Solufeed tec hardness issue

[megladon]

Around a month ago I've swopped over to solufeed tec for my micro mix, and now lost nearly all my more sensitive plants, namely syngonanthus macrocaulon and ludwigia pantanal. It's a softwater set up that's been running for about a year dkh 1, dgh 6, po4 1, no3 10, co2 injected through reactor, ph drops from 6.9 to 5.7 daily. The only change I've noticed in water chemistry is that my kh now rises from 1dkh to 3dkh by the end of the week before a water change. Is that down to the tec? I can't see why it would from the contents. Dosing is daily through dosing pump. Any idea would be appreciated

 

[X3NiTH]

If you are using an active aquasoil type substrate in the tank then any carbonate hardness that it has absorbed over the year is now being released as the dosed ferts are preferentially being uptaken in place of the carbonates. Once the substrate has fully swapped out the carbonates for the ferts over time then it should stabilise again and stop contributing to increasing dKH.

 

[megladon]

Thanks for the reply, totally hadn't thought of that. Hopefully won't last for too long, as I'm gutted it seems to have wrecked my sensitive plants

 

[X3NiTH]

Once upon a time I did a speed run of this exact situation by accidentally dosing too much micro, I manually overrode the timer on the 1ml/min dosing pump for three minutes to replace the traces after waterchange then immediately got distracted and forgot to turn it off, noticed a few hours later when the tank water looked a bit green and noticed the dosing pump still operating. Performed a huge waterchange but the damage had been done and the active substrate went into a rapid reverse mode shooting the dKH up from 0 to a ridiculous number over a period of a few days, pretty much melted everything, devastating. It took me a while to figure out what had happened.

 

[megladon]

That is very interesting as I've noticed this issues at tge sane time as starting to use the solufeed tec sf and also messing up the dosing resulting in a large overdose of the micros. I've never considered that going over the top with micro would affect tge cec so rapidly, also explains why it hasn't happened in any of my other tanks before now