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uscmule

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Everything posted by uscmule

  1. Hi all, I have a question about the size of the leaves on plants. I have several elodea and Amazon sword that i purchased, that had wider leaves when i planted them, but all the new growth is much narrower. My guess is that I'm giving more light than the seller? Or less? I'm running a fairly high tech tank with co2.
  2. I got an amazon sword from ACO, and it came with a runner and two babies!! I let them hang on to the mother for a little bit then snipped em and planted em so they wouldn't put too much demand on the tiny mother. They are growing very slowly, I think there is a transition period where the go from receiving everything they need from the mother to establishing a solid root system. Ive had strawberry plants on runners fail from leaving them attached to the mother for too long... so who knows 😛
  3. Wow... nitrates in the tap? now that you mention it i have heard people say that. In any case, that just gives you a known baseline for nitrate (unless the tap is fluctating wildly?). SiO2 doesnt have any nitrogen, so diatoms are still getting it from the food, no?
  4. PH up and down are kinda different than a buffer/regulator. Its true they do not last as long depending on how well buffered your water is. If you dose a regulator it will take your water to ~7.0 - 7.5 and keep it there. There are also acidic and alkiline buffers that will target PH values above or below 7, depending on your application. This is what I use, hope the link is legal: https://www.amazon.com/Seachem-Neutral-Regulator-1-Kilo/dp/B000255PFS
  5. Hey Lennie, thanks for your thoughts! Your points about the specifics are exactly what im trying to tackle by using the "black box" paradigm. All the natural foods in the aquarium ultimately get their nitrogen from the food we feed the fish, no matter if its uneaten or poop. The only real difference is how digestion speeds up the process. So if we measure all the food that goes in, we know the load we are putting on the system. The trick is to measure over a long enough period of time so that the total processing time is covered for digested or uneaten food. Using a long measuring period also covers some of the interesting variation in feeding schedule. As for how valuable this is... :shrug: i just noticed a lot of hand-waving on the subject and figured we actually know more than we think we do; this is often how I tackle complex systems in the real world.
  6. Hi, fellow newb here. I have super hard well water. I had a hydroponic hobby for a while and I got used to using buffers to improve the water chemistry. When I started prepping an aquarium I just grabbed some seachem neutral regulator reflexively, and have been using it ever since. One less variable to worry about.
  7. Hi All, I'm relatively new to this hobby. I am a software and digital electronic systems engineer by trade, and that tends to color how I look at the world. I've been cycling some tanks over the last several months (one at a time) and thinking about filters and food and bio-load.... I've noticed that its common for folks in the hobby to decry that there is no good empirical way to measure the load of a tank/fish. But, don't we know the load of every tank implicitly by how much food we are putting in? In engineering we often call this black box testing... we have no way to measure all of the intricate processes that are going on in various fish, plants, filters, etc.. but, we can measure the inputs and outputs of the system... if we know how much food is going through the system, say per week or per month, and the system is stable, we can measure the load capacity of the system in units of food (grams?). If ammonia/nitrite start increasing with more food (and doesn't stabilize) we could say that the system has reached filter saturation. If we add raw ammonia (fixed known amount) we could measure how 'reactive' the system is by how long it takes to disappear. It feels to me like with a little thought and experimentation we could quantify this aspect of the hobby. Whether or not that is desirable, i dont know, but it seems like it would help newbs like me 😉
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