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Help: Improving My Tank
- Thread starter Eugine Thomas
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Eugine Thomas
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Vermiculite floats so not great for in a fish tank
Not in my tank: look at the pictures. It's 50-50 (vermiculite and aquatic soil). When vermiculite is saturate with water it does not float: if you soak it in very hot water it'll all sink in a few days...then you can mix it up with the soil and fertiliser as you please.
EnderUK
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It's for remineralising Rain or RO water it does this by mixing in a load of salts including Calcium, Magnesium, Potassium, Sulfates and trace elements which is good for planted tanks. It's a bit on the expensive side there are cheaper products, dosing EI salts + calcium is probably the cheapest method.
You can run 2 bulbs just lower the length of time they are on, maybe start with 4 hours only and every 4 weeks increase the time by an hour till you get it to about 8 hours. I run my low tech tank and high tech tank at 6 hours. Using liquid carbon with your low lighting you might get away by using a little less of the APFUK Simply (Ei). I would maybe start at full dosage 2 times a week for both macro and micros, 50%-60% water change once a week. The good thing about a low light tank is you'll have time to react to problems as they won't be as instantaneous, if you still seeing plant plant Deficiencies then you can increase the amount of ferts.
Eugine Thomas
Member
Okay. I'm using tap water so I'll not need to add this to my water. I couldn't work out if SeaChem Equilibrium was a part of the EI dosing routine or whether people were adding something additional for an additional reason: the latter. Thank you.
Great news. Thanks.
Incidentally: (putting aside the other issues) if I were to update my tank to a high-tech tank, what would I be looking at buying in terms of lights? Does having low-lights (with every other parameter high-tech (EI fertilisation, CO₂, etc.) just mean that your plants would grow slower or does it affect other parameters, too?
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Rahms
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There's a certain amount of grey area in the definition. Personally I'd consider your tank high tech once pressurised CO2 has been added. Upgrading your lights isnt really a technological advancement, its just... more.
If you have low light but good CO2/nutrients you'll have very happy plants which grow slowly. And potentially they'll grow a bit taller rather than bushier, as they seek more intense light. Not sure what you mean by other parameters! Having low light wont effect your CO2/nutrients, aside from reducing the amount plants use.
Eugine Thomas
Member
I was just covering my bases.
Why don't more people do this, then? I can understand why a plant manufacturer would require the plants to grow as fast as possible (more plants to sell and in a shorter manufacture time) but, if you can have plants that are just as beautiful but growing slower, why would the average aquarist want to trim plants every week? This may be a sensitive cultural question but what would you say is the difference between an aquarist and an aquascaper? I don't think I'm an aquascaper (although I want lovely and healthy plants): I probably care more about watching fish (than plants?)...and, also, if it makes a difference, I only want one tank. I hope I haven't stepped on toes, here: eek.
Regards,
Eugine
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Hi all,
You don't have to have quick growth, if you look at Tom's threads <"Bucket o' mud"> & <"Poco pozo">
My philosophy is here: <"http://www.ukaps.org/forum/threads/mineralising-soil-substrate.16405/#post-171669"> & <"http://www.ukaps.org/forum/threads/unlimited-nutrients-using-e-i.27825/page-2#post-291043">
cheers Darrel
A man after my own heart, I've often pondered the same question.
You don't have to have quick growth, if you look at Tom's threads <"Bucket o' mud"> & <"Poco pozo">
My philosophy is here: <"http://www.ukaps.org/forum/threads/mineralising-soil-substrate.16405/#post-171669"> & <"http://www.ukaps.org/forum/threads/unlimited-nutrients-using-e-i.27825/page-2#post-291043">
cheers Darrel
Eugine Thomas
Member
I think you're saying that I should buy the Hagen Fluval Fx5 (it processes ten times my tank volume an hour), instead: if the high turnover of water were to cause a tsunami in my tank, is there a way to reduce the flow-rate? Is there a "volume knob" on this thing? Could you reduce it to 1/10 of its flow-rate if required? Would adding spray bars significantly reduce the pressure? By how much?
I watched a few videos of people reviewing this filter: they were using it on much bigger tanks (the volume of water coming from the outlet was very large).
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Eugine Thomas
Member
I'm going to read over those articles in a second, but can I ask you a sensitive question first? Is a high-tech planted aquarium not, in its extreme form, more accurately (possibly not historically, but in general practice), the application of industrial manufacturing processes to home settings. Is this a "boy-racer" culture?
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Rahms
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well I'm not sure boy-racer is the right term. It's certainly min-maxing, but I think most people do it for their own enjoyment rather than looking good. I think the boy-racer equivalent would be monsterfishkeepers.com !
As for why people don't all use low light. Well... A lot of the enjoyment is in the dynamic nature of an aquarium. It's nice to watch things transform, rather than having a 3D screensaver (granted, that screensaver is unique and interactive!).
Eugine Thomas
Member
That place is a world within a world!
I just couldn't work out if people were adding extra light for the fun of seeing plants grow fast ("turbo-charging" things) or whether the plants actually needed high-light it to grow beautifully: the plants need minerals and carbon dioxide to grow beautifully; they need extra (more than 2 WPG) to grow fast, right?
Are there any plants that will only grow in very-high light?
Also: can anyone post some pictures of aquariums that have been grown with supplemented carbon dioxide and EI dosing (but low light)? I would be interested to see what people have created?
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Edvet
Member
The 10x an hour is for "high tech tanks" , low tech tanks can do wel in 2-3 times per hour
Eugine Thomas
Member
I understand, but: is that not a high volume of water? How do fish survive in a high-tech aquarium?
No. All plants grow in light, its just that some "thrive" better in higher light & CO2 & ferts than others. Some people have grown HC carpets in so called "low light", takes ages to grow and is susceptible to algae, but it grows.
There won't be any. There is no point wasting injecting CO2 and EI when running at low light, the plants can't make use of the extra CO2 and ferts in "lower light" levels, so no point doing it.
My mate runs a "low tech", "low light" tank, a single T5 tube, shaded a bit with "foil rings" and doses liquid carbon & 1/4 dose EI ferts once a week, or when ever he can be bothered. Plants grow, even the Glosso I gave him, all algae free, but just grows slowly, painfully slowly in my eyes used to a high tech tank. He is happy, low maintenance tank.
I have a 180litre tank with 1400l/hr JBLe1501, internal Juwel filter @ 600l/hr and 3200l/hr power head (total 5200l/hr, nearly x30 rate) and fish are fine. They swim in the flow, find lower flow bits to swim in. How do you think fish in rivers survive ?
As my grandma used to say "You are wasting your worries on things that aren't a worry".
Worry about CO2 levels and distribution, all other things aren't a worry or a problem.
Edvet
Member
Lots af fish live in , at least a large part of the year, flowing water. The film footage in nature is often in slow flowing parts with clear water. Sadly these parts are hard to find, hence the lesser amount of documentation of wild living fresh water fish. If you look at the series The Fish guys, by Ivan Mikoljii, you will notice they are always trying to find clear water to film in and find it rarely, even sometimes it's only there part of the season. Much of their film shows more or less flowing water.
Eugine Thomas
Member
DOUBLE POST (see below).
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Eugine Thomas
Member
DOUBLE-DOUBLE POST (see below).
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Eugine Thomas
Member
Why is there no middle-ground between high-tech and low-tech? What if I were to use two T8s (both switched on for sixteen hours a day), with (slightly reduced) EI dosing and (slightly reduced) CO₂? It only costs £20 a year for dry fertilisers, and CO₂, at moderate levels of say 20 ppm, will only cost me about £30 a year: £50 a year isn't much. I don't mind the cost.
I'll take your word: I might just get the Fluval FX6 and be done with my dilly-dallying.
EnderUK
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The Learning from my Mistakes: Low Light - Dirt Tank - Winging IT is about my attempts to do CO2 inject low light tank, it's a bit outdate now. The reason why you won't see many tanks like this as it has the down side of a slower growth of a low light tank (all though it is a little quicker when injecting CO2) and it has the down side of a high tech tank requiring high maintance, 60% weekly water changes, daily dosing. The plants that seem to do best in this tank are the rosette (broad leaf type), I really struggle with stem plants.
The benifits over a high tech tank is that I have a large margin of error. I can forget to dose for a few days, I can see if problems start to build up. I can and have reduced the amount of ferts and CO2 and I can easily slow everything down. When I want rapid growth I can increase the par levels of lightin the tank by adding reflectors making it a medium light tank.
When I can't be bothered with maintence in the summer I can slow everything down. I take the reflectors out of the twin T5NO tubes I reduce the co2 levels slowly over a month making it low tech.
This really has been a on going experiment with lots of failures and changes but I'm starting to refine it. I probably won't do dirt again as I'm finding it very messy.
There is, you can roll your own CO2 and ferts dosing but how you determine it is working and levels are correct is very hard, as when you get algae and dead plants it is all too late. You will not have access to the laboratory grade test equipment to measure ferts and CO2, thus cannot determine your uptakes, thus you can't determine your required dosing, your required CO2 levels, frequency of water changes etc etc all getting very difficult for something that has been devised to be simple.
EI was all devised to keep it simple, no need to accurately measure salts, just bung it in, guaranteed enough ferts for the plants regardless of light level. Done.
As for CO2 set to 30ppm, enough for most "high" light levels and fish. Done.
All you control is light intensity (read from data sheet) and how long for. Done.
EI and 30ppm CO2 will cope with a range of light levels, I started with just T8's moving to T5's and still dose and use same level CO2.
So in summary, you can roll your own fert dosing and CO2 dosing, but I absolutely guarantee you will have issues. Been there done that, got the T-shirt and the corresponding algae.
If you really insist on going it alone, which from your posts I suspect you will, you can mix your own drop checker solution using less the 4dKH strength solution (add distilled to 4kDH) so that it goes green/yellow at 20ppm rather than 30ppm. Also use only 0.7pH drop if doing it via pH dropping. You can obviously dose less than EI doses, but again how much...who knows. And again you can have lower light levels, but without a PAR meter to measure the levels...who knows.
