Nitrates

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I just have a fluorescent 11w light (came with the tank). Lights are on for 11 hours (8am-7pm).
No I'm not using Co2.
Ph during the day is 7.4, never taken it at night but will do tonight.

Just FYI my submersible pump is 5.5w that's 600Lt/H

My LFS dude says it has "good stuff" in it, he's being funny and not giving me his secret recipe. Its usually 10ml per 150Lt dosage but my tank is only 35Lt.
 
I just have a fluorescent 11w light (came with the tank). Lights are on for 11 hours (8am-7pm).
No I'm not using Co2.
Ph during the day is 7.4, never taken it at night but will do tonight.

Just FYI my submersible pump is 5.5w that's 600Lt/H

My LFS dude says it has "good stuff" in it, he's being funny and not giving me his secret recipe. Its usually 10ml per 150Lt dosage but my tank is only 35Lt.


Your tank looks very nice and a first planted tank at that!

11 hours seems quite long imo. Anything over 8 hours you are risking Algae issues as well as the fact that in the wild fish are not used to photoperiods this long and my opinion.

I don't know the exact properties of your light but 11w seems a bit low for a fluorescent. But if your plants are all growing this maybe null to bring up.


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I'm going to agree with everyone else in that your plants are probably using it all up, my tank had 0 until I started dosing ferts now I stay around 10 ppm.

Also great looking tank :)

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FOr nitrate test, they are often not working because unproper usage.

If it's a 3 bottle test kit, shake bottle 3 like hell
If it's a 2 bottle test kit, shake bottle 2 like hell.

One of the chemical reagent tends to crystalise in the bottom of the bottle, so you may want to bang the bottom of the bottle on a table or the floor, shake it, bang it, shake it, as if your life depends of it :D. This may gives better results. Also, it is possible that you have near 0ppm of nitrates, wich means your tank may need a bit of ferts for the plants.

Before I knew I had to do this, I was always getting low values (0ppm).

It looks like you have great lighting on the tank, do you also dose CO2?
 
I had a 3 gallon heavily planted with floating plants go months with zero across the board. No water changes just top offs.

My theory is the plants ate up the ammonia before the bacteria could so the cycle sorta became moot. The water was cleaner using just plants.

I also had a 29 go zero across the board with weekly 50% changes and a lot of plants.


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What most people dont realize is plants LOVE Ammonia, Nitrates are something they only use as a last resort.. In fact plants dont grow right with nitrates, they expend more energy and time trying to use nitrates then ammonia.


I had a tank with 8.0 Ammonia my 27g after i switched substrates, and plants that were normally green but can turn red in the right conditions... Turned red and grew so beautifuly.. Some scientist did a experient on that as well, dosing ammonia with plants of the same species and size and nitrates in the other and the plants with the ammonia grew faster and used up the ammonia quickly and the one with the nitrate didnt grow much and nitrate readings were still in the water column after x amount of time..


In fact if i had a tank with no fish and i wanted to grow my plants red and beautifully and fast i would be dosing large amounts of ammonia, to the point where the bacteria in the tank couldnt keep up, this way the plants would grow crazy and red and lush


Water sprite is a plant they use in refugiums to eat nitrates because it grows quickly and being a leafless plant you dont have to worry about algae , and floating plants like the duck weed you have, have access to an unlimited supply of CO2 because they are on the surface, and because of this they use up nitrates/ammonia and so forth quickly.


This is why plants like the red tiger lotus, or frankly any Lotus with lilly pads soak up nitrates noticably in tanks because once those pads reach the surface they have tons of CO2 to use and they will soak up the water column of nutrients.. This is why i love my huge red hair lilly in my 92g is reduces nitrates by a large noticable amount.
 
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