Re: Slow Cave [Text update]
Yet another text update but I think it's important to add this kind of posts also for anyone interested.
The last two weeks I think I kinda messed this tank, I was aiming to keep only the flow provided by Ecco Pro 300 with lily pipes which didn't work so well, not being a large tank but a long one comparing to the width and height, the flow only reached only a small portion of the back of the tank living the left side and front uncovered, that means half of the tank with poor flow and CO2 distribution, and guess what? BBA and diatoms blooms all over the tank, mainly on rocks, which are so hard to clean especially the ones I can't pull out
As a side note, due to the poor flow most of the plants turned red, stopped growing and I was wondering well do I have enough nitrates? So I constantly was adding TPN+ to the tank until I decided well how about adding the re-circulation pump inside again to see what happens. It did happen that plants turned green after 24 hours and started growing again.
But it wasn't the only change I had to do, I've also switched back to the 8h lighting period 1x24w t5, CO2 2.5h hours before the light resulting in a nice lime green to yellow drop checker.
The moral of this story is get your water distribution and CO2 sorted if things go horribly, I'm saying this like I didn't know it already.
Now I have to wait another week or so, spot dosing the remaining BBA.
I'm the proud owner of a Hydor external heater, kinda hard to place it inside the cabinet but the switch I think was really worth the extra bucks invested, instant heating!.
I also started using Giesemann Midday 6000K, kinda reminds me of Osram 965 6500K but the brightness is much better and I also think it has much less yellow in the spectrum and a little more blue than the other, this means a nice white background and really good plant color rendering, so, I guess that looking just at color temperature when choosing the light is a little bit wrong.
Spectrum comparison:
Osram 965
Giesemann Midday
See ya next week folks,
Mike