Tom,
The 125 gallon tank has an old Schultz Aquatic plant soil substrate with a lot of mulm. I was adding 10 ppm NO3 from kno3, 1 ppm po4 from KH2PO4, .2 ppm Fe from CSM+B, and .2 ppm Fe from Flourish, twice per week with 80% water changes. Co2 was high, but the light apparently was rather low and considered low light. The 175W MH pendants were about 16 inches from the water. Now they are about 6 inches from the wter. The green algae on the glass, and the brown algae and black beard algae on the lower leaves suddenly got really bad. I also had a very heavy scum on the surface. At this point in time the water temperature in the tank had risen from about 72degF during the winter to about 82degF now in the summer. I am now running a window AC unit to help lower the temps.
This tank was very heavily planted, but to try to get more light to the bottom of the tank I culled out about half the plants. I will add many more plants. I would like to run this as a higher light tank and therefore have lowered the lights. I guess I have to wait for the plants to start using the nutrients.
Steve Pituch |