(03-15-2017, 05:22 PM)Fishbone Wrote: Lol, honestly, I do all this to lessen the workload to take care of the fish, plus increase the beauty of the tank. Get an API phosphate kit. Plus a bottle of phosphorus, some fertilizer with potassium (Sera Florena, the Seachem potassium, etc), and something with all the micro nutrients (like Flourish). You almost always need to dose potassium. There is no regular way to get it from fish waste, and nor reasonable way to overdose it. Phosphorus, maybe or maybe not. depending on the food you're using. Dry/pellet foods tend to have more than frozen. But that test is worth the few dollars, if you can encourage your plants to absorb 2-5 times the nitrates out of the water. At least it is to me. But, I just want to do less work, and have the life in the aquarium do it by itself, lol!
Fishbone,
Does the phosphorus kit give recommend ranges for planted tanks? I have the 125gal tank now with soil substrate and a layer of sand over it that does not have any injected CO2. I have just been dosing with Flourish micro elements 2 tims a week in it and in my smaller tank with regular "plant substrate" that has injected CO2. I'm not happy with how the plants look in either tank. So I'm guessing it's time to start trying to figure out what they are missing.
