Planted FW tanks, substrate, pH and CO2 questions ..

[StirCrazy]

Originally Posted by Delphinus

I've swapped over the driftwood to new pieces because I just couldn't scrape the old ones clean so for now the old ones are out on the deck getting the algae freeze-dried into oblivion (hopefully anyhow, I don't want to toss them, they're otherwise fairly nice pieces)..



Oh .. fertilizer. Right .. Umm .. unfortunately I've fallen behind on that. I used to get all my FW stuff from one shop in town which closed down and I need to do a better job of looking for FW planted supplies when I go LFS hopping.

Do you use a liquid fertilizer or the tabs that you shove into the substrate? Any suggestions for a kind to look for next time I make the LFS rounds?

ok couple things I see, are you using real drift wood from the ocean or are you using the mopani wood? If it is drift wood, thats probably leaching into your tank and raising your hardness.

I could never grow algae in my planted tank, do you have a nice mix of fast and slow growing plants? I did both fertalizers, jobe sticks in the substrate and home made pmdd. there are plenty of sights for home made reactor style co2 difusers that use bioballs, I am just using a media reactor (red one from my excess salt water stuff, can't remember who makes it) and a bunch of bio balls. I have it set up to hang on the outside of the tank. I used a fuval canister filter for my fresh water tank, so the ouput of that is going to feed the reactor then I use a subsurface spray bar to put the water back to the tank. the top of my water is dead calm but there is quite a bit of flow under the surface.

Steve