Advice on liquid micros?

[sns26]

Hi all,

I've been letting my tank languish for a while. Too much travel combined with a little laziness and nice warm summer days. I have had the LEDs at about 25% power, and I've been running plain water through my dosing pumps. But the other day I looked at an old picture of the tank and said 'damn, how'd I let things get so bad?' So I'm going to ramp the lights back up, put fertz in the dosing bottles and start photosynthesizing again. Eventually I want to rescape and go away from java fern as my dominant plant, but for now I'm just going to rev my current scape back up.

My question is about how best to dose micros.

I use peristaltic dosing pumps, one for macros and one for micros. I rig the tubing of the pumps to feed right into my PVC CO2 reactor...because I'm so obsessive about avoiding any hardware being visible in the tank or over the tank rim.

For macros, I mix 80g KNO3, 20g KH2PO4 into a liter of water and dose 15ml per day. That has always worked just fine--good growth, no clogging. (Tank is 57gal, pretty heavily planted, mature).

For micros, I had been using a witches brew of ~400ml Seachem Flourish, ~150 ml Kent Iron, and about 400 ml of water. I dose at 15ml/day. I was using the Kent iron because I won a boatload of it a year ago at a meeting. But now I'm out, and I'm out of Flourish too. So it's time to re-evaluate the micro approach. I can't complain about growth, though things can always be redder. The bigger problem has been clogging and weird growth in my dosing bottle. If I don't run a 'rinse' cycle of plain water every now and then, I clog up the tubes that lead to my reactor. (The tube clogs where it is pinched as it goes through a hole in the PVC reactor). Anyhow...does anyone have any recommendations for a new micro brew?

[jcali10]

Dry ferts are economical; you have CSM+B (chelated secondary mix plus boron) or millers microplex available from online merchants. I have always used CSM+B and I've never had anything grow in my bottles. I keep them in clear bottles in a cabinet. There is usually some sediment but it could be strained off if that bothers you. I'm back to dosing PPS PRO again. You did not mention what dosing regime you are following. Just curious.

[sns26]

My dosing regime is something resembling estimative index. Which is to say, dose a lot and change 50% of the water weekly.

[Cavan]

Dry ferts may be more economical, but I think CSM+B has way too much copper in it. Not much of a problem if you don't have inverts. I'd rather just use Flourish.

[jcali10]

http://www.aquariumfertilizer.com/index ... =2&Regit=5Copper, cu, 0.1% in CSM

[Aaron]

http://www.aquariumfertilizer.com/index ... =2&Regit=5Copper, cu, 0.1% in CSM

Right, but if you plug it into some of the calculators out there it's about 10 times higher than Flourish. I seem to have trouble with copper building up in my tanks.

[Cavan]

Never mind the calculators, look at the results of the lab water analysis we had done on APC. Zapins (one of our mods) was using CSM+B on one of his tanks and the copper was WAY high. I don't have confidence with the numbers they give for that stuff and I won't use it.

[jcali10]

My main concern with CSM is if it provides enough iron. I use the PPS Pro calculator for my fertilizer solutions.

[Cavan]

My main concern with CSM is if it provides enough iron. I use the PPS Pro calculator for my fertilizer solutions.

Dose that separately with ferrous gluconate or EDTA. Pretty much every maker of a planted aquarium fertilizer line has separate trace and iron supplements for good reason.

[tug]

It sounds as if there is mold growing in your dosing bottles. I would have thought commercial products wouldn't have that problem.
However, mold can be a problem for me sometimes when using CSM+B. As a mold inhibitor, I use 1 gram of Ascorbic Acid and 0.4 grams of Potassium Sorbate per liter of trace mix. Seems to work for me. Some people just add Excel.

For additional iron I add Fe gluconate to the mix for daily dosing. If you have hard water you might want to add EDTA Fe (what's in CSM+B) or DTPA.

The copper in CSM+B was a concern I had years ago but I still use it with no ill effects that I can see. Of course a water test might not be a bad idea.

To calculate the amount of stuff to add to a mix I like Wett's calculator.
http://rota.la