EI: weekly WC....BB how?

[|squee|]

Thanks for correcting

[mordrake]

Issnt Seachem prime just BB? Do you anti-chlorinate your water after filling the tank?

seachem prime is not bottled bb. it is a highly effective anti-chlorine and anti-chloramine.

http://www.seachem.com/products/prod...ges/Prime.html

[vratenza]

ok, the consensus seem to be it's ok to fill the tank with tap water direct while adding anti-chloramine.

for EI, large WC is key to the method. Can a monthly 50% water do instead of weekly? 50% of 6ft tank is no joke...

[Plantbrain]

I use 50% well, because it about in the middle.

It also makes the math easier. The max build up that can possibly occur is 2x the weekly dosing amount.

So the dose might be 20ppm per week, then, if no plant uptake occurs(say like in a fish only tank), the max amount you can ever have is about 40ppm.

Smaller water changes do NOT provide more stability if nutrients/salts are the issue. That's simply not true. It depends on the method you want to do, with EI, the more, the closer to the true values you will be.

You can change more often, and/or do larger volumes.

The filter bacteria should never have any issue with tap with dechloro, if so, they are adding too much Cl-.
But the Cl- dechloro is about the only thing that would affect filter bacteria.

The bacteria are not the main issues though, plants remove the NH4 at night as well as during the day.

The only thing that plants do not uptake at night: CO2.
So don't add it at night.

When you do large water changes, you pull up and prune plants, that material leftover is what is causing "the bacteria issues and that's why the bacteria aapear to bounce back rapidly."

If there was a lot of Cl- etc that killed your bacteria colony, it'd take some time for them to come back, whereas the organic matter would be broken down fairly quickly in a matter of a few days at most but more like 1-2 days or less.

You can simply run a carbon filter for your water changes, that would remove everything of concern.

As you get a better feel and don't enjoy running the tank at optimal conditions, then the trade off for less water changes may make more sense to you.

Many do 25% weekly, or 50% every two weeks and dose a littrle more conservatively. They just watch the plants well and change as they need more/less etc.

EI is not particularly hard, it's about as easy as you can get with dosing./CO2 enrichment methods.

Regards,
Tom Barr

www.BarrReport.com