h4hapoo
New Member
also i have the 2 mesh bags with ceramics in alishas filter it has only been in 22 days so i doubt all the good bacs have grown do you think they have? think it might be a good idea to add a bag to cassidy's tank?
Fishless Cycle Help Ph Dropping Should I Do Water Change?
- Thread starter h4hapoo
- Start date
waterdrop
Enthusiastic "Re-Beginner"
OK, 4 or 5 days only before you are stalling again is just a little to much of a bother in my opinion. Clearly you've probably got low KH and I think its now reasonable to get a little tougher with it.
This is the tank that's fishless cycling and the pH is dropping almost to 6.2 in 4 to 5 days (cassidy's I think, right?) Anyway my suggestion is only for a fishless cycling tank:
Let's put some tablespoons of pure kitchen baking soda (sodium bicarbonate or "bicarb" as we call it) in there. Lets put 1 tablespoon for every 50 liters (you can use the aquarium calculator to help if needed) and see how this raises your pH.
The way I like to do it is to do a 90% water change with gravel clean and then recharge with ammonia and add the baking soda to the fresh new water, but it doesn't have to start like that, you can just measure in the baking soda if you want, especially if its not a convenient weekend etc.
~~waterdrop~~
ps. make sure its baking soda, not baking powder
This is the tank that's fishless cycling and the pH is dropping almost to 6.2 in 4 to 5 days (cassidy's I think, right?) Anyway my suggestion is only for a fishless cycling tank:
Let's put some tablespoons of pure kitchen baking soda (sodium bicarbonate or "bicarb" as we call it) in there. Lets put 1 tablespoon for every 50 liters (you can use the aquarium calculator to help if needed) and see how this raises your pH.
The way I like to do it is to do a 90% water change with gravel clean and then recharge with ammonia and add the baking soda to the fresh new water, but it doesn't have to start like that, you can just measure in the baking soda if you want, especially if its not a convenient weekend etc.
~~waterdrop~~
ps. make sure its baking soda, not baking powder
h4hapoo
New Member
tougher it is!!! i went to grocery store and got a new box of baking SODA not powder will do another water change tonight and add baking soda! Yes this is Cassidy's tank and is fishless cycling! should i start testing for kh and other things? Alisha's tank is doing great the only issue with that is i dont think the filter moves water around enough and plants are not thriving! but that will be a different post!
THANK YOU SOOOO much for your help you are great! hows Olivers basketball going?
THANK YOU SOOOO much for your help you are great! hows Olivers basketball going?
waterdrop
Enthusiastic "Re-Beginner"
Great, it will be fun to see how your baking soda proceeds. Do you already own a liquid KH kit? You don't really -have- to fool with it. I'm just always so fascinated with this stuff that I can't resist. I use the TetraTest KH kit but there's also the API GH/KH kit and any number of others. Its not a difficult type of test to create so I've never heard of complaints about any of the different brands. What KH teaches you about and tells you is actually the total alkalinity, which in the case of aquariums is a close analogue of Carbonate Hardness, which is what KH stands for. It serves as a "leading indicator" of what will happen to pH in the future if things keep going as they are. That's because its measuring the buffer available for free H+ ions. When KH gets down to zero, for instance, that means no more buffer, which means nothing to neutralize those H+ ions, which means if the H+ ions keep getting produced then the solution will get more acid and the pH number will go down to indicate this. But you probably remember all that from high school chem, right, lol? As a practical matter, KH testing allows you to get the feel for the optimal time to add more baking soda to keep things going smoothly along, rather than reacting to a pH drop, which is a little late, not that it makes all that much difference.
Basketball camp at the high school is over (although as usual, Chapel Hill is swarming with tarheel wannabes in baby blue) and Oliver is back to heavier long course swimming practices and watching home run derbys on tv with his buddies. His sword plant sprouted another new leaf yesterday and is an awesome plant, so says his dad, waterdrop, who is trying to figure out who to trust the fertilizer regimes to during vacation!
~~waterdrop~~
Basketball camp at the high school is over (although as usual, Chapel Hill is swarming with tarheel wannabes in baby blue) and Oliver is back to heavier long course swimming practices and watching home run derbys on tv with his buddies. His sword plant sprouted another new leaf yesterday and is an awesome plant, so says his dad, waterdrop, who is trying to figure out who to trust the fertilizer regimes to during vacation!
~~waterdrop~~
h4hapoo
New Member
Did 90% water change last night topped ammonia up and added 1 tablesspoon plus 1 teapoon (3 teaspoons=a tablespoon) So my levels this morning where
PH 8
Ammonia 0
Nitrite 0-.25
My levels tonight
PH 8
Ammonia 0
Nitrite 0 -.25
So thats looking good! ammonia is dropping to 0 in 12hours again YIPPPIIIIIEEEEE
Nitrites doesn't want to go that one little half step to 0 but still looks good to me!!! Progress is progress i will take it!
I don not have a kh kit but was thinking of getting one they are cheap enough!! Thanks for the kh lesson umm yeah i do not remember that from high school!!! So does kh have anything to do with plants? mine are not doing well in alisha's tank. what type of fertilizer are you using?
gotta love the wanna bes! its great that you have so many things for kids there! we are fairly limited! Oliver keeps you on the go huh? lol i have the Thursday to Sunday off so i am looking forward to some quality and quantity time with my girls! planning to take them to Boston on Friday! Tomorrow is Harry Potter which is a surprise so i dont have to hear them ask a zillion more questions and hound me is it time yet! Is his sword a new plant? yeah must be hard trying to find someone you can trust with your tanks! Good luck! When do you go on vacation?
PH 8
Ammonia 0
Nitrite 0-.25
My levels tonight
PH 8
Ammonia 0
Nitrite 0 -.25
So thats looking good! ammonia is dropping to 0 in 12hours again YIPPPIIIIIEEEEE
Nitrites doesn't want to go that one little half step to 0 but still looks good to me!!! Progress is progress i will take it!
I don not have a kh kit but was thinking of getting one they are cheap enough!! Thanks for the kh lesson umm yeah i do not remember that from high school!!! So does kh have anything to do with plants? mine are not doing well in alisha's tank. what type of fertilizer are you using?
gotta love the wanna bes! its great that you have so many things for kids there! we are fairly limited! Oliver keeps you on the go huh? lol i have the Thursday to Sunday off so i am looking forward to some quality and quantity time with my girls! planning to take them to Boston on Friday! Tomorrow is Harry Potter which is a surprise so i dont have to hear them ask a zillion more questions and hound me is it time yet! Is his sword a new plant? yeah must be hard trying to find someone you can trust with your tanks! Good luck! When do you go on vacation?
waterdrop
Enthusiastic "Re-Beginner"
Yes,lol, Oliver keeps me on the go. At 6:30am I was coming -back- from dropping him on the other side of town for the morning swim workout. The timer hasn't even turned on his tank lights when he leaves!
That's an excellent reaction to the water change and ammonia,baking soda recharge, definately sounds like progress. I'd hold out for 30 days before moving one of the mesh bags of ceramics.
Everybody's fertilizer situation is different, often based on location to begin with. There's the cheapest and best in many ways of ordering in dry powders and mixing up your own. I haven't done that yet but hope to before long. Then there's the UK lucky ducks who can just order up TPN+ and have more or less all their macros and micros taken care of in one fell swoop. Then there's the "black sheep nutritent," the troublemaker lol, good old carbon! By far the jewel in the crown dosing is carbon and getting it to the plants via CO2 has enormous advantages but is both expensive and difficult in some ways.
There are currently three broad categories of carbon delivery methods as far as I know. The first and best is via a pressurized tank with a bunch of gear that would make a scuba diver proud and will set you back anywhere from a couple hundred to almost a thousand. The second is roughly termed DIY carbon and is mostly various methods of fermenting sugar in bottles and attempting to deliver CO2 bubbles underwater as long as possible. Its a poor second to pressurized in the long run. The third method is what I do, liquid carbon.. its not as good as pressurized either as its not really CO2 but a complicated organic that's supposed to be an intermediate with C that the plant can use, but in practice its not as universally good and its expensive. In the USA the only liquid carbon I know of is Seachem Flourish Excel. In the UK they can't find that as easily I don't think but instead they have two choices in EasyCarbo and another that a LFS distributor makes I think. The excel makes a huge difference though.
Getting back to the non-carbon ferts, the best thing to understand from the outset is that its better to think of them in terms of the 17 or so elements of the periodic table that plants are composed of and, not surprisingly, need! They are divided into "macronutrients" and "micronutrients" based on a fairly major division in quantity of substance needed, there being three (Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium, the famous "NPK" of gardening) that are like the "food" of plants. By contrast, the other dozen or so elements are needed in relatively tiny but necessary amounts and thus are like the "vitamins" that plants need, well I suppose "minerals" might be a better analogy to the human stuff, lol.
So what the game boils down to is a giant "matchup" of two long lists of nutrients and numbers. On the one side you're faced with some master lists of amounts/percentages needed for the tank (these are provided in documents here on TFF I believe, speaking off the top of my head this morning) and then on the other side you are faced with a bunch of random nutty numbers off the backs of plant food product bottles or web sites of the product. The products don't usually match well with what's needed (despite trumpeting till they're blue in the face that they do of course, just like the rest of our LFS experiences except maybe fish catching nets, lol!) So, does this make sense? What you often end up doing with bottle products is buying several and concocting little dosing amounts of each on different days in order to fabricate the correct fertilization of underwater plants.
Now, I personally, currently, subscribe to an attempt to roughly create a slight overdose of all the non-carbon nutrients during the week and then assume that my weekly water change pulls out the excess, at which point of course the nutrients will continue to come back in because I dose daily (different mixes on different days.) To answer your question, I currenty use 4 different bottles of Seachem Flourish, but this was because I happened to pick up a ton of them when a store was having a going out of business sale. They are divided into N, P, K individual bottles and then a "general" Flourish bottle that has all the micronutrients plus smaller amounts of the those same macronutrients. I do not necessarily recommend you try to copy me at all as I'm still a lousy beginner at plants and haven't even graduated into "planted tank kindergarden" yet,lol. (Although Oliver's swordplant -is- gorgeous and at least the set of plants we have now are alive and growing!)
The "actions" you take to do plants correctly can be very easy ultimately. In my opinion, having the knowledge to anticipate and do the right things for them is a skill that takes some time and attention. Definately a really cool part of the hobby!
~~waterdrop~~
That's an excellent reaction to the water change and ammonia,baking soda recharge, definately sounds like progress. I'd hold out for 30 days before moving one of the mesh bags of ceramics.
Everybody's fertilizer situation is different, often based on location to begin with. There's the cheapest and best in many ways of ordering in dry powders and mixing up your own. I haven't done that yet but hope to before long. Then there's the UK lucky ducks who can just order up TPN+ and have more or less all their macros and micros taken care of in one fell swoop. Then there's the "black sheep nutritent," the troublemaker lol, good old carbon! By far the jewel in the crown dosing is carbon and getting it to the plants via CO2 has enormous advantages but is both expensive and difficult in some ways.
There are currently three broad categories of carbon delivery methods as far as I know. The first and best is via a pressurized tank with a bunch of gear that would make a scuba diver proud and will set you back anywhere from a couple hundred to almost a thousand. The second is roughly termed DIY carbon and is mostly various methods of fermenting sugar in bottles and attempting to deliver CO2 bubbles underwater as long as possible. Its a poor second to pressurized in the long run. The third method is what I do, liquid carbon.. its not as good as pressurized either as its not really CO2 but a complicated organic that's supposed to be an intermediate with C that the plant can use, but in practice its not as universally good and its expensive. In the USA the only liquid carbon I know of is Seachem Flourish Excel. In the UK they can't find that as easily I don't think but instead they have two choices in EasyCarbo and another that a LFS distributor makes I think. The excel makes a huge difference though.
Getting back to the non-carbon ferts, the best thing to understand from the outset is that its better to think of them in terms of the 17 or so elements of the periodic table that plants are composed of and, not surprisingly, need! They are divided into "macronutrients" and "micronutrients" based on a fairly major division in quantity of substance needed, there being three (Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium, the famous "NPK" of gardening) that are like the "food" of plants. By contrast, the other dozen or so elements are needed in relatively tiny but necessary amounts and thus are like the "vitamins" that plants need, well I suppose "minerals" might be a better analogy to the human stuff, lol.
So what the game boils down to is a giant "matchup" of two long lists of nutrients and numbers. On the one side you're faced with some master lists of amounts/percentages needed for the tank (these are provided in documents here on TFF I believe, speaking off the top of my head this morning) and then on the other side you are faced with a bunch of random nutty numbers off the backs of plant food product bottles or web sites of the product. The products don't usually match well with what's needed (despite trumpeting till they're blue in the face that they do of course, just like the rest of our LFS experiences except maybe fish catching nets, lol!) So, does this make sense? What you often end up doing with bottle products is buying several and concocting little dosing amounts of each on different days in order to fabricate the correct fertilization of underwater plants.
Now, I personally, currently, subscribe to an attempt to roughly create a slight overdose of all the non-carbon nutrients during the week and then assume that my weekly water change pulls out the excess, at which point of course the nutrients will continue to come back in because I dose daily (different mixes on different days.) To answer your question, I currenty use 4 different bottles of Seachem Flourish, but this was because I happened to pick up a ton of them when a store was having a going out of business sale. They are divided into N, P, K individual bottles and then a "general" Flourish bottle that has all the micronutrients plus smaller amounts of the those same macronutrients. I do not necessarily recommend you try to copy me at all as I'm still a lousy beginner at plants and haven't even graduated into "planted tank kindergarden" yet,lol. (Although Oliver's swordplant -is- gorgeous and at least the set of plants we have now are alive and growing!)
The "actions" you take to do plants correctly can be very easy ultimately. In my opinion, having the knowledge to anticipate and do the right things for them is a skill that takes some time and attention. Definately a really cool part of the hobby!
~~waterdrop~~
h4hapoo
New Member
wow i was going through tff withdrawl!! things have been hectic! Took the girls to boston yesterday went to museum of science and took the train in which they loved (personally i love driving myself places!) 630am is very early for a practice! You must get exhausted! But then again when it comes to our children exhaustion is part of the deal, its all worth it in the long run (which sometimes i have to remind myself when i get worn out)! My girls are planning on so many things this coming school year that i think i will have to have a 100 gallon gas tank put outside just to save me time of going to fill up my car!
I figured i would want to wait about a month to move ceramic bags but thought i would ask the expert! Currently cassidy's tank is holding its ph at 8 for a day it went up to 8.2 which was weird but hey i am not complaining! My ammonia was doing great and i made the mistake of almost forgetting to add ammonia and didnt end up adding it until after 1am (usually add at 8) so i think it slows processing down a bit.
todays readings are:
AM--PH 8
Ammonia 1
Nitrite 0.-0.25 (Still)
PM--PH 8
Ammonia 1
Nitrite 0.-0.25 (just wont budge)
today is day 24 so i dont think i am doing to bad i still have patience so much so i am ready for my own tank!!! yes i so believe i am official addicted!! there will be a post soon on questions for that!
Thank you for all the info on plants and fert! i think i might reread it again! I noticed today that one of alisha's plants has gotten a lot more roots so hopefully that is a good sign!
I will update sunday (tomorrow with new stats!) thank you again for all your great help and info!
I figured i would want to wait about a month to move ceramic bags but thought i would ask the expert! Currently cassidy's tank is holding its ph at 8 for a day it went up to 8.2 which was weird but hey i am not complaining! My ammonia was doing great and i made the mistake of almost forgetting to add ammonia and didnt end up adding it until after 1am (usually add at 8) so i think it slows processing down a bit.
todays readings are:
AM--PH 8
Ammonia 1
Nitrite 0.-0.25 (Still)
PM--PH 8
Ammonia 1
Nitrite 0.-0.25 (just wont budge)
today is day 24 so i dont think i am doing to bad i still have patience so much so i am ready for my own tank!!! yes i so believe i am official addicted!! there will be a post soon on questions for that!
Thank you for all the info on plants and fert! i think i might reread it again! I noticed today that one of alisha's plants has gotten a lot more roots so hopefully that is a good sign!
I will update sunday (tomorrow with new stats!) thank you again for all your great help and info!
waterdrop
Enthusiastic "Re-Beginner"
So we're still waiting for nitrites to head up for a nitrite spike, correct?
Whew! Summer swim league champs today, 6am to 6pm of solid work for my other half, its like thowing a party for several thousand people except tall the computers and touchpads and scoreboard and PA systems have to be working and hundreds of volunteers managed, exhaustion!
~~waterdrop~~
Whew! Summer swim league champs today, 6am to 6pm of solid work for my other half, its like thowing a party for several thousand people except tall the computers and touchpads and scoreboard and PA systems have to be working and hundreds of volunteers managed, exhaustion!
~~waterdrop~~
h4hapoo
New Member
GOOD MORNING!! 
no we already had the spike!!! that had started at about day 5 and started to drop at about day 12! my readings this morning are:
PH 8
Ammonia .5 (improvement)
Nitrite .0-.25 (it is almost 0 color is so much closer to 0 then to .25)
12 hours of pure joy it sounds like!! Let me know how Oliver makes out! I wish we had swim teams here it would be something my oldest would enjoy! She's my book lover and can be hard to find things to make her move! Thank god for dance and music! Actually i have seen her chance her little sister out of her room on more then one occasion so i think she might have made that a sport!
Will update later on pm stats!!
no we already had the spike!!! that had started at about day 5 and started to drop at about day 12! my readings this morning are:
PH 8
Ammonia .5 (improvement)
Nitrite .0-.25 (it is almost 0 color is so much closer to 0 then to .25)
12 hours of pure joy it sounds like!! Let me know how Oliver makes out! I wish we had swim teams here it would be something my oldest would enjoy! She's my book lover and can be hard to find things to make her move! Thank god for dance and music! Actually i have seen her chance her little sister out of her room on more then one occasion so i think she might have made that a sport!
Will update later on pm stats!!
h4hapoo
New Member
YIPPEEEE
Ph8
Ammonia 0
Nitrite 0
Ph8
Ammonia 0
Nitrite 0
waterdrop
Enthusiastic "Re-Beginner"
Congrats!
Was this a 12 or 24 later test?
~~wd~~
Was this a 12 or 24 later test?
~~wd~~
h4hapoo
New Member
That was the 24 hour but it was better then the day before, it wouldnt even hit 0! Nitrites at 0 is what really made me smile because it was staying in between 0-.25. But i didn't see 0 in the ammonia today only .25! but thats ok i can handle that,....for now!
AM reading (was done at about 10 hours instead of 12 due to work):
PH 8
Ammonia 1
Nitrite 0
PM reading This is when i add ammonia:
PH 8
Ammonia .25
Nitrite 0
Nitrate 40
How did oliver make out this weekend? Or better yet did your other half drop from exhaustion?
AM reading (was done at about 10 hours instead of 12 due to work):
PH 8
Ammonia 1
Nitrite 0
PM reading This is when i add ammonia:
PH 8
Ammonia .25
Nitrite 0
Nitrate 40
How did oliver make out this weekend? Or better yet did your other half drop from exhaustion?
waterdrop
Enthusiastic "Re-Beginner"
OK, great! Now, during the second half of cycling its just going to be a matter of chasing down double zeros first at "24 hours after the ammonia add" and then at "12 hours after the ammonia add." When you post up a set of results the "result-set" should be identified as such. If we had lowered the concentration of your ammonia additions, you should be making sure to work them slowly back up to 5ppm (that is, if you were adding at only 3ppm or such during the nitrite spike phase.) Let us know how it goes.
Lol, beginning to recover from the weekend now, it was a storm. Oliver had a bunch of good results but the best was coming from behind to edge "the big kid" in the final yards of the last lap of the butterfly to the screams of our team and to win first overall (I guess each event has 30 to 50 competitors) and get tons of people coming up to me the rest of the day to say "did you see that?" Definately one to remember for us. Hey, have you -ever- started to get some summer sunshine up there yet? ...surely... (actually I'll bet Aug/Sept will probably be nicer up there as we'll start to finally get too hot down here, already been pretty steamy here)
~~waterdrop~~
Lol, beginning to recover from the weekend now, it was a storm. Oliver had a bunch of good results but the best was coming from behind to edge "the big kid" in the final yards of the last lap of the butterfly to the screams of our team and to win first overall (I guess each event has 30 to 50 competitors) and get tons of people coming up to me the rest of the day to say "did you see that?" Definately one to remember for us. Hey, have you -ever- started to get some summer sunshine up there yet? ...surely... (actually I'll bet Aug/Sept will probably be nicer up there as we'll start to finally get too hot down here, already been pretty steamy here)
~~waterdrop~~
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