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A place for Corydoras

I'm still wondering if the cause is a lack of iron. I've been doing some research and glass like new leaves with green/yellow tips seems to be a sign of iron deficiency. My Hygrophila has glass like new leaves with green tips.

PlantIssue.jpg

Also the Staurengen Repens is going from bad to worse, attached it the latest photo showing it disintegrating before my eyes.

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The dose you're currently adding is at the bottom end of what Tropica recommend for a tank of your size and advise upping this dose in heavily planted tanks until you find the correct absorption rates.

Where did you find this advice ? When I look for dosing guidelines all I find is what it basically says on the bottle, so for a 100L tank, it would be 10 pumps a week. We are dosing 14 pumps of Specialised and 7 pumps of Premium a week.

Ta.
 
Hello Pal, I'm not saying it isn't iron, I'm not that experienced at spotting deficiency, I actually have some myself at the minute in my tank which also looks like iron def but one thing I know it probably isn't is nitrogen. My reasoning is I dose E.I levels of nitrate and I have floating plants that are thriving. Floating plants tend to show up first any nitrate issues because they are closest to the light, are in a co2 rich top layer and love consuming nitrogen. That's my tank though so back to yours.

The figures I used are from rotala which I linked further up. Put your tank size in and what fertiliser you are using and it outputs the totals of each nutrient. I've highlighted nitrogen and dose. As you can see if you added 35.7ml of Trop Spec which rotala recommends to get your iron level right which is also the bottomn end of the scale when it comes to ei levels of Iron (see image 2) then you would be adding 3.83ppm of nitrate. Knowing your tank, how much plants and co2 with your lighting this is quite low I would have said. EI values range from about 20/30ppm of nitrate.

You dose 14 pumps or about 17ml of tropica spec, which is half of that, forget the premium it has no nitrate in. The premium will up your iron though. So considering tropica uses a good chelator for iron in your harder water chances are you might be low on iron but almost certainly v low on nitrogen. I've followed a few threads on people who have used Tropica only products and the general census of opinion on them is that they had to massively increase the dosages when combined with high lighting to the point it wasn't financially viable.

These are just my opinions though, so please anyone with more experience jump in. The thing is you have some kno3 so it doesn't do any harm IMO to give a little a try. Failing that yes, iron could be in the frame but my gut feeling is it would be suspect number 2.

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Sorry forgot to add, if you read the bottom of the image it says "dose these levels 2-4 times a week" you’re a dosing this weekly so in effect you would need to at least triple the amount of ferts you are using. Obviously there's nothing to say that your tank can't get by with such levels of nitrogen but I doubt it unless it is very heavily stocked with fish in which case you would have to make some big water changes to combat all the rest of the crap from the fish and if there's no nitrogen in your tap water you would still find yourself depleted pretty quick.

I find iron def causes deformed leaves and bad colouring rather than plants dissolving.
 
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Sorry forgot to add, if you read the bottom of the image it says "dose these levels 2-4 times a week" you’re a dosing this weekly so in effect you would need to at least triple the amount of ferts you are using. Obviously there's nothing to say that your tank can't get by with such levels of nitrogen but I doubt it unless it is very heavily stocked with fish in which case you would have to make some big water changes to combat all the rest of the crap from the fish and if there's no nitrogen in your tap water you would still find yourself depleted pretty quick.

I find iron def causes deformed leaves and bad colouring rather than plants dissolving.

I noticed some BBA on a crypt leaf towards the middle of the tank, which I think is sign of low / fluctuating Co2, so I'll go back to make sure that is correct as well.

I've added KN03 and MgS04 to our dry fert mix as well.
 
Hello Pal, I'm not saying it isn't iron, I'm not that experienced at spotting deficiency, I actually have some myself at the minute in my tank which also looks like iron def but one thing I know it probably isn't is nitrogen. My reasoning is I dose E.I levels of nitrate and I have floating plants that are thriving. Floating plants tend to show up first any nitrate issues because they are closest to the light, are in a co2 rich top layer and love consuming nitrogen. That's my tank though so back to yours.

The figures I used are from rotala which I linked further up. Put your tank size in and what fertiliser you are using and it outputs the totals of each nutrient. I've highlighted nitrogen and dose. As you can see if you added 35.7ml of Trop Spec which rotala recommends to get your iron level right which is also the bottomn end of the scale when it comes to ei levels of Iron (see image 2) then you would be adding 3.83ppm of nitrate. Knowing your tank, how much plants and co2 with your lighting this is quite low I would have said. EI values range from about 20/30ppm of nitrate.

You dose 14 pumps or about 17ml of tropica spec, which is half of that, forget the premium it has no nitrate in. The premium will up your iron though. So considering tropica uses a good chelator for iron in your harder water chances are you might be low on iron but almost certainly v low on nitrogen. I've followed a few threads on people who have used Tropica only products and the general census of opinion on them is that they had to massively increase the dosages when combined with high lighting to the point it wasn't financially viable.

These are just my opinions though, so please anyone with more experience jump in. The thing is you have some kno3 so it doesn't do any harm IMO to give a little a try. Failing that yes, iron could be in the frame but my gut feeling is it would be suspect number 2.

View attachment 105760

Our yes Rotala Butterfly, I have looked on there as well but as I don't want to follow EI so I've been doing about half of what it tells me for EI, so for 100L (125L - substrate etc) it says 28.6ml, so divide 2 = 14.3ml which is a bit less than we are dosing of N + P. Interesting though is we are dosing about 25.2ml of everything expect N + P.
 
Those figures are 2 to 4 times a week though right?

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Going to work out my dosing and see how much I'm putting in. I'll do some research on ei as well to see what quantities of each I should be putting in.
 
Let me know how you get on. Maybe isn't nitrate but you can narrow it down.
Any time I've seen posts about iron or magnesium it's caused Plants to look veiny or off colour which might explain some of your leaves but your s repens has starved to death. Whatever it was was catastrophic like no food or co2 getting to it.
I sort of think of it as traces being a balanced diet and npk being the main diet. Sure you wouldn't starve to death if you ate just a potato every day, you would just start looking weird and suffer from health problems :)

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Okay so after a bit of research, I think for EI I should be aiming for the following
  • NO3 range 5-30ppm
  • PO4 range 1.0-3.0 ppm
  • K+ range 10-30ppm
  • Fe 0.2-0.5ppm or higher
I think we are putting in the following

Dry mix a week
  • NO3 - 15ppm
  • PO4 - 4.68ppm
  • K - 11.01ppm
  • Mg - 1.8ppm
Tropica Specialised a week (16.8ml)
  • NO3 - 9.9ppm
  • PO4 - 0.52ppm
  • K - 1.73ppm
  • Mg - 0.66ppm
  • Fe - 0.12ppm
Tropica Premium a week (8.4ml)
  • NO3 - 0ppm
  • PO4 - 0ppm
  • K - 0.67ppm
  • Mg - 0.33ppm
  • Fe - 0.06ppm
Total dosing for the tank per week is
  • NO3 - 24.90ppm
  • PO4 - 5.2ppm
  • K - 13.41ppm
  • Mg - 2.78ppm
  • Fe - 0.18ppm
So iron looks a little low and PO4 looks a little high.
 
Just to clear up, are you dosing the Tropica Spec 16.8ml multiple times or is that the total for the week? if total for week I think your figures are too high, 35.7ml on Rotala has nitrogen at 3.83ppm which it advises dosing 2-4 times a week.
I think people aim for a 10:1 ratio on the n and po4 so setting up your dosing for 20ppm n and 2ppm po4 would be about right. I think you can see from all this information though how weak of a formula Trop spec is. I would set up your dry salts for the 10;1 ratio and carry on with Tropica and see where it goes. Like you say at that you would maybe be a little light in iron. Also if you have high po4 and hardish water this won't help with iron. Po4 and iron react and the iron precipitates out and becomes unavailable to plants. Once you have the NPK sorted then look at you traces again.
 
Just to clear up, are you dosing the Tropica Spec 16.8ml multiple times or is that the total for the week? if total for week I think your figures are too high, 35.7ml on Rotala has nitrogen at 3.83ppm which it advises dosing 2-4 times a week.
I think people aim for a 10:1 ratio on the n and po4 so setting up your dosing for 20ppm n and 2ppm po4 would be about right. I think you can see from all this information though how weak of a formula Trop spec is. I would set up your dry salts for the 10;1 ratio and carry on with Tropica and see where it goes. Like you say at that you would maybe be a little light in iron. Also if you have high po4 and hardish water this won't help with iron. Po4 and iron react and the iron precipitates out and becomes unavailable to plants. Once you have the NPK sorted then look at you traces again.

RB only states N, to get NO3 from that multiply N by 4.4.

When I put in "Results for my dose" and entered 16.8ml (which is my total dose for the week) I get 2.251ppm, so multiply this by 4.4 which equals 9.9ppm of NO3 for the week from Tropica Specialised.

Also I think 10:1 ratio is between NO3 and PO4, but I could be wrong
 
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Just took some photos of the drop checkers, both with the same water and reagent, what do you think, does the JBL look bluer or is it a optical illusion?

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It's not uncommon for two DC's in same tank to give differing results. It's an idea to put one in a place where you expect bad circulation. If you get good co2 there chances are the rest of the tank will be fine. In your case maybe put the DC near the melting s.repens to see if there is a low co2 problem in that area.
 
It's not uncommon for two DC's in same tank to give differing results. It's an idea to put one in a place where you expect bad circulation. If you get good co2 there chances are the rest of the tank will be fine. In your case maybe put the DC near the melting s.repens to see if there is a low co2 problem in that area.
Thing is the s repens are right in the flow

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A quick update, 1.5 weeks into EI I can see some changes now in the Hygrophila, the new leaves look much better, still some brittle, yellow, glass like leaves on the Hygrophila mini at the front of the tank though, so hopefully time will improve this plant.

The Staurengen Repens stalks now have some small leaves on them so hopefully they will pick up as well in the coming weeks.

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Nice one mate. Improvement at last.

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Cheers, hopefully it will look better soon :). What do your do when your go away as far as dosing goes as we are going away soon? Thinking of asking neighbour to dose as they will be feeding the fish anyway.
 
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