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I was considering adding some elaine triandra to the carpet to get the soil covered, since the hairgrass is taking a very long time to fill in, as expected.
I saw that you noted it has a rather shallow root system but spreads quickly. Do you think a large carpet of it may be problematic as far as floating when it becomes dense? I had that issue with Utricularia and Micranthemum if I wasn't incredibly diligent with thinning it out, which is why I chose hair grass this time.
it grows very fast, so if you do not like trimming very very frequently it may not be a good choice. I think the issue isn't floating, but that it will grow very thick quickly without frequent trimming. Smaller crypts are quite low maintenance, as are smaller buceps/anubias when used as foreground
So I got my RO unit hooked up with plans to make the swap over to RO tomorrow.
I have 2 questions:
Since I'm doing to drain most of the tank, should I uproot all of the plants and top them as a reset? Taking into consideration my hair and staghorn algae issues attacking the lower leaves of a lot of the stems. The stems have half old growth from before I bought it, then healthy new tops grown in my tank. Now I'm resetting the parameters, so I don't know if I should just prune the worst of it and leave it be or uproot, chop, and replant the tank with the new tops.
So I got my RO unit hooked up with plans to make the swap over to RO tomorrow.
I have 2 questions:
Since I'm doing to drain most of the tank, should I uproot all of the plants and top them as a reset? Taking into consideration my hair and staghorn algae issues attacking the lower leaves of a lot of the stems. The stems have half old growth from before I bought it, then healthy new tops grown in my tank. Now I'm resetting the parameters, so I don't know if I should just prune the worst of it and leave it be or uproot, chop, and replant the tank with the new tops.
So there's no worries about it making the algae worse if I do most of the plants in the tank? I figured I'd uproot them all, then siphon the water out, and only replant the healthy tops that I'll rinse any algae spores off of. I wasn't sure if I should only do the species with the worst bottoms or just do the entire tank at one time.
Edited to add: the tank got pretty dense with plants since my last photos, so doing this will knock my plant density back down.
So there's no worries about it making the algae worse if I do most of the plants in the tank? I figured I'd uproot them all, then siphon the water out, and only replant the healthy tops that I'll rinse any algae spores off of. I wasn't sure if I should only do the species with the worst bottoms or just do the entire tank at one time.
Edited to add: the tank got pretty dense with plants since my last photos, so doing this will knock my plant density back down.
The final plan is to uproot all of the plants that are affected, drain down to the substrate, paint the wood with APT fix, then replant with only the best looking tops, fill with RO water remineralized with APT Sky and APT 3. Tomorrow I will do another 100% WC with a filter cleaning and APT on the wood again, repeat Sunday. Lights will stay knocked down to 75umols and I'm swapping the co2 regulator/inline diffuser for a GLA dual stage regulator and reactor.
I'll be posting updates with photos along the way to document, including an ugly algae phase photo before working on it so you all can see what I'm starting with.
Edit for Dennis, I have purigen in my canister. I know APT Fix uses some organic compounds in it, do you know if it is okay to leave the Purigen in or would it be more advantageous to remove it during the APT Fix treatments?
The final plan is to uproot all of the plants that are affected, drain down to the substrate, paint the wood with APT fix, then replant with only the best looking tops, fill with RO water remineralized with APT Sky and APT 3. Tomorrow I will do another 100% WC with a filter cleaning and APT on the wood again, repeat Sunday. Lights will stay knocked down to 75umols and I'm swapping the co2 regulator/inline diffuser for a GLA dual stage regulator and reactor.
I'll be posting updates with photos along the way to document, including an ugly algae phase photo before working on it so you all can see what I'm starting with.
Edit for Dennis, I have purigen in my canister. I know APT Fix uses some organic compounds in it, do you know if it is okay to leave the Purigen in or would it be more advantageous to remove it during the APT Fix treatments?
Hey @Dennis Wong , on this subject - - Do you find that slow growers like crypts and buces can tolerate gluteraldehyde spot treatment for heavy algae, or not?
Hey @Dennis Wong , on this subject - - Do you find that slow growers like crypts and buces can tolerate gluteraldehyde spot treatment for heavy algae, or not?
The co2 regulator almost gassed my fish today. I came home to my drop checker yellow despite me lowering the injection rate to account for the lower lighting levels and had my outflow positioned to suck air in and spit it out. Thank God my fish are all okay. This is the last time I use an fzone regulator on such a large tank, the needle valve and solenoid are junk. My GLA regulator came today and will be getting installed tonight.
RO is currently being made, I'm maxing out the running pressure at just under 80psi, but man is it slow going. Fingers crossed it can make the full 30 gallons by 9pm. Quick question for @Naturescapes_Rocco
When you remineralize in a smaller container and just dump it into the tank itself instead of your clean water container, do you fill the tank with clean RO, then dump the remineralize in and start the filter? Or do you dump the mixture in first then fill?
When you remineralize in a smaller container and just dump it into the tank itself instead of your clean water container, do you fill the tank with clean RO, then dump the remineralize in and start the filter? Or do you dump the mixture in first then fill?
Either seems to work. It's often best to have the tank full enough that the filter is running so there's some flow, then pour your little cup of water and remineralizing powder into the moving water.
Also I think you know this, but I like to use a milk frother to quickly mix the cup of powders. They don't need to dissolve in the cup, just get hydrated.
Pouring that stirred mixture into your 90% filled aquarium with the filter running will quickly dissolve the mixture in a matter of an hour or so in most cases. If you don't, CaSO4*2H2O (Gypsum) will often clump and stick together underwater for up to 24 hours.
But none of this step is precise. Just mix the powders in the cup while you start filling your tank, add them to the water if/when the water has some movement, and do it all again in 7 days!
Either seems to work. It's often best to have the tank full enough that the filter is running so there's some flow, then pour your little cup of water and remineralizing powder into the moving water.
Also I think you know this, but I like to use a milk frother to quickly mix the cup of powders. They don't need to dissolve in the cup, just get hydrated.
Pouring that stirred mixture into your 90% filled aquarium with the filter running will quickly dissolve the mixture in a matter of an hour or so in most cases. If you don't, CaSO4*2H2O (Gypsum) will often clump and stick together underwater for up to 24 hours.
But none of this step is precise. Just mix the powders in the cup while you start filling your tank, add them to the water if/when the water has some movement, and do it all again in 7 days!
Thank you so much for the quick reply! I fear I wont have enough time to make the 30 gallons I need to swap over to RO tonight. Even at the pressure I have going in the unit and being able to run the lower flow restrictor to get it to 2:1, it's made probably less than 5 gallons in the last 2 hours. I have the smallest bit of warm water running through the system, but I'm too nervous to mess with it any more than that and ruin the membranes. The water coming out of that faucet is ice cold which is killing the production rate...
I didn't get to post last night because it was so late when I finally got done. I ended up holding off on the RO due to how slow the production is, I have a BRS water saver upgrade OTW that will up it from 75gpd to 150gpd.
Here is what I started with: you can see the GDA is quite bad on the glass, and the hair algae is starting to affect even the healthy tops of some plants
The driftwood is the worst of it, impressively collecting all three kinds of algae I'm dealing with:
Last night's treatment plan was as follows:
Spot treated with h2o2 on the staghorn. Pulled most of the stem groups, topped them, and selected only the best looking ones to replant with. I drained the tank about 75% of the way, filled a cup with an excel dosage at 5ml per 10 gallons, and painted that on the driftwood. After waiting a few minutes I refilled the tank, and whatever excel was left I just dumped into the tank. I ran an airstone all night just to make sure my fish and shrimp were comfortable, and decided to just keep the lights and co2 off for the day and let the ambient lighting from my windows do the work for the plants to try and beat the algae however I can.
Here's the after:
Not too much going on. The staghorn and worst of the hair algae at the top of the wood definitely did not like the excel and is gray. Most of the staghorn is unaffected down on my hairgrass though. The velvety green algae on the wood (GDA?) And most of the hair algae seems to be unaffected as well.
As for further plan of attack:
After I hit "post", I'm going to do another spot treatment of APT fix, followed by another 50% WC with a rinsing of all my filter sponges to help remove any algae spores and organic detritus/mulm. Whatever parts of the driftwood that are exposed during the WC will get hit with some h2o2 and when it's done sizzling I will refill. I have a bit more room on my T90 light mounts to move the Pendants up about 2 inches, so I'm going to max out the mount height on them, lights are now turned down to 20% and will stay there for now. I did not anticipate going that low so I did not take a PAR measurment for that Intensity setting, but given that 30% at my original mount height was around 75umols at the substrate, this may take the PAR to sub 50umols. I'm going to run that for a week and see how the plants react. I'm also going to switch over to APT 3 and see if that may help the plants out, since they did well enough with APT 1 + PO4 supplementation but seemed like something was missing. I'll continue to spot does APT fix and h2o2 as needed, and reevaluate again at the end of the week.
Edited to add because I also made an interesting observation:
I know already that honey gourami do graze on hair algae. I was suspicious that my pencilfish have been as well, if you notice how short in length most of the filaments are, yet at the tip of the wood where the waterflow is highest, it's long. After some observation today, I can confirm that they do in fact graze on it as well. I even saw them ripping off chunks of dead staghorn. To help lower organic waste and encourage more algae grazing, I'm going to do a 3 day fast with the fish and then reduce feedings to every few days versus every other day and see where that gets me. My neos are gorgeous but really only help keep the substrate clean, the real workhorses are my pencilfish, though I have seen the ramshorns on the driftwood more than usual since weakening the algae.
Today was the first day away from the tank since declaring war on the algae. Yesterday I got the co2 dialed back in, came home to a lime green drop checker so I'm happy with that. I had to fiddle with it to account for my lower PAR so as to not gas my fish. The GLA regulator still doesn't work well unless I have the working pressure near 60psi-- anyone have any idea why? It's a 5lb co2 tank. I'm going to email GLA as well.
While I'm sacrificing color on some of the plants and my progress with Hygrophila 'Chai' for the lower lighting, I'm kind of enjoying the moody look it gives. I'd imagine PAR at the substrate is somewhere in the 50-75 range now. I also messed with some custom color settings to reduce the red and blue spectrum some. I wanted to go in with another round of spot dosing APT fix last night, but alas, I crashed super early.
Tonight's work will involve spot dosing APT fix again, and removing some more leaf decay I saw when doing my post-work tank check. This weekend I think it will be time to uproot and top the Aromatica and Rotala Mexicana. I want to add some more foreground plants but am holding off, to be honest I'm not sure if I want to continue this scape or start making plans to move most of the stems to a farm tank and turn this into a true nature style. I'm really loving my Taiwan Lilies. Decisions, decisions.
Anyways heres some photos with the algae update: looks like my work has paid off. A lot of the staghorn is turning white/pink, and some of the hair algae as well. It also looks like the neocaridina have started to eat it off the driftwood, as it looks cleaner than it was and I haven't done any manual scrubbing with a brush. The velvety green algae seems to be the toughest opponent, but the areas I hit the heaviest with APT fix have a weird ashy look, so I think more rounds of fix will do it away. There are still some areas of staghorn and hair algae that is alive, but I think if I do daily spot treatments and resist the urge to up the light intensity, it will continue to die off.
It’s just starting to grow in really nice! Once those lilies get to the surface it’s going to look super cool. The shade will probably help a bit with the algae issues too. I know it’s tough when you have to battle but I feel like you are close to making the turn and stabilizing this tank.
On the high co2 pressure, in line diffuser? Maybe it needs cleaning? I’m just running my first one and it got so clogged in a month that it wouldn’t let co2 through.
It’s just starting to grow in really nice! Once those lilies get to the surface it’s going to look super cool. The shade will probably help a bit with the algae issues too. I know it’s tough when you have to battle but I feel like you are close to making the turn and stabilizing this tank.
On the high co2 pressure, in line diffuser? Maybe it needs cleaning? I’m just running my first one and it got so clogged in a month that it wouldn’t let co2 through.
Hmm, I hasn't considered it getting dirty that fast, but your right! I'll try soaking it this weekend, but then again I had this same issue when I first set up the last regulator as well. I'm not sure if it has something to do with water pressure? I have an oversized oase in relativity to the tank size, it's a 600. I see more commonly on larger tanks people running two 250s or a 250 and a 350.
Very well could be that too, I don’t have much experience with them personally but I did a good bit of searching around when mine clogged. Seems that some folks do have to run higher pressures to overcome really heavy flow.
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