FireMedic's hydroponics idea - success fail stories

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ajsmith235

Feeder Fish
MFK Member
Jul 19, 2010
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Southern Indiana
Title explains it... Firemedic went down a risky road with his stingrays to try to help the hobby by battling nitrates. It paid off for him, and I just want to know how its been working out for everyone else.

Success or failure lets here it...

I will go first:

Introduced Pothos plants into my sump 3weeks ago WITH these water params: ammonia - 0 Nitrite - 0 nitrates - 120 (right before my weekly water change). I have 4 stingrays in my 280gal tank with a 14in aro, and 21in RTC

After a week b4 my routine water change the readings were about the same. Did a water change brought the nitrates down to about 10-15

Week later nitrates were amazingly lower...not much but from normal 120 down to around 70-80. Did another water change.

Today its been a week and a half since my water change and guess what my readings are... ammo - 0 nitrite - 0 NITRATE - 15-20!!!!

the last week i noticed the pothos roots pretty much doubled!

SOOOO this is currently my SUCCESS story battling nitrates and I just wanted to thank FireMedic.

Any1 else have a success or failed story? lets here IT!!! :headbang2
 
I cannot get my pothos to send out roots when suspended in a glass of water...should I have them in tank water to get them to root?
 
What I did was:

I just got a piece of styrofoam drill some holes and put the pothos cuttings in the styrofoam and set the styrofoam on top of my ceramic rings chamber with the roots suspended in the water. added a 2ft flourescent light and left it alone, they took off from there... I would def. put them in your sump tank if u have a sump... the nitrates and CO2 in the water will become their food
 
not at all. They havent gotten down to them yet. my sump is 4x2x2. ceramic rings are about 10in up so i have about 14in of gap between the top and the rings. I put them in this chamber that way the roots wont get anywhere near my pump or wet dry chamber which would clog the pump, and get the roots stuck in the scrubbies
 
I did a little experiment on this a long time ago after seeing a vase/bowl kinda thingy with pothos in it and a betta on this ladies counter in her kitchen a few years back and was intrigued by it.She didn't feed the betta,(that I know of) it just ate whatever algae would grow on the roots and the roots filtered the water.So I started this in a bigger aquarium but ran in to some issues because the fish were eating the roots and killing the plants.Which brought me to thinking,put them in the sump instead but lighting would be an issue and I wouldn't want it to over take the sump and keep me from being able to clean it.So I thought of using these square plastic things I found and drilled a ton of holes in them,filled them with gravel and hung them on the sides of the tank.They did "okay" but not like I hoped.I think they need more light or maybe more ferts of some kind.I also tried this with spider plants but they rotted away kind of like the pothos.So my question is~ does everyone else submerge the roots?I know it can be done,I've seen it many times and in many tanks but there has to be a trick to it? by trick,I mean does everyone still fertilize the plants?Do they get fully submerged or just partially? And I dont see this as hydroponics,its more aquaponics in my opinion,but maybe that is where my problem lies...
 
I see....Dont know how I could do this in my sump then. Ive got a standard 55g sump and ive got the whole bottom full of ceramics...and keep the water level right at the top of em.
 
I dont have a sump, but have had pothos growing in my tank for well over a year, some of the vines which started at a foot are well over 5 ft now i think. Unfortunately, I can not give you parameters, as I have never checked check parameters in my 10+ years of fishkeeping (except at the LFS when cycling a new tank, before introducing fish). I can say however, that they are growing well and I dont fertilize them, so therefore they have to be sucking nutrients from the water. You can see the roots of mine in this video in the upper left hand corner of my tank around 25 seconds
http://www.youtube.com/user/wonword04?feature=mhum
 
I have pothos in my 75 and it does great. The pothos used to grow in a HOB and I attempted to let some hang into the water column, but I had some herbivorous fish that always destroyed it. Now I've reduced the stock to my SAL who is still pretty small, 20 glowlight tetras, and a couple otos. Without the herbivorous fish in there anymore, I let all the pothos grow right in the tank and the roots have exploded. Since around Christmas, the nitrates haven't reached 10 ppm. I even checked my test kit with my turtle tank because I couldn't believe it.
 
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