Yes this is what I was hoping to achieve quicker with the coconut husks. I plant all of my small balcony plants with cinders, rocks, my home made soil, and coconut husk at the bottom of the pot to slow drainage. I started noticing that they were extremely easy to transplant because the coconut husk bound all the roots together at the bottom and the side took care of themselves while growing in the pot. This is the first time I have scaped a tank and I tried to apply a lot of the same organic gardening techniques I use on my balcony plants. I always make my own ferts and try to produce most of the organic material in my own garden.
That seems like a very rewarding program.
Received a package from Amazon. It is my brand new current satellite LED fresh water fixture! I am so excited, my girl friend waited patiently at the apartment to sign for it. When I got home it was waiting on my bed! I had just purchased a $148.00 32 watt LED Aquarium Panel from Sunshine Systems. I witnessed great things from their horticulture line of LED (the 98watt UFO) it ran my buddies entire 6'x4' grow tent with a variety of fruiting and leafy vegetables. However, my experience with their 32w LED aquarium panel left me frustrated. The output of light was horrible and the focus was much to narrow for my tank, it came with no direct aquarium attachment and the whole thing felt like it could/would fall apart while handling it. I quickly searched the internet and began looking at LED aquarium lights from different companies. I was on the liveaquaria Dr. Fosters and Smith site and was looking at different brands when I saw the current satellite LED and remembered Jpappy mentioning it in his 20gallonL build. Being new to the whole planted aquarium thing I was not too sure what a Current satellite fixture was when he had first mentioned it, but then latter he mentioned in his thread that the current satellite had moon light setting and other low light settings. I was very interested in this product after having recollected those instances so I searched for the product on amazon and there it was. On Tuesday (9/10) I ordered it and because it was only $99.00 I sprung for the priority shipping ($35) and it arrived today
As soon as I plugged it in I was happy. I quickly switched it to moonlight because it was night time for the tank. The pictures do not do it justice but I will take more tomorrow when I can explore all the awesome color/light effect settings. These are the moonlight settings you can see that in each picture the lights are dimmer to simulate cloud coverage.
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Will see if there is in increase in growth or a decrease. The unit is only rated 36 micromols of PAR and I read that with CO2 (which I run in a DIY form but with a sloppily engineered defuser* so who knows how much CO2 is actually consumed by the plants and how much is released from the water's surface) you want to have 40-50 micromols of PAR on the substrate" I do not know how much micromols of PAR was being emitted from the CFLs, but as others have mentioned, consumer CFLs (especially spiraled ones) can have weird spikes in spectrum creating periods of useless light for plants. More pictures to come.
*Note to self ORDER GLASS DEFUSER FROM AMAZON!
"http://www.aquabotanic.com/?p=1484
