Mordachai
Aquarium Advice Regular
I recently started PPS pro.
I felt overwhelmed, and just did what the article River Cats linked to said to do. It helped, but my tank is out of balance still.
I'm now realizing that it isn't really overwhelming, I just didn't want to have to think about the chemical notations. Now I've written out what they mean, and it's no big deal to think about what each ingredient is. There really are only 5 total things you're working with. One can be discarded if you have hard enough water in the first place, and another can be reduced or discarded if you have enough nitrates anyway.
Take your time, read through the EI and PPS pro descriptions.
Mostly, you're adding Trace Elements (a hodge-podge of micro nutrients), Potassium, Phosphate, and possibly Nitrate.
You can measure Phosphates, Hardness, and Nitrates directly. So you can adjust those if you do as RC suggests, and keep nitrates separate, and the hardness test should tell you if you need to bother with anything to harden your water at all (test your tap water).
I'm still new to all of this, so I'm sure RC or someone will let me know if I'm wrong about something. But that really just leaves testing your Nitrates and Phosphates weekly, and adjusting your dosing to keep levels where RC suggests (or the PPS pro articles suggest).
Daily dosing, weekly measuring, low cost.
Now I just need to finish getting up to speed on my testing, so I can finally balance out my tank.
I felt overwhelmed, and just did what the article River Cats linked to said to do. It helped, but my tank is out of balance still.
I'm now realizing that it isn't really overwhelming, I just didn't want to have to think about the chemical notations. Now I've written out what they mean, and it's no big deal to think about what each ingredient is. There really are only 5 total things you're working with. One can be discarded if you have hard enough water in the first place, and another can be reduced or discarded if you have enough nitrates anyway.
Take your time, read through the EI and PPS pro descriptions.
Mostly, you're adding Trace Elements (a hodge-podge of micro nutrients), Potassium, Phosphate, and possibly Nitrate.
You can measure Phosphates, Hardness, and Nitrates directly. So you can adjust those if you do as RC suggests, and keep nitrates separate, and the hardness test should tell you if you need to bother with anything to harden your water at all (test your tap water).
I'm still new to all of this, so I'm sure RC or someone will let me know if I'm wrong about something. But that really just leaves testing your Nitrates and Phosphates weekly, and adjusting your dosing to keep levels where RC suggests (or the PPS pro articles suggest).
Daily dosing, weekly measuring, low cost.
Now I just need to finish getting up to speed on my testing, so I can finally balance out my tank.
