Re: Newbie Designs and disrespected substrates

[Bill Wichers <billw at waveform_net>]

> 1. light
> 2. occupants
> 3. substrate
> 4. nutrients
> 5. CO2
> [snip]
> 1. light
> 2. CO2
> 3. nutrients
> 4. occupants
> 5. substrate
>
> That looks a lot more like Arthur's list.
>
> In my experience, approaches that are intermediate between these last two
> lists don't work very well.  The combination of an infertile substrate with
> low or erratic CO2 levels and limited fertilization mostly gives you algae
> and nutrient-deficient plants.

Seems that the order of items in the above two lists stresses money 
allocation over future ease-of-change. In terms of the difficulty to make a 
significant change, the order would probably be something like:

1. substrate
2. occupants
3. CO2
4. light
5. nutrients

#1 being the most difficult to change in the future, since replacing a 
substrate would necessitate tearing down a tank. Occupants are hard to 
change since you have to go catch them, and of course they are very 
resistant to that :-). CO2 and lighting are probably interchangeable with 
each being about the same amount of difficulty to change. Nutrients are 
going to be the easiest to change since you can always change your 
fertilizer regimen and/or do larger/more frequent water changes to change 
the nutrient balance.

In terms of a balance of cost/importance and difficulty of changes I would 
think something like this:

1. light (most important)
2. substrate (most difficult to change)
3. occupants (difficult to change)
4. CO2 (relatively inexpensive / relatively easy to change)
5. nutrients (easiest to change and least expensive)

And of course, that's IMHO :-) I like a more future-proof setup, and would 
be willing to put more $ into a quality substrate in the beginning and not 
worry about it in the future, so I put the substrate higher on the list. 
Light seems to be the undisputed king of everyone's list, and I would agree 
with that since no matter what else you do, if the tank has bad lighting 
the plants are not going to grow. For the rest of the items on the list I 
would think that other factors would come into play such as high/low light, 
amount of maintenance, etc., which would effect their importance in 
relation to the others.

        -Bill



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Waveform Technology
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