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Water Chemistry for Art Majors?
Sounds to me like tha plants arent gettting enough food..Nitrates too low...so
you have an excess of trace elements, which is nicely feeding your cornocopa of algal delight. Rich kush wrote: Jeff, Dave, first I'm going to apologize for being a cretin and then I'm going to try to give you my correct parameters one more time before I let you get on with your lives. My two-year old is sleeping now, so I hope to be able to actually read this through before I hit the "send" button... I have 190 watts, that's one hundred & ninety watts, that's 2 40 watt standard flourescents at ?k in an AllGlass 48" twin strip plus 2 55 watt compacts at 5300k retrofitted into an AllGlass 48" twin strip. The lights are turned on for 12 1/2 hours a day. I keep the temperature down about 72º in an attempt to brake the algae, which probably ****es off my angels. My Nitrite with an "i" is not measurable, and my nitrate with an "a" is less than 0.5 ppm. So, if my lighting and CO2 is alright (yes?), Gh and Kh are wacko but not fatal, trace is added in accordance with packaging instructions or when Fe is not detectable by testing, and "N"s are within acceptable limits, where do I stand in the algae battle? Reduce the daytime to 11 hours? Any recommendations on tamping down the Ph without adding bisodium phosphate, or are phosphates OK with low nitrate with an "a"? Anything else you can think of? Thanks for your time. Do you find it difficult to give people useful advice when they haven't given you useful information? kush "You can't have everything - where would you put it?" Jeff Ludwig jeff at rockytop_dot_net wrote in message ... Oops! High CO2 plus low light. This is an imbalance which often causes algae soup. I would disagree here. I have never heard of anyone implicating CO2 in algae issues. More is better, even for low light tanks, the same can likely be said about potassium. In fact, Tom Barr's recommended levels work great on low light tanks... you get into problems when you're below those levels and light is too high. I must agree however, not enough light. In any case, Plants cannot grow without Nitrate with an A, as it is an important macronutrient. Given that you are dosing micronutrients such as Fe, you are probably creating a substantial imbalance. I believe she's seeing NO2 because her plants are rotting away due to lack of light. NH4 should not even get a chance to be converted to NO2 if light levels are okay. Regarding your KH and pH, these are probably not your problem, although it would be interesting to know where all that KH is coming from. What kind of substrate and stone is in the tank? Recommendations: Your light level is too low for a CO2 tank. Either stop injecting CO2 or double your lighting. Again, as above, I think this is bad advice. Do increase lighting to keep plants alive, no need to stop CO2. Cheers, Jeff Ludwig |
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