dosing help needed

My advice would depend on what plants in what amounts you have in the aquarium. Bear in mind my advice is no substitute for your own trial and error method which you learn from 'reading' the plants.

If this is a new set up, I would decrease the lighting period somewhat for the first month or so.

10 ppm. nitrates

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Do you mean you have 10ppm nitrates out of the tap? If that is the case, then you probably do not need to add much more. If you do not have nitrates in your tap water, then dose enough KNO3 to give you about 10ppm. Dosing dry might be more convenient - though I dose from a bottle of home-made KNO3 solution made by disolving 2 tablespoons of KNO3 in 250mls of water. If it is indeed 10ppm nitrate out of the tap, you might consider adding some PO4 to keep the nitrates and phosphates in balance (10:1). I am not familiar with Kent phosphate, but you could use the Fertilator to calculate an amount sufficient to give, say, 1-2ppm PO4 level and dose that once a week. You could halve the dosage amount and dose twice a week too.

I am not familiar with Seachem potassium either, but you could dose that to give a similar amount of K to the amount of KNO3 you are also dosing.

As for traces and iron, that depends on your plant types. Over to someone else on that.

Andrew Cribb

OK, that explains it.

You will have to dose some nitrates. But recently I found it useful to dose an equal amount of K2SO4 (potassium sulphate from Greg Watson) and the plants responded well.

From your plant list, it seems you have the aquarium well-planted.

I have difficulty growing Ludwigia repens in NYC's soft water. Adding the extra K2SO4 certainly helped increase the NO3 uptake. But as that happens, it might put something else out of balance - for instance, it might be useful to increase iron and traces now....

The ADA line of fertilizers approaches aquarium garden fertilizing from a 1, 2, 3 point of view. I am only just beginning to understand some of the wisdom behind that. 1 = the beginning; 2 = growing in; 3 = mature maintenance.

DIY fertilizing seems to require learning those principles somehow.

Andrew Cribb