Recent content by Ray

128 days (47 days after flooding) This is FINALLY starting to work. I had minor problems with traces of BGA which I am combatting with 50% water changes every 2 days. Hint: you can easily suck it off moss with an airline syphon. I’ve added 11 jelly blue Neocardina Davidi and they are all...

Day 95 (14 days since flooding) A long hiatus posting because since I flooded 2 weeks ago it's been challenging and I got pretty disenchanted with the whole thing. The bad: Flooding was a nightmare - moss detached from stone, chunks of Marsilea and Eriocaulon had very short roots and floated...

Oh boy, oh boy, what have I done? What have I done! :facepalm: Well, the fact you see that you need Tim Harrison to beat Tim Harrison tells me all I need to know - I do like you because we've got so much in common - you're a Tim Harrison fanboy too! ;)

Day 73 Update: The good: - I may be the first person in a dry start to need to cut the stems before flooding! - Lots of Eriocaulon flowers. - Moss is going crazy and looks good. The bad : - Marsilea never really got going. It’s not died but neither has it prospered. It is also very hard to...

Looking very good! So it seems to be good hygiene basically - regular water changes and vacuuming up mulm and debris?

@mrhoyo just checking on you - how goes the war against the BGA?

Based on this comment in another thread it looks like the Ultralife BGSSR did the job? @Ruskie - please can you confirm that's the case?

Thanks for invoking me Josh :). It's 30 years since I sat in a classroom and looked at the ADP - ATP cycle (for A level biology) so I hadn't twigged that that was what the plants needed phosphate for - so thanks for that realisation! As far as I can tell you are correct. The Amano advice to...

Yes. Green Machine talk about it in thier book - they do the hardscape, let it run a month without lights so the tank can cycle, then plant. If you don't have enough mature filter media to seed the new filter, it could be worth running a fishless cycle while you wait.

Going to run a dark cycle while you finish the decorating?

I reccomend doing this for high tech, as it does save a lot of messing about, especially in larger tanks, but my experience of doing this in low tech is that you end up with bonsi crypts that take months to recover and contribute almost nothing to the plant biomas in the meantime. The ones...

Its worth noting that @Ruskie, @mrhoyo and myself are all currently struggling with BGA in low tech tanks. I’ve a feeling this is because the plants have more trouble out competing the BGA without CO2 and hence I’ve now gone big on stems to see if that will tip the balance. I’m dosing Tropica...

How interesting! I was thinking “that’s very clever to use 2 different dKH for more accuracy across the scale” but it seems actually this a case study for just how useless drop checkers are then? Most of us never had 2 running so don’t know this...

Is that one 2dKH and one 4dKH drop checker so you can better gauge your CO2?

Looking good! Nice scape and nice kit. I see you have in line CO2 (watch that kink in the tube there) but where is the drop checker?