[Riona]

I've been doing more reading and re-organizing and have gotten to where when we move later this year I'll only have 2 tanks to move, my saltwater one and my 20 gallon(now housing both of my bettas) On my old goldfish tank(29 gallons) I had a 65 watt PC light. If I'm JUST using excel(and dry ferts), would that be too much light? I don't have the money to do pressurised CO2, and I don't know if I have the technical know-how to do DIY properly. If it is, I'll just stick to buying a T5 for the planted tank. Thank you

 

[freydo]

if you have sufficient plants in the tank, and providing the proper amounts of nutrients for your plants, the amount of lighting will be okay. it is a bit high, so you will need to be on top of things.

if pressurized is not in the budget for now, do give the DIY write ups a read. it's really not that difficult, because going with excel is not very cost effective in the long run for a carbon source.

just ask us questions, people are more than glad to help

 

[Riona]

The excel seems okay to me. I'll be using less than 2L a year, and since I don't know of any way to put a canister on 10 gallons(tank is split in half) and am probably just going to be using a couple of tiny HOBs so using CO2(unless I can find a nice powerhead) would kinda defeat the purpose. I'm going to get some dry fertilizers to use though, so once I get the hang of those down it should work!

If I stick more to faster growing stem plants(was planning on a lot of stems anyway, since the tank is not really long with it being divided) would that help? I was going to get some myrio, that is supposed to be quick growing, and I have some water sprite that I could plant a sprig or two of in one(it's kinda wide!) Should I get some floating plants too? That would at least cut down on the amount of light getting into the plants a bit and it would be easy enough to pull out when I get too much.

Thank you

 

[freydo]

for your tank size, i would leave out the floating plants, as they will just end up taking away the needed light from the other plants.

good luck and post some pics of your progress

 

[Riona]

What about if I was to put the same fixture onto a 29 gallon tank? I just found out that the lights I was going to get for my reef tank are not going to be strong enough, and I really can't afford better than those, so I'm most likely going to put my reef tank into my 20 gallon instead of the 29. I know it would be good enough for low-medium light plants, but how good is it really for a tank that size?