Well, I am not sure what happened since my last post, but it seems the tank crashed. I don't mean that everything died, but my plants seemed to have 'melted'. The amazon swords leaves went transparent, the rotalla wallichii turned to stems and most of the stuff that is red in color pretty much died back.
I followed the directions on the bottle of pellets, same as I did when I initially went to the pellet ferts. Within about two weeks, everything seemed to had died back. Leaves turned brown on the red plants, the swords went transparent, the cabomba turned yellow/brown and the wallichii lost all their leaves. All my water parameters were well within toleration limits.
I did a 50% water change on Monday, June 22nd, removed all the plants, cleaned the crap out of the gravel, and replanted everything. I tossed about 1/2 of what I had and kept the best looking specimens of everything except the micro swords. I tossed those all together (I couldn't get them to stay put. Every week I was replanting them since they had a natural bouyancy to them). I also went to all powdered ferts too.
Since Monday, the wallichii have sprouted more fresh purple/red growth than I had seen since planting them and all the speciments I saved seem to be sprouting back nicely and the swords are sending out new leaves.
I emailed the company on 6/13 asking for an opinion and have not heard back from them, so I cannot report on what I think may have gone wrong. I have about $120 in plants in the tank at stake, so instead of riding the experiment out and seeing what happens, I decided to end it early and go to powered ferts.
There has to be some validity to the effectiveness of this product because I went almost two months using it and was completely happy. If I had received some advice from the company in my email, I may have been able to identify the problem and correct the issue.
So, here ends the post. I will not call this one a winner or a loser. There may have been factors I was not aware of being brand spanking new to planted tanks, but you can read for yourself and see what you think. Water parameters were normal, water changes were done religiously (minus one two week period there) and don't forget I am injecting pressurized CO2 and have just shy of 4wpg of T5HO lighting.
Your thoughts and suggestions are most welcomed. Thanks for tuning in!