please help with my 5 week tank?

First, you have a lot of light, 120 watts for 29 gallons, obviously not CF bulbs and probably not with good reflectors, but still a lot of light. And, you keep the lights on for a long time every day - 12 hours, instead of 8 - 10 hours. So, you do need to be sure to provide adequate quantities of all of the nutrients, from CO2 to traces. Your nitrate dosage is twice what is usually used for a 29 gallon tank, but that won't cause any harm if you are also changing half of the water every week. (I'm ignoring your test results, since I doubt that you have calibrated the test kits, making the readings very questionable.) I can't tell how much phosphate you are dosing, but I found I needed almost 1/8 tsp of KH2PO4, three times a week, and with less light on my 29 gallon tank. I'm guessing you don't dose that much. Then, for CO2 you are supplying 2 bubbles per second, but don't say how you get it into the water, nor how much water circulation you have, so I don't know if that is enough or not. For the 29 gallon tank I had, I used probably twice that much CO2, but I was using CO2 mist most of that time. So, you need a drop checker, loaded with 4 dKH water to be sure you have enough CO2. At that light level having enough CO2 isn't optional.

My suggestions are, get a drop checker and use it, and make sure you are dosing close to 1/8 tsp of KH2PO4 three times a week. Also, be sure you have good water circulation in the tank, with a very slight surface ripple. Then reduce the lights on time to 10 hours - the extra time isn't helping the plants. But, having said all of that, you do have a very nice looking tank of plants, so you are very close to having things set up right.

 

The Dupla CO2 checker will work fine, but you need to load it with 4 dKH, distilled or DI water and pH reagent. That will give you a green color when you have about 30 ppm of CO2 in the tank water. Don't use the pH controller for anything except as a monitor of the tank pH, and that doesn't tell you anything important.

Your water temperature is about 2 - 3c higher than I run, so I don't think that is a big problem. I would increase the phosphate dosing to from 1 to 2 ppm per dose. (Just double what you now dose.) I have found that running the phosphate near the top of the recommended level does no harm that I can see, and it does prevent green spot algae from starting. Without phosphate the plants can't use the nitrate.

 

I don't see where you have said what filtration you use. A canister filter is probably the best way to go, since it provides both good filtration and good water circulation in the tank. If you have a hang on back type filter you may be dissipating the CO2 as fast as you are adding it, with the drop checker located so it sees the CO2 before it all leaves the tank. One quick thing you can do is locate the drop checker somewhere else in the tank to see if you still get a green reading.

 

"Otto cats" are Otocinclus, a small catfish type that eats some algae, and grazes on the algae on plant leaves. I used 3 in my 29 gallon tank, when I had it, but I actually added 6 to the tank and only 3 survived. I still have the 3, now in my 45 gallon tank, and they continue to graze on the plant leaves for algae. This is one of the types of fish, like cardinal tetra, that are very often in poor health when you buy them, or, in any case, they can be hard to keep alive unless you do a very good job acclimating them when you add them.

 

Hi,

You seem to be doing just about everything right.

In many of the pictures the plants look pretty good. Some have a little algae on them, but not a lot.

The tank does look somewhat dark in the lower areas, though. You suggested that maybe not enough light was coming through the plants. Maybe open things up a bit by reducing the plant cover? How many and what kinds of plants do you have?

You do have a lot of light. As was suggested, consider lowering it to around 3 WPG. Also, how old are the bulbs?

Have you been adding any chemicals besides the plant nutrients?

Has anything out of the ordinary been going on with your water?

Don't give up.

Bill

 

Sometimes a tank can have so much plant life in it that water circulation suffers. That causes the concentration of ferts to be different at different areas of the tank, and just isn't good for the plants. So, maybe as Bill suggested, you could try thinning out the plantings a little. My tank never does very well once it gets overgrown with plants. That is when algae tends to attack, in my experience.