on holiday

[phish head]

going on holiday for several weeks. The fish sitter is going to feed the fish but not going to do water changes. The question is do they dose with easy green while I'm away or not ? Any feed back is welcomed ,

thank you

[egruttum]

How do you dose your Easy Green?  If you just use X pumps every Y days I don't know why someone couldn't do that.  That would certainly keep your plants on a consistent schedule.  With all my plants I struggle to keep any nitrate residual in my aquariums so I never do water changes because of nitrates.  If you do water changes specifically to reduce nitrates then adding more Easy Green only creates more problems for you and probably is a good idea to put on hold.  In my case with all low tech plants I would just stop fertilizing while I was gone if I was worried about nitrates.  Not like the plants will run out of nitrates while you are gone.

 

[Rube_Goldfish]

Advantages of asking the fish sitter to do it: probably not hard to mess up, keeps consistency for plants with regard to growth/health and lighting schedule, makes algae problems less likely if plants can just keep chugging along.

Disadvantages of asking the fish sitter to do it: not impossible to mess up (and overdose could lead to algae problems at the low end and I guess toxicity to the fish if they dumped the whole bottle in at the extremes), plants will keep growing and might become overgrown (could lead to shading problems?) without trimming/maintenance, which you would probably not be asking the sitter to do. Are there fast-growing plants?

Broadly speaking, though, I think if you can trust the sitter to feed the fish, you can probably trust that person to do a couple squirts on schedule.