disclaimer: this is not aimed at anyone in particular. just at the thread in general.
Happi does say that N should be higher than K, but he also says ratios are important, he has said this numerous times, if you have better growth with higher K, say you have high fish load, rich substrate or something providing extra N then dose more K if you'd like. He has repeated this to me numerous times, he even recommended me to try higher K like macek. if EI isn't set in stone we can say the same about happis dosing. Happi says elevated K is unlikely to cause any issues, but he doesn;t see any need for it, why add unnecesarry ferts/tds if you know what you're doing. (this does not apply to beginners starting off with EI)
If you look at maceks tanks you will see he has very good plant growth across a huge variety of species., he doesn;t discount the effect of micro-tox, K-Mg antagonism, B-Ca balance etc. I think there's a reason he's able to grow a huge variety of plants from so called nutrient hogs to plants that prefer a leaner collumn all in very good condition at the same time. Maceks micros were based off of happis recipe with a few tweaks such as chelators. Happi encourages modifications of his recipes and continues to do so, both in private and on the forum, and I don't see anyone claiming anywhere that these ratios or formulas are "magic". Infact I notice quite the opposite, like I said before he encourages people to try different doses to find the right amount as he has done with me.
LOL see this is why it's so confusing. This is my friends Sudipta's tank. Has nothing to do with the Happi method.
but they still believe in many of the same fundamentals.
1. urea/nh4 source.
sudipta uses root tabs every few months that should contain ammonnia/urea . nutrient rich substrate containing nh4.
happi uses ammonia containing salts to fertilise the water collumn and rich substrate as well.
2. low co2.
sudipta doesn't run co2.
happi has ran his tanks at 10-15ppm co2 with high light
3. high light
sudipta uses chihiros fixtures over 100 par at substrate.
happi uses t5 or led fixtures with high par at substrate, around 100 par.
4. don't disturb substrate often
sudipta very rarely uproots plants or disturbs substrate.
happi discourages substrate disturbance as he found it can cause issues in lean tanks. this is to do with influx of N, co2 messed up yahda yahda yahda.
5. softwater (specifically referring to kh here)
sudipta runs his tanks with very little kh, this is to promote uptake of nutrients such as Fe which are negatively affected by higher co3. and also maximise available co2.
happi runs his tank with very little kh, most of the time, none. this is again, to maximise uptake of what little nutrients he is dosing.
now here is where their ideas get a bit different, but I think I know why.
sudipta uses higher gh, this could be because thrive contains higher traces.
thrive shrimp adds roughly 4ppm No3 for every 10ppm K. and 0.8ppm fe for 10ppm K ( let me know if i've gone horribly wrong please!) and sudipta has a gh of roughly 6.
while I couldn't find the exact amount he is dosing, I doubt it is more than the above, and if he were to tweak the dosing and lower gh, I'm sure he could get away with much less Fe. Sudipta uses high gh, this is probably helping him with the high Fe and subsequent levels of traces. Happi doses much much much less micros, some times less than 0.05ppm Fe weekly, but he also has very low gh as well, often going under 1dgh.
now, I'd say that their tank methods are pretty similar, wouldn't you say so too? like it has beenn repeated countless times in this thread, dosing is a small piece of the vast puzzle that is our planted aquariums.
