The team (my polys)

[twentyleagues]

They use nitrates so not sure on that. Depends on the plant for ph but most are good high 6 low 8 some of the more fragile will not tolerate the higher or lower ends of that. I doubt your ph is anywhere near the extreams I mentioned. Lighting seems to be the mystery.

 

[clm08k]

They use nitrates so not sure on that. Depends on the plant for ph but most are good high 6 low 8 some of the more fragile will not tolerate the higher or lower ends of that. I doubt your ph is anywhere near the extreams I mentioned. Lighting seems to be the mystery.

Thanks man. Really appreciate your advice. Yeah right now it is 7.6-7.8.

 

[Polyaddict86]

Thanks everybody. The nitrates are a lot higher than I’d like. I am doing 75% WC every 5 days. Also got some more plants to hopefully help and hoping these won’t die.

P.s. for anacharis can I bury it? Any advice on how long to leave the lights on for? And any advice on how much light I need to correctly light my tank?

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That’s cool that the ones you found are higher lemons. Do you like the LED? How do you figure out how much light you need?

I put mines in the sand.

 

[jaws7777]

Here’s some water change data: water samples were taken every day. I feed everybody every other day. Alternating between pellets(hikari carnivore and NLS) and tilapia/catfish. Ie pellets Tuesday, Wednesday fast, Thursday fish.

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Doesn't seem that bad. You could always add another fasting day.


About the plants I could be wrong but I thought I read somewhere that they use ammonia 1st. Also read that floating plants are better than submerged.

 

[twentyleagues]

Doesn't seem that bad. You could always add another fasting day.


About the plants I could be wrong but I thought I read somewhere that they use ammonia 1st. Also read that floating plants are better than submerged.

I've heard that too. But any one doing aquaponics say thats not true that you still need the bacteria to break down the ammonia. I dont know who is right or whose wrong i see the results of the guy at the grow shop and i think im going to listen to him. He has tilapia that he eats and koi running his fairly large aquaponic "garden". I know plants with leaves in the air are better at using nutrients then submerged plants. Something about the available Co2 being more usable or in a higher concentration in air. So J jaws7777 floating plants would do it better.

 

[Polyaddict86]

Heard pothos, water lettuce and frogbit are good for nitrate.

 

[twentyleagues]

Yup. My frogbit and water lettuce grew like mad in the 75 til those darn filamented barbs destroyed them.

I'm going to start growing lettuce, parilla plant and may branch out to some other edibles. I've been researching and think I can do those, and cut my trates down to almost none.

 

[Polyaddict86]

Yup. My frogbit and water lettuce grew like mad in the 75 til those darn filamented barbs destroyed them.

I'm going to start growing lettuce, parilla plant and may branch out to some other edibles. I've been researching and think I can do those, and cut my trates down to almost none.

Send me some plants when you grow them, water lettuce are illegal here in cali but ive seen some in CL for sale, but i might just buy some frogbit on ebay or amazon.

 

[jaws7777]

Heard pothos, water lettuce and frogbit are good for nitrate.

tarheel96 did some myth busting. Seems like pothos were very overrated

 

[tarheel96]

tarheel96 did some myth busting. Seems like pothos were very overrated

I had a 7 gallon container of pothos growing in my oscar tank which had a weekly nitrate accumulation of 30-40 ppm. I calculated the pothos was only removing about 1 ppm nitrate weekly. You need a lot of individual stalks and a lot of growth in order to make a significant difference. You need something like duanes had ... I believe they were papyrus plants?

About the plants I could be wrong but I thought I read somewhere that they use ammonia 1st.

markstrimaran has shown that algae use only ammonia/ammonium, but plants use either ammonia/ammonium or nitrate (also nitrite).