Dirted tank

[cstar]

Are dirted tanks as easy as they make them look on YouTube. Or are they even worth doing?

 

[molly100a]

I switched all my tanks to organic dirt and I would never go back. Not only is it cheaper, I believe it's actually better for the plants. My plants love it. My 75 gal and 29 gal are capped with fluorite or ecco complete, my 20 gal and 5 gal are capped with pea gravel. Before I started using dirt I used eccocomplete. I switched because of all the research I did and success I saw with dirt tanks. I did like the eccocomplete and fluorite, but dirt works better.

 

[jetajockey]

Dirt is nice and cheap but has it's drawbacks so it's really up to you.

The benefit is you can run a low tech tank without much, if any, fert dosing, and have healthy robust plants. It's also cheap to set up.

One of the biggest drawbacks though is how messy the dirt can be. If you pull a heavy rooted plant out you will turn the tank into chocolate milk. The same thing can happen if you aren't careful refilling the tank as well.

 

[cstar]

Cool, that's what I was thinking. Things can go bad fast. Can I cap it with pool filter sand? Or will that trap in gases?

 

[jetajockey]

It will, but sand works good to keep the soil in place. Just don't put a deep soil bed in there, an inch or so is enough. And when you do water changes just poke around the substrate a bit.

 

[rhsoto94]

They also leak tannins a lot. I ended up taking the dirt out of my tanks because they would turn dark yellow in 2 or 3 days.

 

[cstar]

Thanks I'm gonna do it

 

[Mebbid]

They also leak tannins a lot. I ended up taking the dirt out of my tanks because they would turn dark yellow in 2 or 3 days.

That can be fixed very easily by starting to use purigen.