Being relatively new to high tech planted tanks I've learned a lot from people on here about how to grow plants successfully. But the most important lesson wasn't ferts or the fact that instead of trying to strip most of the P04 out of the water, "important in reef keeping," that I actually needed some for healthy plants. It was positioning the diffuser and the powerhead. At first I had the diffuser towards the back of the tank so it was out of the way hidden behind some hardscape and the powerhead in the middle on the opposite side. Plants grew ok, non died but it was slow going and no pearling.
I read posts and looked at pictures of some stunning planted tanks on here and saw that the many if not all had the diffuser and lily pipe to the front so I decided to move the diffuser and powerhead to the front of the tank away from the scape which seemed counter intuitive. First thing I noticed when the C02 came on was was that the bubbles were being driven almost horizontally along the substrate by the flow from the powerhead and in a couple of days the plants started to pearl. This could also have been due to putting a Vivid 2 on the tank as well.
The lesson for me was that although I was injecting quite a lot of C02 most of it was being wasted by not circulating around the tank. Now the problem is that the plants have gone ape and I'm going to have to learn pretty quickly how to cut them back aesthetically and without killing them. 🙂
Just wanted to share my experience to say thanks.
I read posts and looked at pictures of some stunning planted tanks on here and saw that the many if not all had the diffuser and lily pipe to the front so I decided to move the diffuser and powerhead to the front of the tank away from the scape which seemed counter intuitive. First thing I noticed when the C02 came on was was that the bubbles were being driven almost horizontally along the substrate by the flow from the powerhead and in a couple of days the plants started to pearl. This could also have been due to putting a Vivid 2 on the tank as well.
The lesson for me was that although I was injecting quite a lot of C02 most of it was being wasted by not circulating around the tank. Now the problem is that the plants have gone ape and I'm going to have to learn pretty quickly how to cut them back aesthetically and without killing them. 🙂
Just wanted to share my experience to say thanks.