Quote:
Originally Posted by eemeli  Given that the only way to keep an aquarium that I've now experience with gives me results like these, I have a really hard time understanding regimes that require constantly changing the water and otherwise messing with the ecosystem. Also, as my wife puts it, having gotten used to this feature of our living room for a few months now, most aquariums look really bare -- where are all the plants? |
Yes! When I first got into plants, of course they all started wilting. Following the advice on a few forums, I soon had T5HO lights, injected CO2 and plenty of ferts. I had unreal plant growth, but I got tired of trimming tanks 2x per week!! I discovered the NPT/El Natural/Walstad/Dutch/old-Innes "balanced aquarium" method and I knew it was for me. I have 5 aquariums now - 3 true NPT tanks and 2 that I will call semi-NPT and I love it. I am very busy - I love my aquariums, but I don't have time to devote 10 hours/week to aquarium maintenance.
The only thing I miss from the high tech CO2 days is being able to have enough plants to decide on Monday I wanted to set up a new tank and having enough outgrowth by Thursday or Friday to fully plant a new tank. Things go much slower in the NPT world, but I like it.