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Re: new to all this, longwinded introduction
Aquatic-Plants at actwin_com,EOL-Inet writes:
>
>Hello,
>My name is Bob.
>I just added supplimental CO2 today with a yeast bottle tee'd into the
>airline
>for the sponge filter. With the high bioload, maybe I'm already getting
>enough CO2 from fish respiration. The water here is quite hard, and the
>pH was
>off the scale of the indicator paper, so greater than 7.6.
I'd like to share something and ask a question all at the same time. I
too have relatively hard water and when I tested my pH it was >7.4 (which
was the highest that my test kit went at the time).
I've been having a terrible time over the last 2 years since I moved in
getting my CO2 levels up. I've tried Dupla CO2 kits and DIY. I could
never get my Dupla CO2 indicator to show CO2 and my plants were not doing
well at all.
Last month I went out and bought a new pH test kit that goes up to 8.4.
You know what? My water was 8.2 pH Well, I was quite surprised! I have
since started filtering over peat in my filter compartment and I also add
a few mls of "Amazon water conditioner" (contains tannic, humic and
organic acids) to water when I do changes. The pH has come down to 7.4,
my plants are streaming O2 and my CO2 indicator has changed colour for the
first time, indicating a sufficient level of CO2.
My Carbonate Hardness has come down a bit and by using tables I have
calculated about 15ppm CO2 present in my tanks.
So, I suggest that you get your pH down first (Maybe it would be a good
idea to determine what it actually is first). Then see what DIY CO2
injection does for your plants. As someone has already said though, I'm
not sure if your plant load is great enough to warrant CO2 injection yet.
My question to the rest is... I'm interested in the relationship between
pH and the plants' ability to take up CO2. What is the limiting level
above which plants cannot utilise the dissolved CO2? If this has been
written about previously, can you provide me with a URL.
Regards,
Steve
>
===============================================================
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