Seattle_Aquarist

I agree with HeyPK, what you are seeing is probably the supersaturated oxygen and nitrogen being released from the water that you added.

I found that my plants started gassing much better (and growing much better) when I started using a drop checker with a 4 KH solution to adjust the amount of CO2 that I was injecting. I read about it here on APC and I worked for me.

Patchworks

Well guys, today was very enlightening. I went to our local Planted Aquarium group meet today and basically found out a few problem with my tank.

Problem #1
I have a 150 gallon and I only have 1 pump with the intake on one end of the tank and the output on the other end (6 Feet of water). I'm running an in-line CO2 Reactor. Basically what I was told is the CO2 is not making to the whole tank evenly and is dissipating before it reaches the other side of the tank.

I'm told that I should get another filter and criss-cross them and put CO2 Reactors on both so I get a more even pattern of CO2 distrubution.

Problem #2
I have very high KH in my water 10 to 12KH. From what I've read the higher the KH the harder plants absorb nutrients like CO2 and ferts.

So these are the 2 problems I've heard I need to solve to get better results!! Does this make sense?

g

HeyPK

With CO2 fertilizing you can solve the first problem. Just get the pH down to 6 to 6.5 by adjusting the amount of CO2 being added. Getting the pH down solves the second problem pretty much, also. High pHs make it hard for the plants to get iron and phosphate because these tend to precipitate out at high pHs. High pH also reduces the solubility of calcium if you are expecting to get your calcium from dolomite or shells.

Patchworks

Well, apparently I found another problem in my tank. I didn't dawn on me until a few days ago, but I had my CO2 Monitor right next to my CO2 output. Basically since the CO2 on that side of the tank is high, it was kicking my CO2 off prematurely. Solution was to move the CO2 Monitor probe to the opposite side of the tank.

g