# Does this make sense (sorting a cock up)



## AverageWhiteBloke (7 Jun 2017)

Just thought I'd run this by people just to check if my thinking is right. Made a bottle of ferts up and got things wrong, however I do know what's in the bottle. Po4 is way too high which I thought I could just add more kno3 to balance it up but the amount I would have to add probably wouldn't dissolve and I've used some so I'm thinking, if I make up another bottle of same volume it should just be a case of making the other bottle to a ppm that when I average the two bottles are right and mix them together right?


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## Daveslaney (7 Jun 2017)

Can you not just use a bigger bottle? Tip in what you have already made then add the no3? Fill the bottle with water.It should dissolve better in the larger volume?


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## xim (8 Jun 2017)

AverageWhiteBloke said:


> Just thought I'd run this by people just to check if my thinking is right. Made a bottle of ferts up and got things wrong, however I do know what's in the bottle. Po4 is way too high which I thought I could just add more kno3 to balance it up but the amount I would have to add probably wouldn't dissolve and I've used some so I'm thinking, if I make up another bottle of same volume it should just be a case of making the other bottle to a ppm that when I average the two bottles are right and mix them together right?



Right. I do that sometimes.


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## AverageWhiteBloke (8 Jun 2017)

Daveslaney said:


> Can you not just use a bigger bottle? Tip in what you have already made then add the no3? Fill the bottle with water.It should dissolve better in the larger volume



Yeah I thought that afterwards as well, thought I could simply double the amount of water and mix in some more kno3 but I'm trying to divide the po4 by three. For some reason adding two thirds more water doesn't feel right. I.E if I have 450ml in the first bottle would adding 900ml water to this dilute it by three? Then I could work out how much kno3 I would need to add to that to straighten it out. God I wish I'd stuck in at school, who's laughing now class clown 
The easy option would be to reduce dosage in bottle 1 to 8ml and drop some dry salt in to make up the difference in kno3 but I just like dropping my 20 ml in before I go to work and I'm one of those people who tips out the house in the morning like a bag of washing.


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## swackett (8 Jun 2017)

AverageWhiteBloke said:


> Yeah I thought that afterwards as well, thought I could simply double the amount of water and mix in some more kno3 but I'm trying to divide the po4 by three. For some reason adding two thirds more water doesn't feel right. I.E if I have 450ml in the first bottle would adding 900ml water to this dilute it by three? Then I could work out how much kno3 I would need to add to that to straighten it out. God I wish I'd stuck in at school, who's laughing now class clown
> The easy option would be to reduce dosage in bottle 1 to 8ml and drop some dry salt in to make up the difference in kno3 but I just like dropping my 20 ml in before I go to work and I'm one of those people who tips out the house in the morning like a bag of washing.


HI mate,

What quantities are in the bottle now and what dosing are you aiming for?


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## AverageWhiteBloke (8 Jun 2017)

Bottle I have, if I dosed 20ml of it would result in 3ppm of po4 and 10ppm no3. Trying to get it so I get 1ppm po4 and 10ppm no3, essentially I need to dilute it by a third then make up the no3. Used Nutrient companies suggestion in a rush one day and realised it was double what I tend to dose and at the moment I'm reducing tds in my tank as much as possible so the po4 being well over the top is first to go then I can gradually reduce the others.


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## swackett (8 Jun 2017)

AverageWhiteBloke said:


> Bottle I have, if I dosed 20ml of it would result in 3ppm of po4 and 10ppm no3. Trying to get it so I get 1ppm po4 and 10ppm no3, essentially I need to dilute it by a third then make up the no3. Used Nutrient companies suggestion in a rush one day and realised it was double what I tend to dose and at the moment I'm reducing tds in my tank as much as possible so the po4 being well over the top is first to go then I can gradually reduce the others.



What are you dosing?   KH2PO4 and KN03?   if so are you trying to get to the magic 10 : 1 ratio for ppm as I maybe wrong but thought this was for K and PO4 rather than NO3 and PO4.


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## AverageWhiteBloke (8 Jun 2017)

Not sure what you mean bud, the 10:1 is.... no3 10: po4 1. K is between 15 and 30 ppm I think which you get as part of the *(K)*NO3 and *(K)*H2PO4 When you dose both of those at 30ppm:3ppm respectively the K comes in with it within the range. Only if you dose this lower may you need to add a K as well using potassium sulphate.
In my case if I dose 20ml of the current bottle to 10ppm no3 dosed 3x per week I would also be dosing po4 at 9ppm per week when I only need about 1-3ppm per week. I also know my tapwater is heavy in po4. The TDS of my tank sits at between 250-300ppm doing 50% WC's per week after a few months and I'm trying to lower the TDS to benefit soft water species i.e Rams. I've since rolled back on my magnesium dosing which is starting to steady up the TDS raise on a weekly basis so common sense tells me given all the above that PO4 is the next thing I can probably safely reduce, less ferts=lower TDS. Problem is I have a 500ml bottle here I don't want to waste that has far too much po4 in unless I reduce the dose to 7ml and add extra kno3 separately to make up the difference.

Beilng lazy I just want to dose once from the same bottle. I could just add the extra kno3 until the bottle is used up but at 7ml doses this will take 23 weeks.


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## AverageWhiteBloke (8 Jun 2017)

Should also add, I work away a lot and only really get the opportunity to change water once a week which seriously grieves my missus when I should be having family time instead of "that fish tank"  So if I can find a sweet spot of dosing where I could miss a WC if needs be and the fish are happier in softer water that would be nice. As it stands I dose probably way too much on the side of caution.

My tapwater has a TDS of 39 so you can see there's quite a lot of something that doesn't need to be in there.


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## AverageWhiteBloke (8 Jun 2017)

As you can see below, obviously there's plenty of anomalies there as the same dose doesn't make the the same jump in TDS but there's a lot of other things to factor in and my TDS pen is err crap and cheap for the want of a better phrase but in the main my TDS is slowly rising over time. I've been office based for a bit hence me spending far too much time in this forum lately  mainly trying to help with you as well as sort my own  So, I'm taking the time to do a reset with several wc's and hoping to find a dosing regime where my tds isn’t going up.


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## swackett (8 Jun 2017)

AverageWhiteBloke said:


> Not sure what you mean bud, the 10:1 is.... no3 10: po4 1. K is between 15 and 30 ppm I think which you get as part of the *(K)*NO3 and *(K)*H2PO4 When you dose both of those at 30ppm:3ppm respectively the K comes in with it within the range. Only if you dose this lower may you need to add a K as well using potassium sulphate.
> In my case if I dose 20ml of the current bottle to 10ppm no3 dosed 3x per week I would also be dosing po4 at 9ppm per week when I only need about 1-3ppm per week. I also know my tapwater is heavy in po4. The TDS of my tank sits at between 250-300ppm doing 50% WC's per week after a few months and I'm trying to lower the TDS to benefit soft water species i.e Rams. I've since rolled back on my magnesium dosing which is starting to steady up the TDS raise on a weekly basis so common sense tells me given all the above that PO4 is the next thing I can probably safely reduce, less ferts=lower TDS. Problem is I have a 500ml bottle here I don't want to waste that has far too much po4 in unless I reduce the dose to 7ml and add extra kno3 separately to make up the difference.
> 
> Beilng lazy I just want to dose once from the same bottle. I could just add the extra kno3 until the bottle is used up but at 7ml doses this will take 23 weeks.


I was going trough the same as you, hence my thread on ratio as my Po4 was way too high.

So based on what you want which is 1ppm of po4 and 10ppm of no3 per dose you will need 12 tsp of kn03 and 1.25tsp of kh2p04 which will give you your 10:1 ratio per 10ml dose, so if you want to do a 20ml then use 6tsp and .0.6tsp.

So now how much to add to your existing bottle will depend on how much you have used so far, did you say you had 450ml left?


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## AverageWhiteBloke (8 Jun 2017)

swackett said:


> So now how much to add to your existing bottle will depend on how much you have used so far, did you say you had 450ml left?



Wish it was that simple, because I have 3x the po4 needed I would need to add 3x the kno3 needed and it probably wouldn't dissolve. Considering there's probably about 450ml left I would have to add about 80grams of kno3 to even things out. That's why I was trying to dilute then sort.


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## AverageWhiteBloke (8 Jun 2017)

I think I might be thinking a bit clearer about this now, can anyone who did listen at school confirm please, surely the average of 3 bottle is exactly the same as average of three so...

450ml with 3ppm dosages in 20ml
450ml with 0ppm
450ml with 0ppm
divided by 3
I now have a bottle of 1350ml with a 20ml dose being 1ppm

So that being the case I now also have a bottle of 1350ml where no3 doses are (10 div by 3=3.33ppm) per 20ml dose and I need to boost that 6.67ppm. according to Rotala a 1350ml bottle would need 73 grams of kno3 to achieve 6.63ppm and that should straighten me out yes?


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## xim (8 Jun 2017)

AverageWhiteBloke said:


> I think I might be thinking a bit clearer about this now, can anyone who did listen at school confirm please, surely the average of 3 bottle is exactly the same as average of three so...
> 
> 450ml with 3ppm dosages in 20ml
> 450ml with 0ppm
> ...



Yes.


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## swackett (8 Jun 2017)

AverageWhiteBloke said:


> Wish it was that simple, because I have 3x the po4 needed I would need to add 3x the kno3 needed and it probably wouldn't dissolve. Considering there's probably about 450ml left I would have to add about 80grams of kno3 to even things out. That's why I was trying to dilute then sort.



Would it just be easier to throw your existing mix away and start again. You will use 0.6tsp of KH2PO4 in the new solution and 6tsp of KN03, rather than add another 11 or so tsp to try and correct your existing mix.


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## AverageWhiteBloke (8 Jun 2017)

xim said:


> Yes.



See, those teachers were so wrong. If I can find one that's still alive I might ask them to take back their words  Thanks mate.



swackett said:


> Would it just be easier to throw your existing mix away and start again. You will use 0.6tsp of KH2PO4 in the new solution and 6tsp of KN03, rather than add another 11 or so tsp to try and correct your existing mix.



How dare you, throw away perfectly good ferts. I'm not having that. You're talking to a man who swapped out a perfectly good surface skimmer for a lesser version that works just as well because one used 3 watts power and the other used 5   Thanks for chipping in buddy, I'll sort this out and we can get back to your tank.


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## swackett (8 Jun 2017)

AverageWhiteBloke said:


> See, those teachers were so wrong. If I can find one that's still alive I might ask them to take back their words  Thanks mate.
> 
> 
> 
> How dare you, throw away perfectly good ferts. I'm not having that. You're talking to a man who swapped out a perfectly good surface skimmer for a lesser version that works just as well because one used 3 watts power and the other used 5   Thanks for chipping in buddy, I'll sort this out and we can get back to your tank.


Lol let's hope mine gets back on track soon.

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## AverageWhiteBloke (8 Jun 2017)

Yeah let's do that mate, two heads are better than one. Sometimes you can't see the wood for the trees which is totally evident in this thread from me 

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