Substrate help, please. JI3 and ADA Amazonia

[Angharad]

I bet you are all sick and tired of noobs like me doing these threads, I'm sorry! My math skills are non-extistent, so I wanna check that I have this down right and whether the combination should work.

I want to rescape my 100litre (3ft x 1ft base area), and have around 20kg of John Innes #3 sat in the garden. I am hoping this will give me enough to get 2-3inches of soil in the tank, if it was laid flat (which it wont be, but nice to have more than needed than less). Should that be about right? I wasnt sure whether to use the calculator set to gravel or sand, so looked at both and I have somewhere in between the amounts, but closer to gravel. Do I need more? I don't mind buying more of this as it is cheap anyways and my local homebase is shutting, so its an extra 20-40% off.

I was also thinking of capping with a proper aquarium substrate and as I want the soil look but with more stability than uncapped JI seems to give (I have it in a 3 gallon and ended up capping that as it was a nightmare during water changes! D I was considering ADA AquaSoil Malaya, if I can source it. Would one 9kg bag of ADA give a 1" cap? Or is that too much/little of a cap? I love the aestheics of ADA, so if there is something that looks the same I would consider that.

My water is pretty hard and high in PH, but I will be adding new peat to that filter soon, probably at the same time (am swapping filters in there too >.>; Going external) so I am hoping that, after three weeks of being waterchanged in a bucket outside in the garden, the worst of the leeching of the JI should be finished with and that the Peat will helpp handle the rest of the GH increase. I'm planning on testing it daily for a few days before I add it to the tank (there are going to be fish in it, unless I can get a spare tank set up whilst this is resetablishing, but I doubt my husband would let me get away with it!), as being teh noob I am, I didnt put enough substrate in the first time (listened to the now known to be useless LFS, and only have an inch, including a sand cap). :/

ETA: I will also be pre-soaking and water changign teh amazonia, though I should be able to do a smalelr amount indoors. Just want to gte those initial spikes under control dues to livestock. Will be keeping a close eye on the fish if they do have to be in there, and doing very regular water changes.

 

[greenmac75]

I recently did a soil base for 120cm x40cm used about 3/4 of a bag, depth of soil was 1"-2", not sure about capping depths as I used old eco complete from 2 smaller aquariums.

You should check out the tutorial section, that is where I got my info for soil substrate.

 

[dw1305]

Hi all,
This is the tutorial <"The Soil Substrate....">.

I wouldn't put anything like that much JINO3 in a tank that size, you would be adding an enormous nutrient load, even before you added the ADA Aquasoil.

The peat won't make any difference to your water hardness, it works by ion exchange, but you would need to filter your water through a huge volume of sphagnum peat to remove the calcium ions from your water.

Because exchange is exactly that exchange, you would have to keep on changing the peat to stop the calcium ions going back in solution as the exchange sites fill up.

cheers Darrel

 

[Angharad]

That greenhouse shading is genius... so maybe soak enough JI to do a 4cm coverage (will go from 2-4cm from front to back), then use some of the greenhouse netting, and cap with akadama? Thats close to the colour of the malaya soil, with the benefit of being inert.