Mix different NPK Fertilizers?

[Dominik_K]

Hi,

in my future tank, I would like to use my TNC Complete fertilizer with relatively low doses (0.8 to 1.5 ml per Day). With this doses, potassium is pretty rare in TNC Complete.

This is why I thought about preparing 2 different fertilizers on Waterchangeday for the complete week, the TNC Complete and a dedicated potassium fertilizer with some RO water. Will this do any harm to the fertilizers if they stay in a thin solution for the duration of a week?

 

[ceg4048]

Hello,
TNC Complete has more than enough Potassium. I see no point in adding more K as you will never see any difference in performance. If you wanted to add more K then just add more TNC Complete. Why add more complication?

Cheers,

 

[Dominik_K]

Hi,

thanks for your reply. The thought process behind this is simple: Since I am going to plant with a lot of small, slow growing plants, I don't want to dose with hight doses to avoid problems. And if one reads up about leaner methods, PPS Pro and the ADA System show up. Those have N-P-K-Ratios of 1-0.1-1.3 (PPS Pro) and 1-0.7-4 (ADA). TNC Complete provides a ratio of 1-0.1-0.8. All those values are rounded and taken from this site. A lack of potassium is leading to a lot of trouble, one of those might be bad uptake of other nutrients. Thats why I would prefer to have some more. And the ratios of leaner dosing systems seems to support my assumtion.

 

[dw1305]

Hi all,
You can add potassium as a separate potassium salt, potassium chloride (KCl) is probably the cheapest option, you should be able to buy it as "sodium free salt". It will contain a very small amount of magnesium carbonate (MgCO3) as a desiccant.

cheers Darrel

 

[ceg4048]

Hi,

thanks for your reply. The thought process behind this is simple: Since I am going to plant with a lot of small, slow growing plants, I don't want to dose with hight doses to avoid problems. And if one reads up about leaner methods, PPS Pro and the ADA System show up. Those have N-P-K-Ratios of 1-0.1-1.3 (PPS Pro) and 1-0.7-4 (ADA). TNC Complete provides a ratio of 1-0.1-0.8. All those values are rounded and taken from this site. A lack of potassium is leading to a lot of trouble, one of those might be bad uptake of other nutrients. Thats why I would prefer to have some more. And the ratios of leaner dosing systems seems to support my assumtion.

Yes, I'm familiar with these leaner methods and hobbyists using these methods have just as many problems as everyone else.
These techniques were developed and are born out of the fear of nutrients.
The ratios they cling to are completely irrelevant and have zero impact on plant growth and performance.
The ratios are often based on Redfield's Ratio which is a study of the molecular content of plants and plankton.
It is a waste of energy to attempt to reproduce those values because you can never measure them accurately and plants do not uptake nutrients in that ratio anyway. The more nutrition you feed the more the plants will uptake. So the uptake ratio has nothing to do with the molecular ratio. All these ideas of maintaining ratios are flawed and as I mentioned, unnecessarily complicates the nutritional program. It's best to keep things as simple as possible because the added complication will not yield any value at all.

Cheers,