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EI Or PMDD?

AverageWhiteBloke

AverageWhiteBloke

Member
Joined
27 Oct 2009
Messages
2,914
Location
Cumbria
Just embarking on mixing up some fert mix, I have been adding the kno3, phos and mag sulph dry direct to the tank with leaf zone traces purely because before buying my powders I had just bought a large bottle of Leaf Zone and wanted to use it up.
After reading various articles I'm a bit confused on whether to go down the PMDD route or use the EI method, from what I understand so far I believe EI is mainly for brightly lit heavily planted aquaria where my set up is a 165 litre sort of 50% planted with low light only 70 watts in tubes. I do dose co2 through gas as oppose to chemical although I am having trouble finding out the right quantities at the moment. :?

I look forward to any input or a good starting base to work from which I can adjust when I need to.
 
You can use either dosing method on your tank but IMO you'll find it a lot easier to master the EI method. The 50% water change isn't set in stone but does seem to put a lot of people off. But when you get used to doing it and set yourself up with the necessary hardware it shouldn't be an issue.

Your lighting isn't that low at all, in fact its 1.93wpg but you don't say if this is T8, T5 or T5ho flourescent tubes. If it is T5 or T5ho then this is quite high lighting in fact as they are upto 80% more efficient than T8. The abitary 2wpg is considered to be quite high lighting by most although sometimes you do here of people running upto 6wpg :crazy: :crazy:. Its not quite as cut and dried as that though depth and clarity of water play an important role as does the height of the luminares above the tank but I certainly wouldn't on the face of it consider your lighting to be low.

Do you have a drop checker set up correctly i.e. with a 4kh referance solution? If you haven't then IMO you should set one up but assuming you do aim to get the DC into the light lime green colour which should give you about 30ppm which seems to be about the ideal level for both your plants and fish. Ensure you have enough flow to evenly distribute this throughout the tank and that the level remains constant throughout the lighting period and is turned on 2 hours before your lights.

It shouldn't matter to much what trace elements you use so long as they are designed for aquatic use. I'm not familiar with the one your using but if your in doubt there are usually fact sheets available where you can check the quantities of individual elemants and 'James planted tank' website has a quite usefull trace element comparison table that you could cross referance this with. Its fine to add the dosing salts directly to the tank its just that a lot of people myself included find it easier to make up a stock solution. It certainly saves a lot of faffing around with measuring spoons and tiny quantities of this and that above the water surface and delivers the ferts in a pre diluted format which has to aid even distribution throughout the water column.

Regards, Chris.
 
Hi AverageWhiteBloke.

The advice given by chris1004 is very sound indeed, so I would go with that.
FYI, I have 90w over 180 litres (our light to litre ratios are pretty similar) and I am dosing full EI.
You can always start with the full EI levels and tweak it downwards each time you mix up your monthly batch. That way you can keep an eye on your plants health, as any adjustment takes 2-3 weeks to take effect. If you get to a point where your plants are affected just go back up to the previous months levels.
This EI mularkey does get easier the more you do it, as I'm sure many on here will attest.
Good luck.
 
AverageWhiteBloke said:
Just embarking on mixing up some fert mix, I have been adding the kno3, phos and mag sulph dry direct to the tank with leaf zone traces purely because before buying my powders I had just bought a large bottle of Leaf Zone and wanted to use it up.
After reading various articles I'm a bit confused on whether to go down the PMDD route or use the EI method, from what I understand so far I believe EI is mainly for brightly lit heavily planted aquaria where my set up is a 165 litre sort of 50% planted with low light only 70 watts in tubes. I do dose co2 through gas as oppose to chemical although I am having trouble finding out the right quantities at the moment. :?

I look forward to any input or a good starting base to work from which I can adjust when I need to.
Click to expand...

No, you do not need a "brightly lit" tank, I've never stated this is a requirement or for such tanks, it's(higher light) used to drive growth at a max level and thus uptake will also be assumed to be at a max level, which would represent an upper bound.

This way, it's non limiting regardless of the light intensity.

To make the system more manageable however, using less light works best.
I've made this point 1000's of times and list it anytime I reference EI and made it as easy to see/find/hear/notice as possible.

Most every tank I set up and have personally is lower light.
Discus folks have long done 50% 2x a week water changes.

This is nothing new.

You can adjust things down from non limiting high level, to suit by simply watching and slowly progressively reducing the amounts added week by week till you see plant stress.

This assumes you know what good CO2 is and looks like. CO2 is 10X more an issue than anything nutrient dosing wise.
No one has ever killed their fish with EI or dosing KNO3 I am aware of.
On say 5-10 plant forums, we see at least one a week that gasses their fish.........

Water changes are easy and can be automated if desired, water is also a lot cheaper than test kits which cannot be automated. It's a trade off.

Less light makes demand for CO2/nutrient reduced, so you have more wiggle room with dosing/water changes.
Some user skill and observations, progressive reduction can extend water change frequencies out farther, but you cannot over do water changes for tank/plant health.

With a simple U shaped drain and attached to shower, you can drain and refill and not do much. You can sit and type replies to forums while this is being done :idea:

Cough cough.......

Not hard, even an old person with a bad back can do it.
Test kits over time?
Few keep using them.

Motivation to test is very low, most do not calibrate test kits either, even when they are aware they should........water change is a much simpler step.

This tank gets EI, has less light than your tank etc.

Staruotropica180.jpg

I spend maybe 30 minutes a week at most. Most of which si waiting for drain/refill, I trim and harvest weeds to sell, remove RCS to sell etc.


Regards,
Tom Barr
 
There's also some hybridization of PMDD+PO4 and uses EI but like PMDD daily dosing and stock solutions.

You can also chose say just NO3 as the test parameter to adjust via test kits using the PMDD+PO4 methods. James has a simple good run down, I have a few versions of this on my website.



Regards,
Tom Barr
 
Many thanks for all your input. 😳 For some bizarre reason I had wrongly calculated my WPG by getting the sum the wrong way round which I didn't realise until after posting. So as you all rightly have pointed out my lighting is not as low as I first thought. The lighting is also 10000k T8's Chris to answer your question.
After my error I then checked out James PT site and thought that the PMDD-PO4 method of dosing was best suited to my situation and made up 2 stock solutions @
Macros
25g Potassium Nitrate
2.8g Potassium Phosphate (monobasic)
11g Potassium Sulphate
20g Magnesium Sulphate Heptahydrate (Epsom Salts)
500 ml distilled water

Micros
10g Chelated Trace Element Mix
250ml Water
0.5ml Normal Hydrochloric Acid

This I have been dosing daily since the weekend at 4ml of macros and 2ml of micros based on the fact my tank is currently not heavily planted as suggested by James on the site. So I guess now I need to do some calculations to work out correct doses using the stock I have already made up to go down the EI style of fertilising.
I suppose disregarding the low planting I could quite safely double up to the full dosage based on Toms advise that providing more than is required and lower lighting is a lot better option leaving less chance that the plants will never be wanting for anything.
Any suggestions for levels as my stock is at a slightly different make up than the one in the EI method?
So far most of my thinking from keeping a planted tank in the past has been turned on its head. So far through this board I have sorted my water, planting, pruning and now my lighting. The next thing is as mentioned will be correct Co2 levels. I do use a DC but mine has been giving me strange results and is not AFAIK in a 4DKH solution unless the Red Sea fluid has something in it to keep it at the right KH. Reading an article on UKAPS I now see the importance of the DC fluid and that using tank water is not the best way to go about checking levels (ordering some right after this post) hopefully the Co2 levels will be the last piece of the jigsaw.
I always believed the likes of Toms pictured tank here would take extremely high lighting and sophisticated equipment out of my price bracket so to know that results like that can be acheived with relatively low light but correct dosing methods and water maintainance is inspiring.
 
Don't feel bad, when I first started adding KNO3 and K2SO4, they got mixed up and folks where saying to add more K+ to anything that ails thee at the time. Fortunately, this did not cause any issues for me. A few of us make lots and lots of mistakes, but once we get it right, there's many things we know we did and can rule out as possible causes.

But..... we have to get it right.

Low light simply increases this chance we actually have a nice tank without algae and healthy, but managed growth.
Perhaps more than any one thing. Lots more wiggle room for most every aspect of planted aquariums. Here's a lower light tank, 180 cm sitting here today, needs some trimming and then grow out, some more stems and grow out in the rear etc.

resized180staruo.jpg
lowforeground1.jpg
cards2.jpg
180staruogyne1.jpg

Cardinals and other critters are happy, frisky, well feed, eat most anything. Sorry for the point and shoot photos, I may actually do a real photo shoot someday. This tank is admittedly a long way away from any of that. But the rate of growth is good, you can do quite a lot with low light. Light is on for about 8.5 hours, and is about 110 cm from the tops of the foreground plants. About 2w/gal at that long distance. I could easily get about 1.3-1.5W/gal of T5 lighting.

The stock solution you made was very weak on PO4. Do not worry, juicing up the PO4 will help more than many think.
I'd double or triple that amount, I add about 4-5x that amount in the tank above for example. So I dose 2-3x a week: 15ppm of NO3, 5ppm of P04 etc, K+ is well over 20ppm and not used as much as the N , so there's always excess K+.

If light is low, good CO2/current, consistent dosing, there's a great deal of upper range to play around with. Folks generally mess up with CO2 or not adding enough. Most people figure it is better than really adding a lot more than they told you to. Like I did with KNO3 a long time ago, but it taught me that there was no adverse effect. So I was not scared about over dosing. There was no risk.

Regards,
Tom Barr




Regards,
Tom Barr
 
AverageWhiteBloke said:
I always believed the likes of Toms pictured tank here would take extremely high lighting and sophisticated equipment out of my price bracket so to know that results like that can be acheived with relatively low light but correct dosing methods and water maintainance is inspiring.
Click to expand...

Many think this, "more is better" attitude towards lighting, but "less is better" attitude towards nutrients.
Above a light compensation point(growth= respiration), low light is better for most everyone' goals.

You are correct, CO2 will be a huge challenge, it's among the most dangerous(this is the no#1 way to kill fish in a planted tank) and definitely the hardest to accurately measure and maintain. It moves it's concentration in a few minutes dramatically in some cases. Current has a large influence of CO2 also. So you have a number of things that make it a particularly vexing parameter. Many do not realize the importance, give it a passing glance.
Respect the gas...........

Lower light will make that much easier. Higher light if you want more CO2/algae issues/potential should you neglect or overlook the maintenance, but you get faster growth.

I spend all my energy learning as much as you can about how folks add CO2, what and how to do it best.
That will not be wasted effort.

Regards,
Tom Barr
 
My kh4+brom came today may be a stupid question but does it matter how much is used in the dc? just bottle says add 5ml but my dc only holds about 2ml before b the level being higher than the inlet
 
Hi,

No it won't matter as long as the ratios of 4kh water- bromahide blue are the same which being the premixed version cannot change. Be aware though that some have had dodgy batches of this from AE of late so if things don't look quite right check the solution. You can do this roughly by using a KH-PH chart for your tankwater and looking at the drop checker to make sure they are roughly in the same ball park but remember that if the solution is correct then it will be more acurate.

Regards, Chris.
 
hmmm I don't have a ph test kit at the moment, the issue I have with my solution is the colour in my dc is so faint it's hard to make out verging on clear and it is from AE. From a distance it looks like there's nothing in.
 
Thanks Chris that is exactly what's happening to me, I'm sort of stuck between a rock and a hard place on this one.
I will try another test and make sure the DC is well sealed and not mixing in tank like in your link but to be fair the fluid is a very pale colour before it even enters the tank, once in the tank this is made worse by the brightness of the lamps.

I still have a few tests worth in my Red Sea fluid, would it help if I was to add a drop of this to the AE+Bromo mix to improve the colouration making it clearer to read or would this mess with the ratio giving a false result. Could I had a drop of any PH test kit?

The last test I did with the AE stuff gave a very faint blue reading which was difficult to see and after changing this back to my Red Sea mixed with tank water got a nice green after a couple of hours :crazy: Thing is I can't really rely on either at the moment.

I have no reason to suspect there is a problem with the AE stuff as it does say add 5ml which I would imagine would improve the colour compared with only about 1.5ml in my DC, maybe worth giving them a ring. I notice that their glass DC comes with fluid which I obviously don't need right now.

When Tom said the Co2 is the hardest to measure he wasn't joking 😀
 
I've been in touch with AE today who have said that how vivid the colour is will depend on how much fluid is used which is common sense I suppose,their dc's must use 5ml which would be clearer to get a reading. As I have never had his product before and without anything to compare it too I suppose I'm stuck.
AE did say though that I can't put a drop of my Red Sea reagent in as its is orange rather than blue so I'm guessing they are two different chemicals, but I could add more bromo as the ration of 4kh to Bromo was not that important.
Not sure whether to get bromo or different DC, JBL should work as its blue.
Any suggestions
 
Well, you can estimate CO2 by elimination.

Use the DC and other cues as estimates only, and then the eyeballs and the plants for the rest.

You can also hedge your bets by using rich sediments, eg ADA As or soils etc, osmocoat, Worm castings and so on, simple dosing methods to the water column, then with nutrients covered, you simply use low light, most will let you know thwe right amount for the tank you have specifically and what brand, bulbs they like etc.


So that's nutrients and light ruled out, that leaves just CO2/current etc.

Current, just have good current and plenty of it, filtration etc some surface movement, but no breaking the water's surface.

Then estimate the CO2, and tweak SLOWLY from there and wait a week or two in between each adjustment.

Regards,
Tom Barr
 
Thank you again Tom, the Co2 levels are quite an important factor to me due to the type of aquarium I have which is an Aqua One AR850. This is a system type with built in wet dry filtration built into the lid, a power head picks up the water and sprays it over 2 filter baskets in the lid which then runs back via gravity into the tank, this does not cause much surface disturbance due to the inlet being below the water level but I do feel that the spraying over the media may be detrimental to CO2 levels de-gassing the column rather faster than it would with an enclosed system like canisters. Back in the day about 15 years ago when I first had a crack at planted aquaria I had a open top tank with a Mercury Vapour pendant above and canister filtration, the co2 diffuser was also attached directly to the outlet and to be fair I did have a lot more success with plants even without the new information I have picked up here plus a lot of the reading I was doing at the time has been turned on its head as more is learnt. My work commitments and the MV lighting bleaching out my wifes wallpaper :crazy: made me scrap that set up and go with this system for easiness of maintenance.

Anyway I digress, I have posted elsewhere about some plant problems where leaves are not growing on lower half's of plants with slow growth and a bit of BGA. Just through this post I now know its not my lighting which contrary to my belief may actually be TOO bright that I may need to turn it down or provide more nutrients and co2 in level, which I now know the dosing levels to aim for to go with my full lighting. That only leaves the co2 levels(should I use the full lighting) which as a UKAPS member pointed out in another post could be co2 deficiency and the BGA has also been associated with fluctuating co2.

I have changed from a weekly water change to every two week to see if the rapid change of co2 content at change time will help with the BGA. So really the only thing out of my control is the co2 content, that's why I'm trying to get at least a few stable readings out of some tests, that way I can confirm whether or not to have the full lighting on as I would like to have some plants that like higher levels of lighting especially some of the redder varieties which make a nice contrast in the tank.

With the process of elimination I'm hoping that my fears are not confirmed about my filtration system, I don't suppose I will know for about another 3 week. I have been dosing Toms recommendation of ferts for nearly two week so changes will take time to show, No3 tests show low so I'm assuming that goes for all the other nutrients in the column so have turned off one tube to give the plants less stress being forced to grow too fast without what they need. Once the no3 levels get up a bit and growth a bit better I'm hoping to kick in that other tube and change from PMDD+PO4 to EI dosing then I will be able to figure out if my co2 system can keep up with everything else or its the Achilles heal.
That being the case I suppose my options are keep lower light species and turn down the lighting, switch to a liquid carbon source or possibly do away with the filtration and switch back to canisters easily done with a bit of lid modifying (I could just use the lid space to keep my gear in)

Sorry for the long winded post just thought I'd clear up what my long term aim is rather than I'm doing a bit of whining about the colour of my DC fluid is which I appreciate is not an exact science at the best of times even if you can get a definite reading 🙂
 
Hi averagewhitebloke, (whats your real name mate we can't keep calling you that).

I do understand exactly where your coming from I was new to this planted tank hobby only a year ago and it can all seem quite daunting especially when everything you read and hear contradicts what the real experts have to say on forums like this one. i.e the Tom Barrs and Clives of this world.

Sort your drop checker out first and go from there, thats my advice. Buy a new one if you have to or whatever. I have had trouble with AE myself before and don't find them very forthcoming when things go wrong to the point where I won't buy from them anymore. But hey thats just me and this post will probably be pulled cause I'm having a dig at a sponser, hey ho.

Regards, Chris.
 
Thanks Chris it's Neil BTW, I have ordered a Chameleon DC from Ebay just waiting for that to come. I am getting a slightly better reading from the one I have although it is very faint, I think the problem may be that the fluid is so light that when it's just in between blueish to green that you can hardly tell, last night it was still slightly bordering on blue so I turned up the co2 and will check to see if its a more definite green tonight when I get home, I couldn't make it out this morning as its impossible to read without the tank lights on. As you recommend I'm also going to get a PH test from my local fish store today, I have already got a KH tester so I can check the integrity of the 4KH+Brom reading although I know my KH will have no reading as this is all I ever get. My water is very soft from the tap which I used to buffer up but as I can never get my co2 readings out of the blue so have stopped hoping this will help.

The BGA is starting to become a bit of a problem, I had to clip out some fine feathered plants last night that were too badly affected and wipe it off the leaves I could. It seems to be mainly along the front edge of the tank but not limited to there. Like you said contradictory advice, some people say stir up the sand to loosen it up which I did! others say do not disturb the gravel in fear of releasing ammonia into the column so could be that possibly not :?

I've also been thinking about my dosing, at the moment going with that afore mentioned PMDD+PO4 mix, when I tested my NO3 at the weekend I was getting next to no reading. Would you suggest stepping up the dosing and if so to what? Tom has said that he would at least double if not triple my dose which I'm currently dosing double @ 8ml macros and 4ml micros.
Or maybe I should switch straight to EI method of dosing now instead of waiting to see what my current dosing will achieve. I read a lot saying that with any Algea problems more ferts is better than less.

What sort of doses would I have to administer of the mix I have to achieve same levels as EI?
 
Hi all,
that the spraying over the media may be detrimental to CO2 levels de-gassing the column rather faster than it would with an enclosed system like canisters.
Click to expand...
This is correct, the trickle filter will be very efficient at de-gassing the CO2, as the large surface area of tickling water will exchange both CO2 and O2 until the level in the water is in equilibrium with the atmosphere. If you don't add CO2 this is an advantage as the CO2 won't be depleted as rapidly (whilst the plants are photosynthesising) as it would in a filter with a lesser gas exchange capacity. If you do add CO2 it will be rapidly de-gassed until it equilibriates with the atmosphere, the higher the differential between the tank water and the atmosphere the quicker the de-gassing will occur.

This is also why wet and dry trickle filters are very good for keeping fish with a high oxygen demand (like Hill stream loaches or Hypancistrus), they will retain high oxygen levels at night when all the bio-load will be respiring because of this gas exchange capacity and they have a huge biological fitration potential. This is how the old fashioned "clinker bed and revolving arm" sewage treatment plants work.

cheers Darrel
 
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