I'm guessing you're not keen on eco complete Clive..? ! 🙂
Well, yes, I have used the old style and evaluated it's performance against molar clay and other products. It worked as well as any inert clay substrate but was 5X the price. If you want to pay that kind of money then it would be better to buy an enriched substrate like ADA Aquasoil or The Oliver Knott equivalent because those sediments have an equally high CEC,
plus they are packed with NPK, traces and humus material such as peat. ADA Aquasoil has approximately 100X EI levels of nutrients, so at that price, buying lava is a raw deal.
Actually I had decided to use it myself (the fine type) as I don't want a soil/substrate that I'll need to replace after a few years, but want something with high CEC. And dark in colour, not light or red. A dark akadama or moler clay sounds ok, but they're all too light/red in colour for my taste. Is there a better alternative?
Yes mate I totally agree. Those are all good reasons, but it's always important to have eyes wide open when deciding. I never regretted my use of EcoComplete because I dose the water column. But if someone did not understand that water column dosing or enrichment using Osmocote was important when using this product then they might have issues without realizing the cause. The water column dosing does the bulk of the work, and later, when organic waste accumulated in the sediment, like it always does, the sediment became productive. I only regretted the price and the marketing hyperbola, that's all.
I know Clive is not a fan but so many people have used eco complete with great success it must be reasonably good.
Yes, and this also has the potential for being an optical illusion. When people have success using any product, it's very easy to attribute the success to the product alone instead of attributing success to the sum total of all products being used as well to the techniques and practices that the hobbyists undertakes. There are plenty of failed tanks out there where Aquasoil or EcoComplete is being used. Should the failure be automatically be blamed on the sediment?
Again, review my previous post. It isn't that I'm not a fan of EcoCoplete. It's more that I'm not a fan of propaganda and delusion. Look at the very name of the product. Look at the total horseradish posted on the webpage. The product has the word "complete", yet it's far from being complete because it does not contain NPK. If it was being sold at a lower price more in keeping with it's capabilities then that would be fair. If it doesn't outperform cat litter then it should not be priced 5X higher than cat litter.
Here are plants rooted in EcoComplete, dosed with high level of water column nutrition, strong flow and high CO2. It would be foolish to conclude that EcoComplete alone is responsible for this performance, rather, it would be more accurate to conclude that EcoComplete had no deleterious effects on performance. If you really want to check the performance of any sediment then use RO water (to eliminate tap water nutrients) and do not dose the water column. Turn up the CO2 and lighting and see what happens to the plants. Then you will see the difference between inert substrates and enriched substrates, and you will have a quantifiable assessment of the worth of any given sediment.
Cheers,
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