Adding extra potassium

• pH:
• Temp:
• KH:
• GH:
• NH4:
• NO2:
• NO3:
• PO4:
• Iron:
• Dosing: 5 mL Flourish, 30 mL iron chelate (3 ppm), 50 mL Flourish potassium (10 ppm)

Notes:

Time for pruning

I thought I could see some new black spots forming on the stargrass. It's hard to tell if it was old (meaning having formed before I added more potassium from the Equilibrium during the last water change) or new. I had a leftover bottle of Flourish potassium, so I added about 10 ppm of potassium to the tank to tide it over till the next water change this weekend.

I've been letting the Rotala indica and the stargrass grow out a bit, so that I can take the trimmings with me to the LFS (www.albanyaquarium.com) to see if I can trade it for some other plants.

The algae levels this week are much better than last week. Keeping the CO2 levels up helped suppress the algae by boosting the plant growth. I want to try to reduce the algae levels even more next week by keeping tighter control on my nitrates/phosphates, although they've never really gotten out of hand (always < 15 ppm nitrates, < 2 ppm phosphates). It's a fine line trying to find the balance between minimizing algae growth and giving enough nutrients to prevent deficiency in the plants. I might just end up getting some more algae grazers (SAE, otos, shrimp?) to give me some more latitude. I've read that excess iron can cause algae, but I don't know if that's really the case. I'll try reducing the nitrates/phosphates first to see if that has any effect on the algae.

I mixed up another 250 mL of iron chelate solution: 8.5 tsp of 10% iron chelate in 250 mL water. 5 mL of this solution in 50 gallons water = 5 ppm iron. One drawback of iron chelate is that it tends to tint the water yellow, whereas the iron gluconate did not tint the water too much. But since the iron chelate is so much more economical, I can live with it.