magnesium about half the calcium amount.

So potash is £5 from wilko and lasts 10 times as long you use tiny amounts, for every gram of rainmix you should only add 0.1g of potash( so the tub will last for about 15,000 buckets of fertilizer):

Attention Required! | Cloudflare

The important things to take away from it are as follows:

I bought some sulphate of potash last year for a basket that I was going to fill with strawberry plants. Since planting it made a huge difference to the size and quality of the strawberry plants in turn the strawberries were juicy, red and a decent size. Plenty of fruits on each plant too. I have another batch of plants ready for this year's crop so got this box in readiness. Also used on my potatoes and tomato plants with further bumper crops.

I know every grower has their secret sauce, like dustin in the recent youtube chat I watched uses bloodmeal which is pure Nitrogen. Bonemeal is phosphorus and potash is potassium. Ideally you shoudl use all 3 together for best results.

Healthier flowering

translation: no brown leaf spots

Encourages disease and drought resistance

to be fair all of these statements are true but they are also pretty meaningless. You can say all of the above about calcium too.

The point is a plant needs all essential building blocks.

Having too little of some and too much of others would be like trying to bake a cake with too many eggs and too little flour.