benafit from excel & flourish?

[jaymasta]

Hey,
I have a 29 gallon tank, with 2X20w flourecent tubes, one of them is a powerglo, and the other is a standard "daylight" bulb, giving me about 1.3W per gallon or so with a homemade tinfoil reflector, I have 7 plants and they are growing slowly, 2 anubias, 2 banana plants, 1 sagitaria, and 2 other plants, I have 9 fish in the tank 6 gouramis 1 angel 1 pleco and 1 crayfish, and I feed them once a day and usually give them a little snack at night time, anyways Iam wondering if my plants will benafit if I use flourish, and or flourish excel, or if this will just be adding unnecesary chemicals to my tank.?

thanks for your help guys.

 

[djlen]

Your tank can sustain itself the way it is and, with patience will slowly develop nicely.

The addition of Excel will give the plants a nice infusion of carbon, a major building block for all living things and IMO can only aid in their growth and development.
The addition of Flourish, a trace element mix would also be a nice additive for them.
I think you would see an acceleration in growth and color if you use them.

In my opinion it would be worth dosing them at 1/2 strength to see what they give you and make a judgment from there.

In short - you don't 'need' them, but your plants would like them.

Len

 

[jaymasta]

sounds good to me, I just wanted to make sure due to my LOW watts per gallon that I wound't just be dumping more chemicals into my tank for no benafit, I think I'll buy the smaller sized bottles and give them a try and see what happens. thanks again

 

[Wishful]

I've had pretty good results with my slower growing plants doing daily small doses. When I dosed according to the bottle directions (so many capfuls once a week), my faster growing plants took off like crazy and my slow-growing ones didn't respond at all. When I dropped the recommended amount by half and added it to the tank equally over the same seven days, my fast growers maintained reasonable growth and my slow growers (especially my anubis nana) started putting out steady new growth.

It makes sense to have a small but steady availability of fertilizer and nuitrients.