Hi Jaime, I'm sorry to hear that your starter isn't behaving like it normally does! Is there a chance that it was exposed to temperatures close to 140°F, or to chemicals or something toxic? If neither of these things occurred then your starter hasn't died, but your feeding routine may be causing your starter to become sluggish. What household temperatures are you dealing with? Anything in the 70-80°F range should work fine for your starter, although fermentation will happen a little more slowly at the lower end of the range, and more quickly at 80°F. Have you been feeding with unbleached AP flour or bleached? If you've been feeding with bleached flour, I would recommend sticking to unbleached flour. When a starter triples in just a few hours in the way you describe, that sounds like a great thing, but if you're only feeding twice a day and the starter is allowed to fall significantly between feedings, this can end up resulting in sluggish yeast behavior.

To keep the yeast at optimum activity level you want to replenish (feed) your starter when it's at its highest point of rising, or just beginning to fall. While I don't recommend adopting a feeding schedule that requires you to replenish your starter every 3-4 hours, you can adjust the rate of fermentation so that the peak of rising lines up more closely with a twice a day feeding routine when you're maintaining your starter at room temperature. Feeding your starter a relatively larger meal (less starter as compared to water/flour fed) will slow down fermentation, while a higher percentage of starter as compared to water/flour fed will speed things up. And, as I indicated above, temperature also plays an important role in the rate of fermentation. So, for example, if summer is heating things up in your house and you want to slow down fermentation you might want to adopt a 1:2:2 or even 1:3:3 ratio of starter:water:flour, by weight, so that your feeding time lines up more closely with the peak of rising. 

It's also possible that your earlier process (when you weren't paying attention to ratios) resulted in you saving a higher percentage of starter, as compared to the amount of water and flour you were feeding. As I said, this makes things happen faster, but ultimately may have caused sluggishness. I would try to weight things carefully and observe your starter a little more closely for the next few days. Hopefully it will begin to rise in a predictable fashion. At that point you can adjust the ratio of ingredients so that your starter peaks closer to when you're able to feed it. 

I hope this helps! Let us know how it goes. 

Barb

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