Fallout wrote:
snip
As for ferts, what are you dosing? You may need quite a bit of potash to
help the plants use all that nitrate.
You can get Tropica Master Grow from the same place that sells the
lighting you're considering.
http://www.fishathome.co.uk/watertre...mastergrow.htm It's a
great fertilizer. www.gregwatson.com sells PMDD ingredients from Canada,
but I don't know what shipping would cost.
I'm actually using Nutrafin PlantGro. It contains Iron, Manganese, Zinc
and -Nitrogen-. So I appear to be adding more Nitrogen and no potash. I just
bought a big bottle of it too.
Oh, bummer. What an odd choice of ingredients for a fertilizer designed
for fishtanks. I think you will find that dosing a fertilizer with
potash makes a huge difference in the vigor of your plants. In fact,
that's probably the first thing to fix. I'd do that even before
worrying about the lighting.
Also, what's your pH? If it's high, you can use Seachem Acid Buffer to
lower KH and pH to make more C02 and trace elements available to the
plants. http://tinyurl.com/866ua That should help a bit too.
My pH is about 7.8 - 8.0 straight after the lights come on, when, presumably
it should be at it's lowest with the CO2 on all night. The test kit is
pretty out of date but it sounds about right. I hadn't considered adding a
buffer, I was hoping the CO2 would have more of an effect on lowering the
pH, but I guess the effectiveness of yeast generated CO2 is pretty limited.
I would love to go for RO water but that is definately overkill for such a
small tank.
Yeast generated CO2 works fine in tanks of that size. I've used it on a
29 US gallon tank with water of KH 4 and gotten acceptable levels.
Your main problem is the high pH/KH of your water. CO2 doesn't dissolve
very well or shift pH much in highly alkaline water, so you would have
trouble with any CO2 system. BTW, do you have vending machines at the
supermarket for drinking water? I get UV/carbon/RO filtered water by
the gallon for 25 cents to mix with my tap water for my little planted
discus tank. I understand exactly what you mean when you say getting an
RO unit is overkill because all of my tanks are small too.
You might switch to Seachem's Flourish Excel as a carbon source if you
prefer not to buffer or soften your water. It's working very nicely in
my tanks, and my water is much like yours, with pH 7.8-8.0 from the tap.
I only soften the water in the one discus tank. Your plants will
still not have optimal nutrient uptake at a high pH, but not everything
has to be ideal for a beautiful tank.
Thanks again for all the advice. It has given me much food for thought.
-Jon
You're welcome. Let me and anyyone else who's reading know how things
turn out in a few months. :-)
--
Elaine T __
http://eethomp.com/fish.html '__
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