For the past year and a half I have been dosing PPS Pro ferts purchased from Green Leaf Aquariums into my 60 Gallon heavily planted aquarium. I run co2 on a Neptune Apex Jr and dose flourish excel daily. I do a 25 to 30 percent water change every week. I followed the recipe found on the Green Leaf Aquarium PPS Pro bottles and dosed 5 ml before my two 48 inch finnex planted plus led lights came on (they are on for 6 hours daily). At first I did notice some increased algae and cyano bacteria but figured it was the tank getting used to the extra ferts available and figured it would clear up. After the first few months I also grew tired of dosing by hand every day so I switched to a cheap automatic doser made by Jebao, After a while one of the the Jebao doser heads failed and for all I know it was not dosing any micro ferts. The macros I believe were still getting in there. Interestingly enough during this time my plant growth was thriving. So recently once I realized the Jebao failed I switched to a Neptune Apex DOS doser. I now have both the macros and micros dosing consistantly. I did lower the dosing amount to 4.8 ml's for both macros and micros figuring i might be dosing too much. Its been about a week and I am noticing brown algae on my dwarf hair grass and some of my ludwigia repens stems are melting. Tonight I used an online volume calculator to estimate my water volume trying to take into account the lava rocks, large amount of ADA aquasoil(the soil is over a year old) and the heavy plant load. The volume calculator calculated roughly 42 gallons of water based on my rough measurements. So tonight I adjusted the dosing amount for both the macros and micros down to 4 ml's daily.
Do you guys think I have been overdosing the PPS Pro method this whole time because I never took into account the actual water volume? Should I adjust the micro and/or macro amounts independetnly(i.e dose less micros and keep the macros the same)? Hopefully someone can shed some light on my situation. Thanks in advance?
Do you guys think I have been overdosing the PPS Pro method this whole time because I never took into account the actual water volume? Should I adjust the micro and/or macro amounts independetnly(i.e dose less micros and keep the macros the same)? Hopefully someone can shed some light on my situation. Thanks in advance?