Do I need to add calcium to my macro?

Hi everyone,
Just after a bit of help with this. Wasn't sure if to post in the water section or here. Either way, according to my water board, my water is very soft. Now after reading that plants aren't so much suited to very soft water, I'm wondering if aswell as the mgs04 I add to my ferts, would I need to add a calcium salt of some sort.

I'm clueless when it comes to calcium content etc, but on the report for my area, it states magnesium is Only 2.71 mg MG/l, and calcium is 9.98 mg CA/l. According to the table on this link http://www.thetropicaltank.co.uk/hardness.htm I think I don't reach 1 degree of hardness.
I'm not seeing anything in my plants I believe to be calcium deficiency, but will I benefit by adding some. I do keep chocolate gouramis which are from soft water areasand rest are cardinals. I'm just thinking that maybe I'd not be getting the full potential from my plants. Or I'll start to see problems.

Thanks guys

Your tap water is quite good.

No need.

You need to measure the Ca and Mg together as equivalents of CaCO3.
General hardness.

plantbrain said:

Your tap water is quite good.

No need.

You need to measure the Ca and Mg together as equivalents of CaCO3.
General hardness.

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Thanks for that. Coming from the man who knows I'll leave it as it is then in that case.

Alastair said:

plantbrain said:

Your tap water is quite good.

No need.

You need to measure the Ca and Mg together as equivalents of CaCO3.
General hardness.

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Thanks for that. Coming from the man who knows I'll leave it as it is then in that case.

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This assumes you do water changes and all however

Yeah Alastair, like Tom says, you've got to really pay attention to the units on Hardness because it gets confusing.

Check out these basic equations (DO NOT FREAK OUT):

Equation 1
Total General Hardness (in equivalent ppm of CaCO3) = (equivalent CaCO3 ppm of Mg) + (equivalent CaCO3 ppm of Ca)

This is probably the strangest relationship for people to swallow because what it's saying is that the effect (within the water column) of a certain amount of pure Magnesium ion plus pure Calcium ion is identical to that as if you had a certain amount of Calcium Carbonate (CaCO3) dissolved in that water.

Equation 2
GH (in German degrees) = Total General Hardness (in equivalent ppm of CaCO3) / 17.8
This one is more straightforward, but again it's a relationship between the GH number that your test kit measures and a certain amount of CaCO3, even though you may not have any actual CaCO3 dissolved in that water.

But CaCO3 is simply a reference standard material and someone then had to figure out how much dissolved pure magnesium ion acts as if it were dissolved CaCO3 and how much pure Calcium ion acts as if it were dissolved CaCO3. Here it is:

Equation 3
Calcium Hardness (in equivalent ppm CaCO3) = Calcium (ppm Ca) X 2.5
Magnesium Hardness (in equivalent ppm CaCO3) = Magnesium (ppm Mg) X 4.2

What the heck does this equation mean? Well, whatever effect hard water has, i.e., soap won't lather, tastes nasty, conducts electricity and so forth, having CaCO3 dissolved in the water is only half as effective as if i just had the same concentration of Calcium (Ca++) alone dissolved in the water. It also says that CaCO3 is about 4 times less effective at doing those nasty things than just pure Magnesium ion (Mg++) dissolved in the water.

So now, by finding a common denominator between Calcium and Magnesium, i.e, how much each acts like CaCO3, I can then add their effects together to find the Total Hardness:

Equation 4
Total Hardness (ppm CaCO3) = Calcium Hardness (ppm CaCO3) + Magnesium Hardness (ppm CaCO3)

Now I have the tools to figure out my GH as long as I know what the pure ion content of each is. So lets revisit your water report. It states specifically that the pure Calcium ion concentration is 10ppm and that the pure Magnesium concentration is 2.7ppm. No big deal using Equation 3...
Calcium Hardness (ppm CaCO3) = 10 X 2.5 = 25 ppm CaCO3 equivalent
Magnesium Hardness (ppm CaCO3) = 2.7 X 4.2 = 11 ppm CaCO3 equivalent

Then, using Equation 1:
Total Hardness = 25 + 11 = 36 ppm CaCO3.

Now, the final step is to equate it to the units in which your test kit would report (German Degrees conversion as shown in the Equation 2 listed above):
GH = 36 ppm CaCO3 / 17.8
GH = 2

OK, well, I suppose you could have saved yourself some aspirin by spending 10 quid on a GH test kit, but then you would have just gotten a number, and not had even one iota of a clue what that number actually is telling you, right? That's why test kits basically suck.

Anyway, the GH is only slightly, low but the actual concentrations according to the water report are fine for micronutrients. You can easily experiment by say, adding a bit of extra Calcium Chloride (CaCl) for three weeks or so and/or adding a bit more MgSO4 and then compare the results. Do the plants look fuller? Do they have better color? If there is little perceptible change then there is no need to keep dosing extra Ca and/or Mg.

Cheers,

Hi everyone,...I am sorry for the rude hijack but suppose one is already dosing EI levels of ferts( for co2 enriched systems) or modified EI (Tom Barr's method using weekly Seachem Equilibrium) for non enriched tanks,....does the person really has to worry about the GH of the water?

Sorry if I asked a stupid question.

I tried not to freak out reading that Clive, I got a little brain melt during it until I got my head round it. Makes alot more sense now. Looking at the sponsors, they don't seem to do the calcium chloride and anything online seems to be for marine and have other things mixed in.
So following a bit of advice from ceejay, how does adding a tsp of calcium nitrate a week on a trace day sound and going from there??

Thanks

Yep, absolutely mate. Ca(NO3)2 works exactly the same. Calcium ion is Calcium ion.
So as long as the Calcium source you use dissolves relatively easily, then it doesn't matter.
I'm just partial to CaCl because it dissolves very easily and gives a higher percentage of Calcium per unit mass than either the Nitrate or the Sulphate versions.

faizal said:

...but suppose one is already dosing EI levels of ferts( for co2 enriched systems) or modified EI (Tom Barr's method using weekly Seachem Equilibrium) for non enriched tanks,....does the person really has to worry about the GH of the water?

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Faizal, look at the powders being used in the EI recipes. Calcium is not really addressed. In fact I only added Mg because I knew at the time that people born and raised in The Matrix were programmed (via microchip firmware) to use RO water for plants, which is completely devoid of Ca or Mg or anything else. If you're using tap water then normally you don't need to add either of these. So this simplifies the dosing. But then again, there were some municipal areas which are very low in Mg and it was discovered that adding MgSO4 improved performance in those municipal areas. These were just little tweaks. In low tech tanks, some plant species actively de-calcify the water by precipitating CaCO3 out of solution in order to generate CO2.

So if you're into EI you're always thinking about the two imperatives, nutrition and cost. Nitrate salts, for example, are typically cheap, but even so, if you live in an agricultural zone, then it's likely that your tap is high in Nitrate due to contaminated surface water runoff (which is an environmental problem in and of itself) so you may not need to dose as much NO3. If you live in a hard water zone then you may not need to worry about adding Ca and/or Mg. This saves cost if there is no need to buy a particular product. Remember that in some countries these salts may not be readily available or may be prohibitively expensive, so it's smart to be aware of this stuff.

What Tom is saying is that under most circumstances, there is no need to incur the added cost of GH Booster or even MgSO4, or whatever. It's very unlikely, if you see a problem with the plants, that it will be due to Ca or Mg shortfalls. 95% of the time, there is actually a problem with CO2/flow/distribution. So although it's good to experiment and to learn what works best for each of us, we should not obsess over Ca and Mg because they are miconutrients and the plants need them in only very small quantities. Better to obsess over the big things...N, P, K and C...

Cheers,

Hi Clive

your posts are always useful, always! I was wondering how, if having excess ferts in water affects the plant behaviour. In EI type dosing wherein ferts are practically unlimited for the given light, does having an extra dosing (say of Ca/Mg for already hard water) affect the water osmosis? So fert uptake by plants might still be doing ok, but its the water that the plant looses? I made a similar line of questioning regarding Tobi's spezial N magic chem. Are there good references to get these details and concentration limits etc..?

Thanks man!

-niru

For a non CO2 tank, in general, there's no water changes, so in this case. some dolomite might be the answer.

Or once every month or so, add some GH booster.

Adding a bit more GH will not hurt. If it gets to 25 degrees, you might want to back off, the dosing, but otherwise, there's going to be little negative impact.

Too low GH, while rare.........will reduce growth and color IME.
So having some extra seems wise.

niru said:

...In EI type dosing wherein ferts are practically unlimited for the given light, does having an extra dosing (say of Ca/Mg for already hard water) affect the water osmosis? So fert uptake by plants might still be doing ok, but its the water that the plant looses?...

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Hi niru,
To corroborate Tom's response I can honestly say that I have not seen any visible effects of excess Ca/Mg on plant growth, and that's starting from GH 3 up to an even beyond 25 GH. There is a lot of chatter on the web about Ca and Mg content. A lot of that chatter involves the Ca:Mg ratios within the water column. That's because in terrestrial plants, the sediment content and ratios have a significant impact on performance. I guess that a lot of the data comes from hydroponics sources or from field studies of terrestrials. People then automatically carry these arguments over to aquatic plants. If there is some magic ratio I haven't seen it because I've dumped boatloads of Ca/Mg into the tank and have not yet detected any significant impact from content or ratios, whether high or low. Now of course, I don't have a scanning electron microscope so I can't say that at the cellular level there aren't some osmoregulatory effects, but if there are, they certainly aren't showing up at the macroscopic level because the growth rates and structural quality at unlimited nutrition are just too amazing. Check this out:

Ludwigia inclinata var. Pantanal is a notoriously difficult plant to grow in high GH water. This plant, along with Tonina sp are about the only ones included in a handful of plants that demand low GH. Just about everywhere, you'll read how GH for L. Pantanal must be no greater than 3-4. I got a hold of a couple of stems and stuck them in my tank with unlimited nutrients and at KH 15+ and GH 25+. By all rights, there should have been no hope, but two weeks after sticking it in the tank, here was L. Pantanal happily pearling away at GH 25+:


Later on, these stems did just fine after adjusting fully to submersed. Now granted, these specimens did not achieve their growth potential under these conditions. They were very slow growing and stunted, but they didn't disintegrate as predicted either, and that's a direct result of unlimited nutrition and good CO2.


Other specimens in the tank under the same high GH and KH conditions and under high nutrient loading. I see no evidence of osmoregulatory issues as a result of the nutrient load. The same can be said whether using unlimited Nitrogen from Nitrate or unlimited Nitrogen from Tobi's Urea/Ammonium. There can be no doubt that even under adverse conditions, unlimited nutrition solves problems for aquatic plants and does not introduce problems. You can be assured that if you visit any website in The Matrix and someone complains that they have this problem or that problem due to excessive this or excessive that, it's a certainty that their real problem is simply that they do not have enough of this or enough of that....


Cheers,

Thank you

It's not everyday we get tips from both Kings !!!!

faizal said:

Thank you

It's not everyday we get tips from both Kings !!!!

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I wish Clive would stop putting pics of his plants up. It's not fair ha ha

Clive's pictures just prove once again that at GH > 20 or so, the refractive index of water changes to such an extent that the resulting Wormhole induced hypnotic vision collaborates with the Quantum Optical World Perception to make us believe that water close to his plants is actually O2 pearling bubbles.

Inhaling the excessive CO2 around also causes semi-permanent dillusions of great plant growth which then due to the above effect makes a permanent mark on the photographic images. There is no way to escape the dark nature of the MATRIX. Guess someone needs to check on the hallucinational behaviours close to tanks with too much CO2!!

And what you (want) to see, is what you (think you) get! 8)

-niru

The latest web steer manure argument against such stuff: "Tom Barr's tanks do not look anywhere near as good as Amano's, thus he cannot give advice, I will only do and listen to what Amano says. Amano is the Expert, not Tom"

Lol! Well that's u put in your place!

Where did I leave my ADA flag?!?!

I've heard it all now

plantbrain said:

The latest web steer manure argument against such stuff: "Tom Barr's tanks do not look anywhere near as good as Amano's, thus he cannot give advice, I will only do and listen to what Amano says. Amano is the Expert, not Tom"

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What a crack up!