Ah man, that's a great set of dry ferts you got there!
As for a tutor, I would suggest aqua-chem, if he doesn't mind. I spent my best 3 years at varsity doing Chem 101. As for advise all I can give is from my own hands-on experience.
Seachem Excel is not a fertilizer. Its a carbon source that can be used to replace CO2. You still need to dose ferts.
CSM b is your micro ferts and replace Flourish. You can continue to dose Flourish until its finished.
The rest is your macro ferts. Now that might take some testing to get it right. And that's where dosing and observing comes in to play. To start off you just want NO3 present. 5ppm is a good starting point. Potassium you'll need about 5 times the amount of NO3, so you can make that up to 50ppm. I've read articles where they dosed up to 200 ppm potasium with no negative effect. So I wouldn't worry about overdosing. Phosphates take a bit of feeling to go by. Start off from 1ppm and monitor things to adjust from there. This is where algae identification can play a big role.
In a nutshell, EI dosing is basically overdosing on all nutrients and once a week resetting with a 50% pwc.
I'm by no way an expert. But I've been using dry ferts for a few months with great results. So this is just from my experience with it. Your tank is different from mine and everybody else's so you need to be patient and find the best ratio for your setup.
Hope this helps. You just opened up an awesome part of aquarium keeping!
Dunno why you would recommend me when you see to have a pretty good grasp on everything.
EI is nice because it uses tsp-tbsp amounts rather than grams. I wouldn't even want to figure out the mass of each chemical needed to achieve a certain ppm concentration..... ugh...
EI actually has you dosing about 4x the amount (by volume) of nitrate as potassium. I think that the desired concentrations are 30ppm of both K and nitrate, with phosphate at about 10% of N. HOWEVER, both nitrate and phosphates come in the form of potassium salts, which will help you maintain your K levels. I know some people don't even dose K2SO4 for this reason, but others do. As hinted by Epiphysis, there aren't really much issues inherent with excess potassium*, so there's really not much to lose. I would follow EI to the letter until you start seeing an issue, and then modify from there.
This site has a pretty good outline of EI:
James' Planted Tank - Estimative Index Explained
Epsom salt is magnesium sulfate (MgSO4) and is NOT what you want to use vs ich. It can be used to supply Mg, a micro/macro nutrient (some contention on that point). However, I don't use it because my GH is >10, and GH is primarily composed of Mg and Ca, so I should already have >50 ppm present in my tank.
The nice thing about EI, more so than PPS or other methods, is that EXACT concentrations are largely not of concern. I couldn't tell you the K or P (or even N most of the time) content of my tank. Rather, you can judge your tank by levels of "about right," "low phosphate," etc. Is actually fairly non-technical.
