Journal 20 Gal + 15 Gal Bucephalandra Recovery Tanks [Very high light, high co2]

[snowballs99]

Both tanks contain a lot of bucephalandra stems I have recently melted by feeding my caridina tanks with mulberry leaves. I have no idea what the heck happened but all buces melted in those tanks heavily over 3 days with every other plant + shrimp being fine. Don't wanna risk the plants dying so I'm throwing them back into high tech for a few months to recover.

Set Up:
Both tanks uses heavy co2 misting
Horticulture LED lights (dimmed, so probably 25-30 watts?)
Will steadily increase light weekly if I see no issues, max is 40 watts.
Dual sponge filters. (Air bubbles help prevent co2 gassing, also seems to really help stabilize tank, so less algae)
1 Internal filter with an atomizer for misting.

Regime:
All tanks get a 30-50% water change, twice per week.
Micros dosed daily (unless I forget, which happens fairly often.)
Macros Front Loaded and only in new incoming water.

6 Gallon bucket water change:
~350tds (Using seachem equilibrium remineralizer)
~22ppm KNO3, using KNO3 + KH2PO4
~40-50 ppm Potassium due to remineralizer
~4-5GH

Buce Lottery Colors
Lots of buces, various names, collected over the years. A lot of them were ultra rare and I cannot buy them anymore. Most of the ultra rare I probably accidentally killed from trying to grow them in a "no filter, no co2" style tank. Either way, not much color in low tech, will see what lottery colors we pull once they get going with better colors in higher lights + co2.

Both tanks are planted tightly front to back with bucephalandra. Kinda hard to see it all with moss blocking the way, but my view will be your view.

Random Mosses
Some mosses I've collected as well, honestly I grow a lot of them free floating so they kinda look the same. We will find out how they look after I attach them to something.

15 Gallon, very aged sand + pebble tank.

20 Gallon long, aged aquasoil I pulled from an existing caridina tank.


Wanted to take some macro shots, but does anyone know how to take an angle show on the glass without distortion? I have a DSLR long tube lens that works under water but color rendition is really bad.

Why so much moss?
Mostly to help stabilize the tank and to reduce light bleed. Less surface for algae to grow.

 

[snowballs99]

My favorite stem is actually Bucephalandra Rosemary, and a nano metallic purple bucephalandra with very thick and prominant iridescent bubbles on the leaves.

I have no idea where either of those plants are in this tank, or if they still exist in general. Will need 2-3 months for them to grow out before I can distinguish them. Most buces grow in my low-tech tanks seem to all be green with smaller sized leaves. Pray they are still alive.

This was a photo when it was last seen, with pinkish led lights. Please still be alive in there.

 

[snowballs99]

2 week update
Removed most of the moss now.
Reduced light a tad bit as well to make sure everything's good.



Tuffs of hair algae and black beard algae on buce leaves. Killed them with excel dip. Pretty easy and straight forward. Buces are extremely tolerant of high concentration excel dips.

You can see the algae turn colors.



Previously melted buce also recovered with new leaves.


Everything looks good so far.
BBA phase should pass as the leaves adapt to new EI parameters. And after u kill the remaining algae with excel of course.

 

[BranchScape]

What is your excel dip setup? Bowl that is 50/50 excel/water or 25/75 and how long?

Looks like a cool wabi kusa ball setup of moss and buce.

 

[snowballs99]

What is your excel dip setup? Bowl that is 50/50 excel/water or 25/75 and how long?

Looks like a cool wabi kusa ball setup of moss and buce.

I don't have exact measurements but u can be pretty wrong and it will still work.

1.5 capful of metricide 28 (1.4x excel concentration). Cap the same one on the table. Maybe 10ml?

A regular mug of water.

I soak all infected buces for 3 minutes and pull out. Even nano species are fine. Moss do ok with it as well. But I only keep 5-6 species.

It's more gentle on moss than hydrogen peroxide which I've killed a lot of moss with before in the past.

Mini pellia moss example will also melt after excel dip. But that's fine, that moss has been a cancer on my tanks. Other liverworts probably hate it as well. The thicker the leaves of the plant, the more tolerant of excel they usually are.

 

[snowballs99]

Update:

This tank is getting a worrisome amount of BBA . Typically these tanks should be super steady by now esp on the small amount of light I am using.

Its either crowding/flow/CO2 issue. So I just improved all 3 and will reduce each one later on once the issue is fixed.

Sponge filters swapped out for internal filters I already had lying around. Flow is now 3-4x with no dead spots.

Also removed 1/3 of the buces to another tank to reduce crowding.

ALso doubled my Bubbles per second on the CO2 as well.

I tend to run into algae issues always when dosing EI, but rarely when doing lean dosing.

 

[snowballs99]

Still getting a lot of black brush algae. Things got worse after swapping to a yugang diffuser. Atomizer seems to have a much faster reaction time and can be on same time as light. Yugang seems slower to build up.

Gonna turn on CO2 3-4 hours before photoperiod to compensate.

 

[Mr.Shenanagins]

Gonna turn on CO2 3-4 hours before photoperiod to compensate.

This right here is pretty key. I think most running a reactor have theirs injected 2-3 hours beforehand to ensure optimal co2 concentration before lights on.

 

[snowballs99]

This right here is pretty key. I think most running a reactor have theirs injected 2-3 hours beforehand to ensure optimal co2 concentration before lights on.

I've pretty much got 0 new algae now, should be completely algae free after i excel dip off the old ones.

I can't say it was solely turning on the reactor sooner, as I have multiple tanks which I change at the same time. Another 10 gallon with the same reactor on earlier still has algae issues. The other tank however is only 1 month old, this ones close to almost a year, so it seems to stabilize a lot faster. Both have sand substrate with pebbles mixed in.

I'd say switching over to a leaner dosing with apt 3 seem to also reduce algae a ton.
I can go a lot longer without having to do water changes with lean dosing, which preferred at this point.

 

[snowballs99]

Introducing my new bucepehalandra sp. Fuzzy pink



90% of the way to algae free. I should be fully clean by the end of the month now.

 

[snowballs99]

Gotta plead guilty here.
I ended up putting the buces from the 15 gallon tank with sand substrate into a caridina tank with aquasoil + bell/yugang diffuser.

I noticed 20 gallon long aquasoil tank just had better growth of pretty much everything, and the 15 gallon tank with sand felt like im constantly walking on a wire.

For the sand tank, It's just really easy for things to go wrong. Filters get clogged super often, waste constantly settles on top, requires weekly water changes or things start getting cloudy. Buces also don't seem to grow as steady. This seems like a tank that actually needs a strong canister filter, or oversized filter to run properly. It also brings me a bit of stress as I'm a bit paranoid of missing fertilizer dosing.

For the aquasoil tank, waste just seems falls to the bottom of the tank instead of on top of the soil, which actually makes the tank more stable. Particulates, dust also settles at the bottom, which means more water clarity with less filtration. The aquasoil tank now is just powered by 2 internal filters, both 5 watts each and honestly isn't moving that much water, but everything looks very healthy. I'm also fairly certain I can forget to dose this tank for 1-2 weeks and be fine.

Overall, I'm slowly moving towards the thought of "Just let your substrate capture the waste since that's where 80% of it ends up anyways. Gravel vacuum 1-2 times a year and move on".

This has led to convert the caridina tank into one with a UGF filter + bell/yugang diffuser to see if it works. My past experience with UGF filters have always been basically 0 maintenance but with ultra clear water.