240L setup - Day 9

It is over week and yesterday I did another 20% water change. The level of ammonium is going down on its own, it is around 0.2-0.3 level back from 0.5 two days ago. Nitrite can be barely seen, the value is maybe a little above 0 and nitrate is almost not traceable. This leads after a week to few issues, one of them is actually Nitrogen deficiency in my plants, I can easily see that the leaves are getting more yellow than green, especially visible on my larger leaves. This can by the way be other deficiency like Potassium. Potassium is important for plants and highly overlooked. I'll monitor the nitrate level and will try to add some potassium (K) to check if this will help with nutrients transport in plants. In the pictures you can also see a visible sign of diatoms having some good time. Also some other type of algae is popping out, which in same cases in normal in some shows some improper balance.At this stage I'll not worry much and wait to see where it will go. Removal of diatoms is actually important as they feed on silica which is hard to remove other than with water changes and removal of diatoms. Even if you have fish that eat diatoms, they will not digest silica and will put it back to the task with their waste so that new diatoms will have more to eat. I plan to add some hardy algae eaters for some time until water will be good enough for shrimps.

Glossostigma has a lot of runners going in all directions, some of them will have to be trimmed. I have some issues with other plants, especially Blyxa Japonica, but will se if potassium can solve some issues.

How to control algae - Redfield ratio in aquarium

In my post about the nitrogen cycle I wrote that the nitrate is used by plants. Of course there are a lot of different elements in water that are used by plants. Those are divided into macro and micro nutrients (by amount of them required). The main macro nutrients that we are interested in are: CO2, NO3, PO4. Those are providing plants with carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus.The micro nutrients like Fe (iron), K (potassium) etc. are usually taken from the soil, Fe and K is usually added with some plants fertilizers. Lets go back to the main pack, C, N and P. People were doing a lot of research in the area of the actual ratio of those three in oceans and living things. Redfield started this research in 1934. What he found is that this ratio is actually quite constant in the oceans, whatever deep you go to. The ratio C:N:P was calculated to be 105:16:1. Other research has gone to find out how the algae blooms happen, and how to control this process. Here findings were very nice for aquarists, actually this whole thing can be controlled. What actually determines type of algae to grow is ratio between nitrogen and phosphorus in your tank. If this ratio is low, you will get blue-green algae, if it is high, you will get green algae.

Calculating amount of the nitrogen and phosphorus in the water can be somewhat tricky. By making few assumptions like the fact that ammonium and nitrite levels should be close to 0 and actually nitrate is the main nitrogen source, the whole calculation can be made very simple. See above the diagram prepared by Charles Buddendorf (check his blog here). Find out the level of PO4 and NO2 in your water by using some test kit (I use Sera). Check in the table above what is your ratio. Add some more nitrate or phosphate if necessary (I use Easy Life Nitrat and Phospho).

The main thing is that this works well in open nature, not in your aquarium. Generally from the table you could think that with 20 mq/l of nitrate you can have 2mg/l of phosphate and everything will be ok. Unfortunately it is not true. The issue is that in aquarium any excess amount of phosphate or nitrate will be used by algae, the table will only tell you if it is more blue-green or green type algae you will have. Generally plants should be able to use all the nitrate and phosphate that you have in your aquarium, when you do test for it you should see almost 0mg/l of both. The weekly water change is necessary to keep those levels down.  For me the Redfiled ratio is only valuable to find out what should be the ratio of Nitrate and Phosphate in the fertilizers I add when plants use more that in produced in aquarium. 

The chemistry of your aquarium looks complex but by controlling only few elements you can have a nice setup. Make sure that you do your weekly 25-30% water changes and keep your Nitrate and Phosphate levels low. Use the Redfield ratio to dose additional N and P if your plants are needing it. 

Cheers,

Marcin

Nitrogen cycle

The nitrogen cycle is very important for aquarium hobbyists. The whole cycle is the cycle of life for plants and other living beings. The whole thing starts with nitrogen of course, which is in the air and in the food you give to your fish etc. Nitrogen is also part of all organic matter. When living fish produce waste or the food that is given for them is not eaten fully, this all leads to the process of Ammonification. During this process organic matter (dead fish, dead plants, organic waste) is used by bacteria or sometimes fungi to covert organic form of nitrogen into ammonium. Such ammonium when dissolved in water can produce small amounts of ammonia. How much will be produced depends on the water pH. This ammonia is very toxic to fish. This part is very important when you have a freshly setup aquarium, the first stage will be ammonium production, by using test kits you can measure the amount of ammonium and by checking it against the pH level in your aquarium you can find out how much ammonia is in the tank. In established aquarium or after some time in newly setup one, a bacteria will convert the ammonium into nitrite in the process called Nitrification. That kind of bacteria is naturally living in the soil, in the aquarium this biological filter will buildup in your filter medium and in the substrate if enough oxygen and water flow exists there. Nitrite is toxic to your fish and plants. Second type of bacteria will kick in and convert nitrite into nitrate. You really want this bacteria in your filter, those two types of bacteria as well as few others are very important in the aquarium. It takes time to build up this biological filter (2-6 weeks). Nitrate in high dosage can lead to very unpleasant issues, like extensive algae growth (algae blooming) and is not nice for your fish. Nitrate is also consumed by your plants. Check the other blog entry about the Redfield ratio, where I'm explaining how ratio of nitrogen and phosphorus can be controlled to eliminate algae problems. If you have heavily planted aquarium and small amount of fish you may not have a problem with rising amounts of nitrate in your tank, you may even have to rise its level by adding additional one. If your nitrate level is too high, you can get rid of it partially during a periodic partial water change. There are also some chemical treatments which should be only used when the amounts of ammonium or nitrite are really high, try to prevent those things before they happen by testing your water every week or so (during the cycling process before the biological filter works, you should do this even every day or every second day).

Cheers,
Marcin  

240L setup - Day 5

This is the fifth day of the setup. On fourth day I did the water change (around 35%). I also did some trimming to the grasses and fixed some front plants which were still floating instead of attaching to the ground. The ammonium was already in 0.5 ppm range. After water change it came to 0.3 ppm. Actually I keep the water pH below 7, which lowers the toxicity of it for the fish (actually what is toxic is ammonia, which is created from ammonium in water with pH over 7). The nitrite and nitrate levels are still not traceable.

Plants are growing nicely, even with lack of nitrate around, I wait to have nitrate kicked in to see how this will boost it. I also already arranged new lightning for this aquarium which will double the amount of light to 160W. I notice small green algae buildup on Riccia. Actually it can be only found there. I plan to clear it a bit tomorrow and we will see what will happen later. I also introduced a 1 hour break in lightning cycle. It is supposed to break the growth cycle of algae, which requires 10h of sunlight. We will see how it will work out. I increased a bit CO2 intake to 2 bps.

The whole thing still looks healthy. I will possibly increase number of fish in the aquarium to speed up the cycling process as right now water condition is quite well.

Cheers,
Marcin

240L setup - Day 3

The third day came with the surprise, rasboras started to spawn eggs under some leafs and on some equipment. The water starts having some amounts of ammonia in it, the nitrite is still not there not mention nitrate. But ammonia level is still low, so I plan to change 1/3 of water on Day 4 so should be enough to change water twice a week for now. Plants started to produce lot of oxygen but I have to start thinking about my lightning. What is suggested is that you should have around 0.5-1 Watts of lightning per liter (2-4W per gallon). In my case it is 0.3W per liter. When plants will get bigger I will have to change it. Microsorium is growing nicely, vivipara as well. Glossostigma has nice green color, so I hope it will go well during next two weeks.

I do not think that the eggs will actually hatch before all the eggs will be eaten by my fish, it is not the time yet for this to happen. We will see.

Due to the fact that fish are added, I also installed the air pomp, so that during night oxygen is added to the water. During day, plants provide oxygen by using CO2 and lightning. During night time, plants can consume back oxygen and are not producing any so additional source is required.  Right now lightning and CO2 is turned on at 9a.m.and turns off at 9p.m. (with stronger light, I would go maybe 1-2h less). The air pump is turned on between 10p.m. and 8 a.m. (of course, all of this is automatically controlled by two timers).

Cheers,
Marcin

240L setup - Day 2

 

In the morning I did check the water conditions. Looks like the CO2 did its job and pH is in reasonable 7.2 range. I checked other parameters and everything looks fine for a fresh aquarium setup. The water was treated yesterday and active coal removed all the bad stuff from the water which means that it was OK to start the biological filter cycle. How it works: the dead plants and fish waste as well as unused food produce ammonia. This ammonia is harmful to fish, but there are bacterias that like this stuff and produces from it nitrite (bacteria genus Nitrosomonas). Now, high levels of nitrite is also bad for fish but here comes next bacteria to play and by feeding it with nitrite you will get nitrate (bacteria genus Nitrospira). Nitrate is not that toxic and you may have much higher levels of this in your aquarium. By changing part of your water once in a week or two you may control amount of the nitrate easily. This is so called nitrogen cycle.

To start the cycle you may rely on your heavy planted aquarium or use limited amount of fish (around one small fish per 40L). The fish should be hardy so that the not great environment will not harm them. I've chosen to go with my proved method and I went to local shop in Drachten (Jumper) to see what they have there. To my surprise they had exactly the fish I wanted to keep in my aquarium as they complement the plants and roots. This way I got six Harlequin rasbora. Those are lovely, hardy fish. After few hours they looked very interested in the environment and the look of them all swimming together is really nice. 

Cheers,

Marcin 

240L setup - Day 1

Today I did the setup of my 240L tank. I spend over 7 hours today doing this and I hope this will survive the cycling period. One week ago I bought the pieces of Mangrove roots and decided to base this layout around them. Those are two big guys so the layout was kind of tricky. First I put them into aquarium and filled it in with water to also check if the aquarium is correctly glued. Today my day started with taking this water out. Than the roots took a shower and I began setting up the soil. As the Amano stuff is almost impossible to get in the 400km zone, not saying about crazy expensiveness of it, I decided to go with the German stuff and I bought Dennerle Deponit Mix (Pro). So first thing was to setup the Dennerle's floor heating. This stuff should help water circulation in the soil to improve nutrients delivery to plants and so on.

Than came the Deponit soil (2cm deep). I also put more of it in the back making two hills behind the roots. Next I put Manado soil on top of it from JBL. This thing should be pH neutral what is important for me. I put aroud 6 cm of it and more on those two hills. It part took a while to setup the soil properly, It took around 15kg of Deponit and 35 kg of Manado, so my soil weights 50kg. After setting this up I put back the root, setting them up was quite easy as I already knew what I was going after. Planting started after around 1.5h. I did only sprayed a bit of water over the soil and I put maybe 10 liters of water to make sure that there is some humidity there. I started with Glossostigma, and it took a lot of time and nerves to put it there. I'll be listing the plants in another entry so if you are interested in the types of the plants I used search for it. Overall it took around 2h to fully plant the tank. The whole setup should be visible after 6 weeks when all the plants should have some significant growth. After planting came the lengthy process of putting the water in, fixing plants that really wanted to go back to the surface etc. 3.5 hours later the tank was full. I was using some de-chlorinator to make the water nicer for everyone. As I said before, my water has high pH so I started CO2 delivery as soon as the reactor was covered by water and in few hours the pH was in good range for my plants. Make sure that if you have fish in your tank you will not make quick changes in pH. I also decided to exchange part of my filter for a active coal. This stuff will remove the de-chlorinator waste and also some colorants from the roots. After 4 weeks this guy will go out and the default stuff will move in. I will post more pictures later when I will be taking about some plants I've chosen and the setup I made.

Cheers,
Marcin

Water pH chemistry

I live in Netherlands in the very independent region of Friesland. One of the disadvantages of this is that my tap water has crazy high  pH value between 8 and 9. I already started thinking about using turf and other ways to lower pH to normal values. The first test I did was the pH test, which proved the value to be very high. After that I started reading about the ways to push this value down. I already knew that CO2 can bring this value down, but I was not sure how much and in what conditions. After some investigation I found out articles about  the relationships between pH, kH and CO2. To make the long story short, pH is not giving you the whole story. You may have very soft water (what normally corresponds to 5-6 pH) even when your water gives you readings of 7.5pH (normally considered normal, to lightly hard).The whole thing is that the real hardness of the water comes from kH which is the carbonate hardness. So there is relationship between kH, CO2  and pH, more CO2 less pH (kH is constant when you add more CO2, only pH goes down). So in my case I hoped to have normal kH (5-10dH). I run to quickly measure the kH in tap water and the result came 5dH. This means that the water has very little CO2 in it, as low kH and high pH means limited amount of CO2 in water (in my case around 1.5 ppm, where good value is between 22-28). Summarizing: check always both values. If your pH is over 7, check your kH, if it is lower than 10, you can simply add CO2 (check the tables online that will give you proper amounts, i.e. on Dennerle site) to lower the pH. If kH is very low < 5dH, make it higher as the pH can be unstable (little change on CO2 makes big pH change). If your kH is high, try to move it down - not pH, as whatever you will do, pH will go back to high values (or you will have to add big amounts of CO2, which will cost you a fortune and kill your fish). Make sure that you use quartz sand not lime (unless you want your pH up) and less stones, the better.

I hope it may be useful to you guys.

Cheers.

(P.S. I know that this topic is more complex as the whole thing depends also on another type of hardness buffers that may exists in your aquarium.).