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Watering the aquarium plants.
A few general comments.
First off, while common knowledge is that "hardness is bad", there has been evidence of supposedly acidic loving plants flourishing in hard water in nature and in tanks. Do a Google search on this newsgroup's archives and I'm sure you'll find many many articles on the matter. That being said, I think that focusing on hardness was really the wrong thing to focus on. Of all your water problems, it is the nitrates that are of the biggest concern. Plus mollies traditionally like hard water, so even if they aren't showing effects now, it might appear in the future. Also, most of the plants on your list would be perfectly fine in your type of water as I have most of them in my 20 dGH tanks. Now, onto the nitrates. Many of those denitrafying systems depend on setting up colonies of anaerobic bacteria which will fix the nitrate out of the water. Of course, the downside is you have a potential biohazard sitting in that loop should something go wrong if those anaerobic bacteria are of the sulfur sort. Hydrogen sulfide coming from the tank is not only unpleasant, it can also be potentially life threatening. This leads me to find alternative ways to fix nitrate out of the water in my own tap situation (only 20ppm from the tap for me). Now, on to the solutions I pondered for my own nitrate situation. First, I stopped drinking the tap water. Nitrates are as bad for humans as they are for fish. Then I considered an RO unit for both drinking water and cutting the tap water on water changes, but being a poor student I really didn't want to go that route. Bottled drinking water is plentiful in this area, so I went with that for me, but it's a tad expensive for the fish. For my tanks, I considered two approaches to removing the nitrates. One was a vegetative filter. In this concept, you run the tank water through a system with terrestrial, aquatic or bog plants planted in it. Of course, you provide plenty of light overhead for them to grow rapidly. Many house plants adapt well to growing in a hydroponic situation (roots in water) and there are several which were said to be good at fixing nitrates, like pothos/creeping charlie. Unfortunately, those house plants also happen to be toxic to cats and I have cats who like to nibble plants, so I couldn't go that route. Another plant said to be good was water lettuce, but I can't find that locally (I believe it's listed as a "noxious plant" here and therefore illegal to sell). The second option was to heavily plant the tank with aquatic plants. I went this route with also a heavy tolerance towards algae. Most of my new tanks are algae wastelands to begin with but you know what? That green string algae is great at taking up nitrates. Just a pain to pull out every week, but it did a good job. If I could figure out how to keep it contained, I'd set up a vegatative filter with just it. After a while, the tank seems to reach a sort of equilibrium where the plants are better at sopping up the new nitrates than the algae, then my algae problems decrease to nearly nil. My similis tank took the longest to reach this point, but that was mostly due to the similis digging up every plant except the amazon sword, apogogeton bulbs and a few crypts that escaped their destructive rearranging. |
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