livionakano;14792 said:
When you say stable CO2 concentration, do you mean peak or mean concentration?
For example, does it really matter if starting CO2 when lights are on is very low (as 5-10 ppm), as far as five or eight hours later, CO2 concentration is about 30 ppm?
Does this changes has any direct adverse effect to plants?
Regards,
Livio
Definitely harms plants.
I suggest starting the CO2 30-45 min before the lights come on so that the CO2 is high and stays high all day long.
So 20-30ppm all day, starts at maybe 20ppm and ends at slightly more, 30ppm or so.
If the tank does not get good high CO2 right away, then the plants suffer.
A waty around this is use low light for the first 2-4 hours, then blast the light after the CO2 has built up.
Amano does this, I'm not sure if he knows why he does it.
He thinks that plants need to slowly wake up etc.
They do not, they will start growing like mad as soon as the light starts hitting them.
It can make it easier for folks with poor mixing or other issues, but if you have a CO2 method that is responsive to the CO2 demands for the light set up, then it's not an issue.
On the other hand.......
Plants will take up a lot of CO2, hold it there while "waking up"..then blasting light for 3 hours will suck up all the extra CO2 and then allows for CO2 to build back up later before the lights go out.
So that works well also, but many do not have such lighting options.
You can go either way though, each method have it's trade off.
Still, I'd rather have a good CO2 method and not have to rely solely on lighting, rather, using the best of both methods is best solution.
I think ADA dioes this, but has not considered it quite in the detail I have and about why.
He does know that it works...............and gives some furry fuzzy reason why in some poem type wording, but does not really ever answer the question directly.
That avoidance of direct answers bugs me and make me as well as others that have talked and met with him if he knows quite why things are this way or that he's just done trial and error.
Many folks have done very well with trail and error, myself included.
I knew if I learned more, I could be much better able to answer why rather than doing the trail and error method.
So I went that way.
He went his.............
The above statement assumes that plants and this alga are present in the same tank. In absence of plants, then other culture methods such as moderate CO2 work well, or if you raise things commercially, why bother with CO2 at all?
Just use hardwater, shake the trays often to get a nice round ball form.
the algae can grow well using the hardwater and little CO2 present.
Simple and cheap.
Regards,
Tom Barr