# What am I deificent in?



## jalfeld (Jun 22, 2005)

I am having a problem with almost all of my plants developing yellow spots that spread to cover most of the leaf, also some of the plants are developing pinholes in the leaves that spread also. This is a 55 Gal tank with 190 watts of light (110 watt 10k AH supply lights and 2 40watt 9325 T-12's) and the following water parameters:
Temp: 76 degF
Kh: 8
Ph: 7.0
This puts my CO2 concentration at about 24ppm.

I does on the following schedule:
Day 1: 
20Ml Flourish excel
KNO3 7g
KH2PO4 .6g
K2SO4 3g
CSM+B+Fe 4g
CACO3 15g
MGSO4.7H2O 10g

Day 3 and 5 are the same schedule, day 6 is a 50% water change followed by the same dose of nutrients.

What am I deficient in that is causing these problems?


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## jalfeld (Jun 22, 2005)

Bueller, Bueller, anybody???


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## MrSanders (Mar 5, 2006)

Sorry to see no one has posted a reply to your post. After reading it over I am sort of at a loss..... I am hoping what you have posted as values of what you are doseing is a mistake. If not I would imange your problems are from an issue of unbalanced ferts being very over dosed..... it says 7g KNO3.... looks like 3 times a week.... so that would be around 60 ppm a week N.... way to much you simply dont need that much of all the ferts.
You KH2PO4 dose looks good, around 2 ppm per dose is plenty, K2SO4 is probably high, your adding almost 20 ppm per dose with 3 grams.... will this hurt anything probably not.... but its simply not needed. 4 grams of CSM+B again is probably about double than whats needed, a lot of us use a solution and dose 1 ml per gallon per week. and the Mg and Ca is adding a good amount also.... im not really sure that it is needed, that all depends on what your tap water is like, but keep in mind to much Mg will cause issues, i believe to much causes a blockage of K.... anyway I would try to get things balanced out and go easy on the KNO3... 

You might want to read up on the EI method and check out the ppm ranges for a week that are suggested.... then use the fertlator to figure out what you need to dose to get there, once you get things balanced a bit i think you will probably see improvements.


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## Zapins (Jul 28, 2004)

Yea I agree with MrSanders, seems like you are adding quite a lot of ferts every week. It might be easier to use the fertilator calculator on this website to figure out the ppm dosage that you are adding.

As for the holes in the plants, if you could describe them in much more detail, colors, patterns of yellowing, shape, etc... Also good close up pictures of the affected plants would help tremendously.


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## hoppycalif (Apr 7, 2005)

The only thing I can suggest is to increase the CO2 dosage. Our methods for measuring how much CO2 we have in the water are not all that good, and generally seem to overestimate what is there. You could try increasing the bubble rate on the CO2 by about 25%, watch the fish carefully to see if they seem to be distressed - the tend to gather at the top and try to gulp air. If they aren't distressed you can either leave the bubble rate there or increase it a bit more and again watch the fish. Eventually you want the CO2 concentration to be well below what adversely affects the fish, but as high as you can get it otherwise.


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## Laith (Sep 4, 2004)

Hoppy is probably right. Your CO2 is probably lower than you think due to all sort of influences on KH and pH that make the standard charts give lower CO2 concentrations than you actually have.

You want to try to keep the CO2 at around 30mg/l. Here's a good method to measure your CO2: take some of your tank water in a glass and let is sit for 24-48 hours. Measure the pH as accurately as you can. You need to inject enough CO2 in your tank to lower this pH by 1 (eg 7.5 to 6.5). This is more or less equivalent to getting 30mg/l of CO2 in your tank.


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## ranmasatome (Aug 5, 2005)

i wouldn't know what you are deficient in but i agree with the co2 suggestion for your plants.


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## banderbe (Nov 17, 2005)

In my admittedly limited experience, low CO2 results in stunted growth which may allow algae to get out of control, but won't result in pin holes or yellow spots. So, I will venture to guess that CO2 isn't your problem. Also when I have had CO2 run low the plants stop growing almost instantly, whereas other nutrient deficiencies may take a day or two or more to begin showing.

For a list of nutrient deficiencies and what to look for, check out this link: http://www.csd.net/~cgadd/aqua/art_plant_nutrient.htm

A good question Chuck poses is whether or not your pin holes and yellowing are happening in new or old growth or both.

Also I notice that you are dosing CSM+B+Fe at the same time you are dosing KH2PO4.

I believe this can result in the Fe and PO4 reacting and precipitating out of solution. Search the APD (fins.actwin.com) for PO4 and Fe together and you will find a lot of posts that can explain this more eloquently than I can.

Most folks who follow an EI-based dosing regime avoid dosing traces and PO4 on the same day for this very reason, unless they dose TMG for traces which doesn't have this problem.. I think because of the state the iron is in compared to CSM+B. Again, some research on these topics will help more than I can here.


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## hoppycalif (Apr 7, 2005)

Laith said:


> Hoppy is probably right. Your CO2 is probably lower than you think due to all sort of influences on KH and pH that make the standard charts give lower CO2 concentrations than you actually have.
> 
> You want to try to keep the CO2 at around 30mg/l. Here's a good method to measure your CO2: take some of your tank water in a glass and let is sit for 24-48 hours. Measure the pH as accurately as you can. You need to inject enough CO2 in your tank to lower this pH by 1 (eg 7.5 to 6.5). This is more or less equivalent to getting 30mg/l of CO2 in your tank.


Unfortunately, this method may also be very inaccurate. See the Barr Report at http://www.barrreport.com/forums/showthread.php?p=9260#post9260
for a discussion about this.


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## jalfeld (Jun 22, 2005)

I appreciate all of the replies on this, I will try dosing the CSM separately from the other nutrients and see where that gets me, I am fairly confident that my CO2 is at an adequate level based on the drop I am getting, I am getting about 1 1.5 drop in pH when my bottles are fully putting out. I know I am dosing at a fairly high level, but it is based on computations from the fertilator on this site, I dose on the high side due to the amount of light I have on the tank.


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## hoppycalif (Apr 7, 2005)

I just noticed that you are dosing a lot of calcium carbonate and magnesium sulfate three times a week. Usually people only dose that weekly, as I recall. I don't know how that might affect plants, if at all.


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## Laith (Sep 4, 2004)

hoppycalif said:


> Unfortunately, this method may also be very inaccurate. See the Barr Report at http://www.barrreport.com/forums/showthread.php?p=9260#post9260
> for a discussion about this.


Sorry, I don't really see the correlation...

I haven't had time to read the whole thread but the bits I did see were all about exhaling into a tube into the water  .

I'll take a better look at the thread later  .


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## hoppycalif (Apr 7, 2005)

Laith, the method of measuring CO2 in water by outgassing a sample and comparing it to the tank water only works if we know what the ppm of CO2 in the outgassed sample is. We have been assuming it was 3 to 4 ppm of CO2. If the tank pH is 1.0 lower than the outgassed sample, the tank ppm of CO2 is ten times that of the outgassed sample. The problem we are seeing is that the time required to outgas the tank sample and the final ppm of CO2 in it doesn't seem to be a definite number at all. Some have found that the pH of their outgassing sample continues to rise for two days, and the ppm of CO2 left in it may be as low as 0.5 ppm. The reason for the tests by blowing into a sample was to see if that leads to a reasonably repeatable ppm of CO2. If it does, that lets us use that as a way to measure tank ppm of CO2. It appears that blowing for 5 to 7 minutes does leave you with a reasonably repeatable ppm of CO2, but until a lot people play around with it we can't really say that it is a workable method.


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## Laith (Sep 4, 2004)

Ah, now I get it. Thanks of the clarification.

So if equilibrium is actually at 0.5mg/l, then a lowering of the pH by 1 would only give you 5 mg/l of CO2 (10x)? That is a problem...

And here I was thinking that a more "foolproof" method than the CO2/pH/KH chart had been found!  

I wonder what would cause variations in the equilibrium level? The KH level of the water?


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## hoppycalif (Apr 7, 2005)

I think it is just very hard to measure how much CO2 is in water. Measuring pH accurately is hard enough by itself, and the titration test kits, as easy as they are to use, seem to be accurate for most of us only to about +/- 0.2, which means a difference in two pH's is only accurate to +/- 0.4. But, the equation relating ppm of CO2 to pH involves ten raised to the power of a pH difference, so a +/- 0.3 error means we only know the ppm of CO2 within a factor of 2 (a 20 ppm answer could actually be 10 or 40). Then, add in the uncertainty about what contributes to the alkalinity the KH is a measure of, and we are left with our CO2 measurements being largely guesses. Perhaps, there is no accurate way to measure CO2 in water. 

This may be why so many times we see here that someone has measured their CO2 and is sure they have over 40 ppm, but is still having BBA problems, which seem to occur when our CO2 is too low. Maybe the best way to handle CO2 is to increase it while watching our fish carefully, and stop only when those fish look distressed, then lower it until they no longer are distressed. Then as long as we keep the same bubble rate, however we measure that, and keep the same efficiency in injecting CO2 into the water, we will have the right amount of CO2 for our tank. I think that's how I will approach it now. After all, a famous aquatic plant expert has always been telling us to just watch our plants and use them as our means of measuring how much of any nutrient we need. If we add to that watching our algae and fish that may be the "silver bullet" we are looking for.

I hope some bright chemist someday will develop a simple to use, accurate CO2 meter or test, but I don't think we have that now.


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## hoppycalif (Apr 7, 2005)

Laith said:
 

> Ah, now I get it. Thanks of the clarification.
> 
> So if equilibrium is actually at 0.5mg/l, then a lowering of the pH by 1 would only give you 5 mg/l of CO2 (10x)? That is a problem...
> 
> ...


My opinion is that there really aren't big variations in the equilibrium level, just in our measurements of it. Test kits just aren't good enough to accurately spot the continuous increase of pH for two or more days when tank water sits in the open. A good pH meter will do that, but until a couple of days ago I hadn't seen where anyone had actually tried that. Even if everyone had the same equilibrium ppm of CO2 for a sample sitting out in the open after two days, measuring that ppm would be hard, because the KH would be rising due to evaporation of water, so the KH would no longer be the same as the tank water. And, this would become a two day long test everytime we checked our ppm of CO2, if we wanted reasonable accuracy.


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## titan97 (Feb 14, 2005)

To get back to the original question, my sword plants start to get yellow and develop holes in them when I forget to dose my macros, specifically K and N. For 2 weeks I stopped adding my NPK mix but kept dosing my micros heavily. I did this because my tank seemed to have a stable amount of NPK coming from the fish and food. However, at the end of the 2 weeks, I noticed that my sword had developed holes and was turning yellow. I tested my water and found out that my NO3 had bottomed out. My PO4 was still about 2ppm. I'm in the process now of bringing the NPK mix back online. Try increasing your NO3 for a while and see what happens.

-Dustin


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## hoppycalif (Apr 7, 2005)

Please, let me apologize for hijacking this thread with my rantings about CO2. Just because I have become obsessed with it was not a good reason to do that.


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## MrSanders (Mar 5, 2006)

> Try increasing your NO3 for a while and see what happens.


I dont think that is really a good idea. In his original post he stated what he is doseing. And i could be misunderstanding what was written but it appeared that he is adding 7 grams of KNO3 to a 55 gallon tank 3 times a week. Jump over to the fertlator and you can quickly see that if the above if correct he is adding over 60 ppm N per week...... if plants arnt growing well and only 50% waterchanges are being done once a week.... he could easily be well over 100 ppm N already..... bad news....


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## banderbe (Nov 17, 2005)

MrSanders said:


> I dont think that is really a good idea. In his original post he stated what he is doseing. And i could be misunderstanding what was written but it appeared that he is adding 7 grams of KNO3 to a 55 gallon tank 3 times a week. Jump over to the fertlator and you can quickly see that if the above if correct he is adding over 60 ppm N per week...... if plants arnt growing well and only 50% waterchanges are being done once a week.... he could easily be well over 100 ppm N already..... bad news....


Hi MrSanders. Why would 100 ppm of Nitrate be bad news? For plants, I mean. I am not certain but given the Estimative Index philosophy on dosing, I really doubt a super high level of N would lead to algae. Or perhaps I've misunderstood you


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## MrSanders (Mar 5, 2006)

Not for plants, Im sure it wouldnt make any difference, nor do I think if CO2 was high and everything else was in balance would High N cause algae. I ment bad news for fish and espically shrimp..... Im sure it wouldnt bother the fish all to much for a short while... but over a longer period I think it would take its toll and you would see losses, and for shrimp I know they dont tolerate very high concentrations like that for more than a few days.


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## Zapins (Jul 28, 2004)

Nitrate may not be the trigger for algae but algae sure as anything need nitrates to live just as much as plants do.


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## banderbe (Nov 17, 2005)

Zapins said:


> Nitrate may not be the trigger for algae but algae sure as anything need nitrates to live just as much as plants do.


Agreed, but I think that algae needs far less nitrate than plants do. It's why I don't understand why people keep telling other people to cut back nutrients in order to fight algae.


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