# Last go for some help



## swackett (7 May 2017)

Hi,

I have just bought a new Roma 125 LED aquarium. I'm using my existing Eheim thermo filter, I have co2 injection and am now using LED lighting (new to me I have used T8 and T5 in the past)

I've used Tropica plant substrate covered with a good 2 cm or so of gravel and have the following plants.

Cryptocoryne (various)
Echinodorus (rubra and ozelot)
Narrow leaf Java fern
Anubias (various)
Alternanthera cardinalis
Hygrophila Rosae Australis

I've set the lighting period to 6 hours for now as I'm in the establish period, my question is should I dose liquid ferts and if so how often. I'm thinking the only plants that would use this are the stems as the Crypts and Echinordus will get most of there nutrients from their roots (once established)  is this correct?


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## Zeus. (7 May 2017)

When you dose ferts you dose the AS as well. The AS mops up any surplus ferts from the Water Column, so when you add ferts you recharge the AS. Your AS will be new so will contain most of the nutrients your plants need, which varies from brand to brand OFC.
So in a way you don't need ferts, but why not then you will now your plants won't be lacking any nutrients, plus having an abundance of nutrients doe not encourage aglea. 
I would dose ferts, EI dry salts cheapest and contains everything your plants need.
Daily dose except WC day if using EI.

Sent from Mountolympus via neural interface


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## Vandal Gardener (7 May 2017)

Hiyah Swackett,

I think you want to establish what type of lighting your LED provides which will help determine your nutrient regime.

Just to emphasise I'm but a humble hobbiest nowhere near the levels of some of the folk on here but my understanding is all plants will feed from both their roots and the water column so although you've put the tropica substrate in which should keep you covered initially and will have good CEC properties later so that it can store nutrients you add to the water column, maybe a bit crude but my rough understanding of how it works.

So to answer your question in my opinion it would be best to do both substrate and water column feeding.

As to how much there's loads of info on methods e.g. lean EI, EI, PPMD etc etc so its really up to you what method.  You can use pre-bought fertilizers in the form of tropica, ada, etc or buy dry salts and either make your own liquid feed or dry dose the salts - you'd need a set of scales capable of measuring small amounts - 0.01g.

But to go back to how much and when - well first establish what kind of aquarium - high light etc then try to mimic one of the successful diaries here.

For example I use Tom Barr's PMDD http://www.barrreport.com/forum/bar...ccuracy-want-daily-pmdd-style-ei-dosing/page7 - but as said I'm no expert so watching my plants to try and let them tell me how its going.  Or rather watching the algae accumulate  
The reason I liked the PMDD + PO4 was pure and simply because it had dry weights and not spoons as cups as measures  - I'm a bit sad that way.ov

My tanks are long established so there wasn't any question in my mind as to over egging the pudding - the beauty of EI is with a 50% water change weekly there's little chance of levels building up to harmful levels.

If I've got anything wrong here folks feel free to pull me up -

Good luck


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## AverageWhiteBloke (7 May 2017)

No that pretty much covers it. Check out the EI page in UKAPS articles for more detailed explanation and you can dose ei dry with spoons if you want. 
Essentially ei is dosing enough ferts in the tank that regardless of how bright your lighting is and given good flow round the tank and enough co2 the plants shouldn't need any more than that. 
Lighting drives the requirements of ferts so it's a one size fits all solution. 

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## swackett (7 May 2017)

Thanks for your replies, I've done EI in the past.  Been away for a few years and now trying again .  The led is the standard one that comes with the Roma, so 10w, not sure of the colour temp though.

So maybe a dose of tropic liquid ferts once a week to start with?


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## Zeus. (7 May 2017)

More suited to a low tech tank, with your CO2 and light upgrade a daily fert regime would be better then less chance of aglea. If your tank becomes nutrient deficient 

Sent from Mountolympus via neural interface


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## swackett (7 May 2017)

Ta, the Tropica bottle states for 100l tank I should use 10 doses a week. Maybe I'll start with one every day for the week then up to 1 a day and see how things go.


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## AverageWhiteBloke (8 May 2017)

Which Tropica are you using? Premium only contains trace elements and specialised contains traces and macros ie nitrate and phosphate. In a tank with your lighting and co2 enriched I would suggest you need some specialised. You can off course mix dry salts with premium or buy your traces as salts. Buying dry salts is a far cheaper alternative but as your tank isn't a large volume maybe you can live with commercially prepared ferts. 

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## GHNelson (8 May 2017)

https://www.aquasabi.com/nutrients/liquid-fertiliser/
Have a look ...Available various combination ferts/nutrients from one of our sponsors above!
hoggie


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## swackett (8 May 2017)

AverageWhiteBloke said:


> Which Tropica are you using? Premium only contains trace elements and specialised contains traces and macros ie nitrate and phosphate. In a tank with your lighting and co2 enriched I would suggest you need some specialised. You can off course mix dry salts with premium or buy your traces as salts. Buying dry salts is a far cheaper alternative but as your tank isn't a large volume maybe you can live with commercially prepared ferts.
> 
> Sent from my STH100-2 using Tapatalk



We are using Premium at the moment, so you think Speciaiised would be better?


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## swackett (8 May 2017)

hogan53 said:


> https://www.aquasabi.com/nutrients/liquid-fertiliser/
> Have a look ...Available various combination ferts/nutrients from one of our sponsors above!
> hoggie



Thanks will have a look.  I was looking at Aqua Essentials, but they only seem to the sell the 5L bottle.


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## AverageWhiteBloke (8 May 2017)

Good chance mate. Premium only contains the trace elements.  Generally speaking unless you have nitrate in your tapwater or a heavy load of fish the plants will require some extra for growth. You may be getting away with it at the moment because it's still using from the new aqua soil. It will probably need replenishing at some point. 

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## swackett (8 May 2017)

Well we have been using it for some years with the old setup (Crypts, Java Fern, Anubias) under T8 lights, but these plants are slow growing and light is very low.


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## Vandal Gardener (8 May 2017)

Swackett,

Have you thought about buying the dry salts, I ordered some earlier in the year and have plenty left, in that time i've given a 500ml bottle to a mate to try and gone through a couple of 500 ml bottles of macros.  All in, the liquids if bought in commercial form would have cost in excess of £50 - I got all my salts for much less that - but then again I'm skint and would rather have the money for fish or plants.

ATB


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## AverageWhiteBloke (8 May 2017)

Not taking anything away from commercial ferts but in essence a large portion of what you pay is for the bottle and 99% water. 

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## swackett (8 May 2017)

Agree with you both, as I used dry salts on our old 240L tank, but an £11 bottle of Tropica will last us 30 weeks at 10ml a week.

We still have some of the dry salts in a cupboard as i came across it the other week.


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## AverageWhiteBloke (8 May 2017)

That being the case I would start using salts combine with the tropica as traces and see how you get on. The 10ml per week may be a bit lean though.


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## swackett (8 May 2017)

So I could also do the same with Tropica Specialised, maybe start off with more premium and slowly increase the amount of specialised I use week on week.  So I could do the following and monitor algae growth?

Week 1
Premium - 10ml
Specialised - 2ml

Week 2
Premium - 8ml
Specialised - 4ml

Week 3
Premium - 6ml
Specialised - 6ml

etc


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## AverageWhiteBloke (8 May 2017)

I have to admit I'm not sure at what dosages you add Tropica. From what I understand in a heavily planted tanks that is moderately lit you would have to add more than their recommended dose. 
It actually works the other way round than you are thinking. Ferts don't cause algae unless it's the lack of as opposed to too much. That's why EI provides too much because if the plants get hungry and there's bright light algae will gain the upper hand so if you were trying to gauge the right amount the idea would be to start from the top and work your way down. If you see a negative reaction in the plants you would then back up with the dosing. 

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## swackett (8 May 2017)

But if i remember rightly with EI you do a massive water change each week to reset the water column.


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## AverageWhiteBloke (8 May 2017)

Sort of yes. Doing a large water change weekly prevents build up if the tank isn't using it but more importantly it removes other nasties in the water which do encourage algae. Plants themselves have by-product waste so encouraging them to grow faster with unlimited ferts and co2 enrichment combined with high light=fast growth and more waste produced by the plants. 
With high lighting even the slightest of raises in pollutants, stuff you can't reliably measure will result in algae growth. 
If you're not wanting to go down the route of large weekly water changes the best option would be to reduce the lighting in either intensity or duration. You maybe could get away with dosing Tropica ferts at their standard dosing. The good thing about having your old salts is if you come across a deficiency you could just top off with the salts as long as you know what deficiency the plants are showing which is no mean feat. 

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## swackett (8 May 2017)

AverageWhiteBloke said:


> The good thing about having your old salts is if you come across a deficiency you could just top off with the salts as long as you know what deficiency the plants are showing which is no mean feat.



Indeed !!


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## AverageWhiteBloke (8 May 2017)

Do you actually need to use premium and specialised? Something I've often wondered.  I thought specialised was traces+npk. Best suggestion would be keep the light period down to start with and dose specialised at its standard dose. Notice any ailing Plants and up the dose slightly. If it gets to the point where it's going to get expensive or you you can't keep up with the water changes you could reduce lighting further or add some extra n and p through salts. You should be covered for traces using Tropica. I've often fancied the specialist but my local P@H never has it in. Would be interesting to compare.  

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## AverageWhiteBloke (8 May 2017)

Just been having a quick look at Tropica Specialised to satisfy my own curiosity. Checked with Rotala Butterfly and Tropica Website . Now I could be wrong here so anyone please feel free to correct me. According to the Tropica Site you would dose 6ml per week or 5 pumps per 50 ltrs, Going by Rotala, to achieve dosing somewhere in the region of EI methods you would need to be more like dosing 43ml per week. Even at that as you can see that still wouldn't take you into the lower region of EI dosing regarding your N and P.
A 300ml bottle at that rate would last two weeks! Unless you have deep pockets then either supplementing with dry salt or reduction of the lighting would be the way to go.


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## swackett (8 May 2017)

At the moment the lighting period is 6 hours, so maybe I'll try that with specialised as suggested.  Do you count 6 hours as a short lighting period?


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## AverageWhiteBloke (9 May 2017)

I'm not sure what you would class as a short or long lighting period or the minimum. Somewhere between 6 and 8 hours seems to be the norm for most I think. I have mine on for 6.5 hours at this time of year because the tank gets some sunlight for an hour or so before lights on because of the position of the tank. I winter when it gets dark earlier I would change that to about 8.5 hrs just so the room the tank's in isn't dark when the light comes on. 
I also have the ability to dim it if needs be when things are getting out of sync. If I get some algae issues generally down to lack of time and poor cleaning regime and I don't have time to keep up I drop the lighting to 50% for a while. 
Does your light have any dimming options? Some of the generic eBay dimmers will work with a lot of lights.

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## swackett (9 May 2017)

No it just has an on and off, funny you mentioned the dimmers as we talking about dimming the lights last night when the light went off at 10 and plants and fish were plunged into sudden darkness.  It would be nice to dim them down and up over 30 minutes


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## Vandal Gardener (9 May 2017)

Sorry if I've missed a bit here - but isn't your LED 10w Swackett? 

I'm assuming that's low light which is making me question your need to raise the light/use a dimmer or lower the duration at all.


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## swackett (9 May 2017)

Yeah it is 10w.  Interestingly the Hagen website mentions its 7.5w !


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## AverageWhiteBloke (9 May 2017)

Yeah if the light isn't that bright you could see how it goes with the Tropica specialised if big weekly water changes aren't your thing. I don't know much about your light fitting just assumed it was going to be medium to high.  

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## swackett (9 May 2017)

No I think its more like medium to low.   We used to do big weekly water changes, but then found it too laborious every week and before you know it you have forgotten one week, then the next week, etc, so wanted an easier life rather than give up on the whole thing


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## AverageWhiteBloke (9 May 2017)

You can only try mate. I know the feeling keeping high-tech, sometimes it can feel like a full time job if you have a busy lifestyle. If commercial prepared ferts are your thing and you have the coin to buy it I would try lights for 6 hours with Tropica Spec and maybe change 50% water every two week. At least if you're not too heavily planted and the plants aren't chomping through the n and p you might have a chance of it building up to sufficient values. People often forget EI is what your plants are unlikely to use not bare minimum. More often than not you can get away with far less but you need to keep an eye on it. You can always throw an extra WC in the mix on the odd day when you find yourself with a couple of spare hours, the more the better as it removes all the other crap in there. If your plants do look a bit under the weather you have your salts there to top off. I think the traces will be fine if anything the n and p will be the ones to watch.
Have a read up on plant deficiencies and the plants it affects, that way you'll know the tell tale signs early before it gets out of hand and algae rears its ugly head.

Good luck.


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## swackett (9 May 2017)

Thanks for informative help mate, very much appreciated.  I have started a journal which shows the setup so far if you are interested?


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## AverageWhiteBloke (9 May 2017)

In fact, just remembered Darrels duck weed index if you search for that. That could be beneficial for you, basically put some duck weed in the tank and monitor that. Being a floating plant with access to plenty co2 and closest to the light first signs of low n and p and the duck weed will tell you.


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## AverageWhiteBloke (9 May 2017)

swackett said:


> Thanks for informative help mate, very much appreciated. I have started a journal which shows the setup so far if you are interested?



Very interested, link it up I'll be keen to see how this goes.


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## swackett (9 May 2017)

Heres the link https://www.ukaps.org/forum/threads/a-place-for-corydoras.49696/ let me know what you think.


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## swackett (18 May 2017)

What ppm of phosphate should I be looking to achieve?

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