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Re:Augh

> I am getting frustrated.  I have been keeping plant tanks for over 3 years
> now and this last one has been up for 1 year and 3 months.  As I haves
> stated earlier I have a 55 gallon with 220 watts of light power on for 12
> hours.

Lots of light. Get lazy and it can cause lots of problems. If you have a no
CO2 tank and lower lighting etc this don't happen when you get lazy. But you
can whip it back into shape since the plants have high light and high CO2.
Takes a little while but there's trade offs in each method.
> 
> When I first started this tank I used PMDD and then got lazy and stopped
> using it.  About 3 weeks ago I started to use it again.  Now I am seeing my
> plants covered in what looks like brown algae which is easy to get off the
> glass and my new SAE which is 3" long seems to like it but it is covering
> EVERYTHING.  The plants were green when I started and now they look worse.
> Yellow....kind of sickly looking and seem to be dieing.  We had a flood in
> our basement cause of heavy rain so I had to remove the CO2 to keep the
> bottle from rusting on the carpet.  CO2 has been down for two days.  Can
> that make this much difference?

Oh yes. NO3 limited also. C and N are the two biggest things you can delete
from this tank. With all that light too. Both of those are going to be used
up first and fast. Plants get stunted there and in comes the algae. If you
don't use CO2 iron is a good choice for a limiting nutrient in the water
column. 
Folks think that their plants are doing bad etc so they dump a bunch of
trace elements in there when it's most often a CO2 issue(If you have high
light). 
> 
> Recently I have added 9 Rummy Nose tetras to the 6 that I already had, and I
> added 6 Neon's to the 9 I already had.  That brings my fish load up to 31
> fish.  Now I see that 4 Rummies have died and One Neon.  Did I add to much
> at one time?  I thought that with an established tank they should be ok.

I have 30 Rummy noses in a 55. I dumped them all in at the same time. I also
have about 40 shrimps and a bunch of snails. Not one loss. Not exactly high
waste producers. The shrimps produce more than the fish in all of my tanks.
> 
> I hate making rookery mistakes. ***Sigh***

Get use to it. We all make more of those than we'd like to admit:)
> 
> Any way I just ran some test on the tank and this is what has come back:
> 
> 1. GH 3
> 2. KH 2
> 3. PH 7.2
> 4. FE 0
> 5. NO2N 0.1
> 6. NO3 0
> 7. Amonia 0
> 
> What in the world is going on?  I am very frustrated.  The tank was doing
> better b-4 I started to use PMDD and adding fish.

Assuming the nutrient levels are correct, you need iron, NO3 and CO2. That's
some soft water too. Your fine but close there. You need to knock your pH
down with CO2 or cut the light down to 60-80 watts to run the tank at that
present CO2 level. 
Get the CO2 back first. Clean up all that algae vac some lightly and do a
big water change(40-60% or so). Make sure things are fine with your PMDD.
Add to tank. Repeat once a week for 3 weeks. Clean filters and prune as
needed for algae removal, dead plant materials etc.
Regards, 
Tom Barr
> 
> ***Sigh***
> 
> Dave Berryman
> 
>