Just got a few things I need to get written into the journal, ill do another round of pictures on sunday
My little candied friends are still doing well, although my camera focus leaves something to be desired 😅
Right now my two Fluval Plant 3.0 (46W) lights are running at 100% Red, 50% Blue, and 70% Cold White, Pure White and Warm White.
Im calling this an average of 70% intensity in my mind. (The 3.0 spectrum is very high on Blue and low on Red, so my settings might bring it a little bit closer to even.)
Based on the Fluval customer support PAR data some helpful ukaps user (whos name escapes me at the moment) posted, these are the numbers for the 46W;
3"=7.62cm 470 PAR
6"=15.24cm 267 PAR
12"=30.48cm 112 PAR
18"=45.72cm 66 PAR
The back of my substrate is about 35 cm from the lights, and the front about 40 cm away. As you can see the numbers drop off the further you get away from the light source, but not in a linear fashion.
Still, I think this kind of PAR data (I dont even know if this was with all the channels at 100%?) will be guesswork at best. The only way to know for sure would be to actually measure my tank with a proper sensor. So I think its acceptable to assume that any numbers worked out from the above data will be an estimate and not exact.
Just to keep things simple for what is already a guesstimate, I averaged the PAR for 30cm and 45cm and got approx 89 PAR for 37cm.
70% of 89 is ~62, so with two lights I
might be sitting somewhere around 124 PAR.
I seem to recall reading somewhere that 100 PAR is a pretty good place to be, so maybe I should go back down to my previous step, ill need to give it some more thought.
Im most tempted to just keep it like it is now and see how it goes.
Photoperiod is still 8 hours with 30 minutes for ramping added before and after. I tried out having 1 hour ramping but it didnt feel quite right to me, so I went back to 30.
If I ever run out of problems I can always mess around with this at a later point, although increasing to 10 hours sounds much nicer than longer ramps, so more hours will probably be higher on the list of shenanigans.
But im not going to do that until I have fixed some other persistent issues.
For a while whenever I was in doubt about something regarding plants I would think, "What would
@dw1305 do?".
I have recently added "What would
@KirstyF do?" to my toolbox.
Im finding this one to be a highly effective shenanigan repellant
First spathe on the smaller/second Crypt yujii opened today 😊 They are initially filled with air when they open underwater
The two main problems in the tank is our good old chlorosis issue, which we are fairly close to solving I feel, and the thread algae issue.
The thread algae issue is a very problematic one. My budget is limited and in order to buy more expensive things for the tank I have relied on sales of shrimp and plants.
The shrimp colony was struggling last year and the population was getting very low, not helped by the scutariella parasite and frequent water changes due to medication. The shrimp are thriving again and the population is recovering very well, but they are not numerous enough that I want to remove any yet, and I still have about 2-3 months of biweekly Praziquantel treatment planned to be absolutely certain the parasite is gone.
Unfortunately, I havent been able to sell any plants lately either, as I dont feel its ok selling plants affected by algae and especially not thread algae of such an annoying kind as the one I have acquired. It sucks throwing out loads of cuttings that are very rare locally and that could help fund my hobby.
I also need to eradicate the algae problem completely before I can send plants to other hobbyists like
@Wookii , im not so keen to give him a disease worse than duckweed and if I do im not sure we will be friends any more 😂
Mid autumn is the perfect time to ship plants, so time is ticking!
The amount of thread algae got pretty wild while I was away on holiday, but it seems to have settled down a little bit now that I am home and doing my regular maintenance.
Contrary to what some might believe, I do in fact manually maintain and look after my tank and dont sit around all day thinking about fertilizer and ratios 🙄
It is in fact possible to have several aspects of plant keeping in mind
at the same time and writing about one thing doesnt mean thats the only thing I think about or do anything about.
I personally dont find pictures of removed algae and pruned plant leaves very interesting to look at, so I dont take photos of that and dont post them to my journal.
But I digress..
In addition to the regular maintenance, for the past two weeks I have added a half dose of Happy-Life Algin Regular which is a Salicylic Acid based treatment.
The half dose seems to be well tolerated by the Thiara sand snails.
Im changing the water once a week currently, but I think I will increase this to twice a week to see if I can get this problem properly beaten with some more elbow grease.
The long drawn out struggle is getting annoying.
Im not able to say yet if the Salicylic Acid is helping or not, so please dont go out and buy it because you see it mentioned here.
I dont have concrete picture proof arranged but I feel like my plants (especially the hungry ones) take a bit of a dip right after water changes and spend some days getting back on their feet.
This suggests to me that maybe the water column is getting too lean after my large water changes (I like to do 80-90% because clean water), and I want to start again to add some ferts back in right after the WC.
I happened to look at the Masterline ferts lineup the other day, and they recommend adding three times the normal dose back into the water right after a larger water change.
This isnt exactly the first time I have read about front loading, but it refreshed it my mind and I think it makes sense based on what im seeing from my plants.
Especially if im going to do water changes twice weekly. Havent decided how much to add yet but ill figure something out.
My Nurri red flowers all the time, but that one is something else! love the colour of the spathe! Now I want one of those lol
Ah how cool! Nuuri has a red spathe or am I misremembering? Please note I now have the correct ID for that crypt in the picture, it was actually Cryptocryne yujii, not Silver Queen. Its possible either the importer or the store got the ID mistaken for my plant. I dont mind though, the yujii is very nice too 😊
Curled top leaves may be a sign of Ca deficiency, but also B, Cu, Mo, Ni. (The latter two I consider very unlikely.)
So in your opinion the downcurled leaves on the Pantanal could be an induced Calcium deficiency, or possibly B or Cu?
I still believe that you should count your Na content as quasi-K, and adjust your ratio (Na+K) : Mg : Ca closer to 1 : 3 : 10 (by weight).
What would getting to this ratio accomplish? Im sorry, maybe you have written it earlier but I have bad memory
Ive tried wrapping my head around this ratio, I assume by weight means mg/l or ppm?
My tap water Na is about 5 ppm. If I were to get my K down to 2 ppm, the value for Na+K would be 7.
I remineralize currently to 10 ppm Mg and 30 ppm Ca.
1 : 3 : 10
7 : 10 : 30
So to compare the ratio I would have to divide all the numbers by 7?
1 : 1.4 : 4.2
To get your ratio for my Na+K value of 7 I would then have to add 21 ppm Mg and 64 ppm Ca, that would work out to a GH of 13.7
😳?
Please correct me if this is the wrong way to work it out?
Im sorry but so far I find the ratio thing quite hard to get on board with, and there are so many people who dont care about this at all that grow very nice plants 🤔
I still dont quite understand how this could be applied to my tank?
