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How far can I push liquid carbon without harm to plants and livestock?

M

mike b

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1 Feb 2015
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Hi all. I'm new here so please be patient with my lack of knowledge :) at the moment I'm using easy carbo simply for its convenience. I double dose as it says I can do on the instructions which for my 180 litre tank works out at approx 7.2ml (which is probably over dosing as the tank won't hold 180 litres). I want to add more carbon as I'm getting some green hair algae on a sword plant. Thanks to Clive I've got my distribution of nutrients better by adding a power head and my turnover rate is around 10x per hour (can't thank Clive enough for his patience and excellent advice). I'm dosing macros and micros in accordance to ei. Just wondering if I can dose easy carbo higher than the instructions state? I know some plants such as riccia and egeria can't handle higher dosages but I don't keep these plants. Also I know it can be toxic to livestock. Any advice is appreciated.
 
I used to dose 3.5x normal dose into one of my tanks. Fish and shrimp seemed fine but with higher doses Shrimplet and fry survival rates can be seriously affected. I only had one shrimplet survive from a berried female which i received from one of the forum sponsors.
The best thing to do is up the dose a little bit weekly and monitor the tank closely
If breeding shrimp are present then 2-2.5x dose is about maximum
 
Hey thanks for your advice. So live stock seemed fine with 3.5x normal dose. I'm not breeding shrimp so this isn't an issue. Did you see and affects on your plants with 3.5x dosing? Quicker growth rates or disintegrating plants?
 
Only disintegrating riccia and algae but that was one of the reasons i was using the higher doses.
Plant growth didn't really increase that much
6980D3FD-3F3B-401D-AF91-B3E09092C965_zpsnqdqvoxq.jpg

Fissidens did ok but some mosses can be sensitive
11831EA4-A2B5-454E-BED8-771DC18D21B9_zpsatslr13z.jpg

These photos were taken the day i added pressurised co2 everything was growing nice and healthy on the 3.5x lc and ei diet before that
35l tank with 16w t5 lights crammed into the hood, even the hc did ok
 
mike b said:
How long were you dosing 3x normal dose of easy carbo? Fissidens does look amazing.
Click to expand...
About 4-5 months
I nearly forgot, i read somewhere liquid carbon lower o2 in the tank
Better to make small increases than risk killing things with a big increase
I was lucky with that tank the fissidens was the healthiest plant I'd grown at that point then i stripped it down because the trickle filter stopped me adding the amount of co2 I wanted
I now have my cube and I can pump crazy amounts of gas in there and I still dose 2x lc in there too
 
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