[plant101]

To all plant fanatics,
I have a 55 gallon fish tank with a few rummy nose tetras, cory cats, shrimp, and neon tetras. I have roughly 5 jungle vals, amazon sword, ozelot sword, and a few other plants of which i do not know. I use FLourish excel, complete supplement, iron, and trace I se the trace and excel once a week, and the iron on complete oonce a month. My water is 6.6 ph, soft, 0 nitrite, 0 ammonia, and about 1 nitrate for the plants. For some reason my plants aren't growing as fast as i would like them to, and they arent producing leaves. There green, but thats all i can tell, please help if you can!!
Plant101
P.S. my temp is 80 degrees with 4 watts per gallon

 

[Karackle]

I don't know a whole lot about high light tanks, but it sounds to me like your light is too high for the amount of nutrients you're dosing, you're not giving the plants enough CO2 to grow in that amount of light, i think you need to be injecting CO2 or lower your lighting, you probably need to dose your trace and macros more frequently than once a week with that amount of light.

I'd wait for someone else to chime in, but that would be my first guess.

 

[kid creole]

Start listing off your exact light fixture, filters, substrates, etc. How long has the tank been established, your current algae situation. Something isn't right, so it's a little tougher to give standard advice.

You also have some heavy root feeders there, and would benefit from root tabs.

 

[plant101]

Sorry about that, it me again....
I have a marine land c-220 series canister filter, 250 watt heater, Eco-complete substrate, and nova extreme slr 4 bulb light fixture with 216 watts total. I use no c02, but i use root tabs as well...i hope this helpd, and thanks for replying!!

 

[kid creole]

What kind of bulbs? This should be an algae farm.

 

[Ariel301]

Wow, that's a lot of light. I think you probably ought to use CO2 on this tank; you may see better results that way.

 

[fish h20]

I am amazed you you can grow anything but algae in that setup. You need either CO2 or to take out all the bulbs but one or maybe two.

 

[plant101]

ok, i got 2 10k blubs and 2 atinic bulbs. If i take out the atinic bulbs, what would be a good way of adding c02?? I have had a homemade c02 injector that worked..but not as well as i hoped. I got a large amount of bubbles from the bottle, but it didnt last long. Also, what would be a good way to make sure the c02 bubbles are being diffused well??
plant101
P.S. i got algea...but it isnt horrible, i got a lot of snails, but it seems that they dont eat algea... becuase i got about 100 of em..and i still got algea:icon_ques

 

[tacoman1423]

for co2 diffusion, a rex reactor style would be the most effective.

as for the diy co2 generation, what size bottle and what kind of recipe did you use?

And as you suggested, you should take the actinic bulb, its useless for a planted tank, great for saltwater but not in a planted tank.