35g Iwagumi, Dry Start Method

Looking forward to see where this goes.

 

Hi echan,
Your iwagumi looks good. Me too, trying dry start with iwagumi style. Do you have any issues with mold (kind like spiderweb) in your 3 weeks tank? Could you please share your tank condition?
Thanks a lot.

 

Ah that’s unfortunate, it sucks when you lose plants like that. I have this hermit crab that requires a minimum 70% relative humidity. If things get too humid, and there’s no air movement you can get mould fairly easily. I’ve never done a dry start personally, but you could control things better with a humidity gauge. You could get a small hygrometer to show what your levels are, they are fairly cheap.

You could then crack two 1 inch gaps in the cellophane lid corners (front and back) to start, this will allow fresh air in, but still maintain humidity. As long as you kept the gauge between 70-80% relative humidity, I imagine your plants won’t dry out. You can do this by varying the gaps in the cellophane lid. This way they get a constant supply of atmospheric CO2 throughout the day. You close one of the gaps at night when your light is off and your temperature drops. I hope things work out for you.

 

You set yourself quite a challenge so don't be too disappointed. It's much harder to get dry start to work with steeply banked substrate; where the sed is shallow it'll be water logged, whilst where it's deep it'll be too dry.
Also, I'm all for soil substrate capped with sand etc, but shallow rooting carpet plants aren't necessarily going to benefit especially during start up phase. You'd perhaps be better off using a Gucci substrate like AS.
This may help https://barrreport.com/threads/return-of-the-shallow.14359/page-2#post-145505

 

Please let me know about the lighting


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