The Cookie Crew

Hard to say on the hard/soft front, but the Amano picking at some seemed like it wasn't easy to pluck off as there was some jerk in the leaf with each plucking motion... 

The black stuff is mostly around the edges of many plant leaves in the tank, but not on wood...  I drop the ferts and carbon directly in the path of the outflow from the small Eheim "Pickup 45" internal filter, so that it gets mixed in right from the off... 

As of today, I'm back down to a straight six hours of tank lights and will soon stop the carbon completely again...  probably drop down from the current 1ml per day to 0.5ml per day just for a few more days, then stop... 

Interestingly, the Hygrophila Costata is pretty much done for and whilst it has grown new leaves lately, the last remaining plants just look very poor now and maybe they're just not suited to my tank...  Ironically, they're supposed to be very easy to grow...  I think the plan now is going to be to remove all remaining H.Costata and replace with some new plants... 

Then, I have Pogostemon Helferi (http://tropica.com/en/plants/plantdetails/4499/4499) which should be trikier to grow, and it's growing like bonkers...!!!  It's a funny old game this planted tank malarkey, eh...

One thing that could be at play here is water hardness...

Have you seen:?
https://forums.thinkfish.co.uk/fish-tank-plant-advice/plant-suitability-by-water-hardness/

How do those two plants fit with your water parameters?

Just late last night ordered up a bunch of new plants...  Part of me is loathe to put more plants in the tank while there is this algae issue, although it is hopefully coming under control with changes made now...  But then they do say that more plants in your tank will help to combat algae... 

Anyways, got the following ordered:

Another Echinodorus Amazonicus (love this smaller sized Amazon Sword), another Echinodorus Red Diamond, an Echinodorus Aquartica (new to me), an Alternanthera reineckii 'Pink' (another new one to me) and finally a Ludwigia sp. Mini Super Red... 

The Ludwigia is yet another new one to me, but I do have a couple of other red type Ludwigia plants; Palustris and Repens Rubin...  I did have two Repens Rubin, one crashed & died while the other survived and now flourishes, so the "Mini Super Red" is something of an experiment really... 

Also ordered in a potassium test kit...  Already have kits for Nitrogen and Phosphorus and consequently know my NPK is out of balance, low on N & high on P, but I don't know where my K levels are at and a Potassium deficiency does look like a possible candidate for the stalled growth in the tank which started all of this current problem set...  Will be interesting to find out how those Potassium levels are and complete that NPK picture...

That thread references this site Pierre:

en.aqua-fish.net

Is Kh the calcium hardness bit with Gh being the general hardness (includes all minerals) ? I may be wrong !!!

lolol, just a little observation...  I only started this hobby in January this year, late January at that...!!!  Blimey, the learning curve is steep, eh...!!!  I can't get over some of the chats going on now... 

GH is general hardness, the same thing that water companies give as 'hardness'.
GH is a measure of all the divalent metal ions in the water. In practice, these are mainly calcium with some magnesium and trace amounts of other metal ions eg copper, iron II, manganese, zinc etc - you'll find a lot of these trace metals in plant fertilisers.
Sodium and potassium are not measured by GH because they are monovalent metals. Iron III is trivalent, as is aluminium, so they are not measured by GH either.

Hardness can be expressed in several different units.
Degrees include Clark, French and German, though only German is used in fishkeeping and is often called dH. In fish profiles, degrees, dH or even ^odH are all German degrees.
The other units can cause confusion. These are mg/l calcium (Ca), mg/l calcium oxide (CaO) and mg/l calcium carbonate (CaCO₃). These sound as though they are the amount of the specific chemical in the water but they are not. They are the hardness expressed as what the number would be if all the hardness was just calcium, or all just calcium oxide or all just calcium carbonate. It's just a convenient way of comparing 2 samples of water without saying 'this sample contains x caclium, y magnesium, z copper while that sample contains a calcium, b magnesium, c copper' They use one measurement that includes everything, but they call it all calcium or all calcium oxide or all calcium carbonate.
The amounts of each individual metal are given in water companies' water quality tables.
Ppm is the final unit and this is the same as mg/l calcium carbonate. This is the other unit used in fish keeping.



KH is the amount of buffer* in the water. In practical terms this is carbonate and bicarbonate. KH is rarely given on UK water companies' websites, but if one does give it they call it alkalinity because of the method used to measure it.
As for GH, there are 2 units for KH in fish keeping - dH and ppm. Where water companies do give KH (alkalinity), they most likely use the unit mg/l calcium carbonate. As for GH this is not the amount of calcium carbonate in the water but the figure it would be if all the carbonate and bicarbonate was calcium carbonate. In reality, it will be a mixture of calcium, magnesium and trace metal carbonates and bicarbonates.

* A buffer is simply a chemical dissolved in water which stops the pH changing.




The source of this information is my younger son who worked as an analyst for a water testing company a few years ago.

One footnote to add for anybody that is following the story of what's happening with this tank:  I initially scooped out a whole lot of the floating Amazon Frogbit, on the grounds that they're acknowledged as being nitrogen greedy and having such low nitrogen levels in the tank...  I've now reversed that and am letting it re-populate, which is because I'm now thinking that the shade it provides is a greater advantage when it comes to algae than the downside of it being nitrogen greedy... 

It's just the darndest thing, but this BBA breakout is definitely backing right off now...!!! 

Lord knows exactly what has caused the turn around but the two most likely candidates are the reduced lighting period and/or the reduced fertilisers/carbon...  Highly likely to be a combination of the two I would imagine...?

Fish keeping...  huh, the more you learn, the less you know...!!!   

I think your also achieving that troublesome 'balance' of co2 lighting and ferts... glad to hear things are on the up!