im sorry, i cant do that, ive been tweaking a long time and the only way im going to get my water right is testing, take a look at my last pic, thats with ei and co2 ?
Hi George, what everyone is trying to explain to you is that tests are useless for your purposes. This is because their level of accuracy is low and they won't be able to give you any interesting information..
What you want is healthy plant growing in your glass cube... Ok, so you have enough light, but the filter turnover and the flow seem very poor. Have a look to other threads and you will find that most of us work with filters rated 10x the volume of the tank. This is because the filter output is measured by manufacturers without media and tubing. Some of them recognize that in operational conditions these values decrease by 50%. Afterwards you will need to manage this good filter turnover the best you can. The idea is to achieve a circular flow that is able to move gently all the plants in your tank and making sure there are no stagnant areas (quite difficult in corners, bottom front, bottom rear). There are plenty of ways to achieve this but a spraybar along the rear glass works fine (place it one inch under the water level with jets looking horizontally... If everything is ok with your filter, jets should hit the front glass)
As mentioned by other posters, water changes are extremely important as they reset the system getting rid of algae, spores, plant debris, etc. You need to change in a high tech at least 40% weekly to really say that you are changing water. In my case I do this twice a week. As you will read in this forum WCs are what you do more frequently and in larger volumes when things go wrong. In your case I would be changing 50% twice a week minimum until you find the way to healthy growing. WC only do good in your tank.
Another important thing is that plants don't really care about the water parameters you mention. Actually they can live in a very wide range of conditions unless you don't provide them with what they need. You (and most of us) are growing very easy plants, with no special chemistry requirements that in fact are weeds causing serious problems in some parts of the planet. They just need some very basic conditions to thrive... And this is light and food. EI dosing relies on that principle: you make sure the water column has enough (unlimited from the plant point of view) nutrients not to starve. It is very important to understand that algae blooms are not due to nutrients excess by itself but to a combination of issues, being one of the most important lack of co2 (the most limit ant nutrient) for the light you have, poor flow to deliver co2 where it is needed and lack of basic nutrients (NPK + microelements). Failure on all this leads to poor plant growth, and plant poor growth (death of plant cells) is one of the signals for algae spores to wake up and invade your tank.
This is why we are recommending you to save your money wasted on test kits that won't give much information on this very important issues described. Your eyes are much better to test how the flow is, how the light is, how the nutrients and co2 delivered are... Thus focus on better flow (you probably need to upgrade your filter), efficient co2 diffusion (bubbling co2 in the tank is not enough, look for dedicated tutorial) and good levels of nutrition (idem). All this, especially in that critical phase should be combined with very good tank husbandry. That's all you need.
Jordi
