If you ever get to trimming some good shoots from the Hygrophilla 'Sunset' I'd love to take some off your hands.
Planted Tank Frustrations
- Thread starter MidnightPyro
- Start date
One thing people always need to keep in mind when planting tanks is it WILL take some time for your setup to be where you want it. You ask anyone who has beautiful planted tanks and they will all say that it took some time to do that. The biggest part of both fish keeping and plant keeping is patients. Your plant will not grow 3 inches over night, especially if the roots have not had a chance to establish themselves.
After peroids of neglect, it's just the same old thing over and over and over again, trim, prune , scrub, water change, add ferts back, add ferts 3x a week or so, next week do another water change, clean well etc.
Repeat, resetting the tank is simple and routine, takes some work, but once doign well, keeping up on it is rather easy.
Do not read into your test kits too much, they are certainly not calibrated and not particularly accurate, even the best test kits like Lamott only offer a range of 1-4ppm of accuracy.
If you know the tap water and you know how much you add each week of KNO3, that's all you need to have better accuracy than most test kits offer.
50% weekyl water changes will prevent anything from build up 2x the total amount dosed for the week, that would assume that no plants are present and or are not taking any nutrients at all up.
If you assume that a planted tank at very high light/CO2 etc can only remove about 4ppm per day of NO3, then adding 20-30 ppm a week will prevent anything from running out on most all tanks.
So basically you do not need a test kit since the effective range is easy enough to hit using a teaspoon and a water change.
You can see the article EI on my site for more about it.
Regards,
Tom Barr
www.BarrReport.com
Repeat, resetting the tank is simple and routine, takes some work, but once doign well, keeping up on it is rather easy.
Do not read into your test kits too much, they are certainly not calibrated and not particularly accurate, even the best test kits like Lamott only offer a range of 1-4ppm of accuracy.
If you know the tap water and you know how much you add each week of KNO3, that's all you need to have better accuracy than most test kits offer.
50% weekyl water changes will prevent anything from build up 2x the total amount dosed for the week, that would assume that no plants are present and or are not taking any nutrients at all up.
If you assume that a planted tank at very high light/CO2 etc can only remove about 4ppm per day of NO3, then adding 20-30 ppm a week will prevent anything from running out on most all tanks.
So basically you do not need a test kit since the effective range is easy enough to hit using a teaspoon and a water change.
You can see the article EI on my site for more about it.
Regards,
Tom Barr
www.BarrReport.com
