Water results local supplier

guy tillmans

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I asked our watersurplier to give me the results of our tap water.
Mg 13ppm
No3 30 ppm
K 2 ppm
Po4 0.05 ppm
Ca 57 ppm
Fe 0.05ppm
Kh 2.0 mmol/l
Do i have to make some changes in my EI dosing, (less no3 and more K) My EI dosing is standard for 80G
Do i need gh booster?
Does(KH) 2.0 mmol/l mean 2 DH?
Could you advise me in my EI dosing regimen

thanks folks
 

Tom Barr

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guy tillmans;41742 said:
I asked our watersurplier to give me the results of our tap water.
Mg 13ppm
No3 30 ppm
K 2 ppm
Po4 0.05 ppm
Ca 57 ppm
Fe 0.05ppm
Kh 2.0 mmol/l
Do i have to make some changes in my EI dosing, (less no3 and more K) My EI dosing is standard for 80G
Do i need gh booster?
Does(KH) 2.0 mmol/l mean 2 DH?
Could you advise me in my EI dosing regimen

thanks folks

No need for GH, switch to K2SO4 only(GH booster is 50% K2SO4 anyway).
Yes, the NO3 are high, thank past agriculture and dairy farms.
I'd cut the KNO3 down.

A 50% weekly water change would add 15ppm assuming the tank water is now 0 ppm due to plant uptake. The highest would be 30ppm and maybe a tad higher if no uptake occurs and you feed the fish well.

Still, 15ppm might not make it through for an entire week for NO3 in a stem plant tank with good light and CO2.

To convert from Moles or mM to ppm, you need the molecular weight.

For a 1 millimolar solution of bicarbonate, the alkalinity is 1 meq/L.
meq/L units are very common, as are mM in research.

However, carbonate hardness is technically a measure of only the carbonate species in equilibria whereas alkalinity measures the total acid binding ions present which may include sulfates, hydroxides, borates and others in addition to carbonates. Nh4+ can as well. In natural water, carbonates make up 96% of the alkalinity so equating alkalinity with carbonate hardness isn't too far off. But......some tap waters add various things to adjust this, and it can change, so can the source at different times of the year, tap water does not have stable KH/GH in most cases for surface water sources.

The KH is the majority of the alkalinity, but not awlays, that's why folks have 200ppm of CO2 according to the pH/KH/CO2 chart, but the tank does as well as another with 30ppm and the same fish stock and plants.

Here is calculator for you:

SaltyZoo's Alkalinity Reading Conversion (meq/l / dKH / ppm CaCO3) Utility

A real good one, more specific to marine, but good nonetheless article that everyone should read that uses CO2 and wants to know more about KH/alkalinity:



Chemistry and the Aquarium - Randy Holmes-Farley

Randy has written very well and done a great deal of good service to the reef community over the years on line. It is unfortunate that he has not the same for the freshwater plant hobby. He is a service to the hobby.

Still, plenty of reef folks do not read either:mad:

So he's as mad as I am many times:)

Regards,
Tom Barr
 

Philosophos

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your tap has nitrates at 30ppm? You should be contacting someone about that, given the EPA max for drinking water is 10ppm.

Your Mg levels are plenty high enough; I wouldn't bother to add more if you are.

-Philosophos
 

yme

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well, I don't have the same water supplier, but I do live in the same country.

I just looked at the data from my water supplier:

max nitrate (mg/l N): 50.

levels that were in the tapwater the last months: 0.65-1.61.

greets,

yme
 

Philosophos

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Your water company is jerking you around then. If you live in the US, your drinking water must contain levels of contaminants below these levels:
Drinking Water Contaminants | Safewater| Water | US EPA
Just write them a letter about being baby killers (see EPA notes) ;)

*edit* Of course the EPA levels may be meaning NO3 measured as N to mean 10ppm N. In that case it'd be 44ppm NO3:

N: 14g/mol *1 = 14
O: 16g/mol *3 = 48

( 14 + 48 ) / 14 * 10 = 44.28

Give or take less than a tenth for more precise atomic mass

-Philosophos
 

yme

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a quick babelfish translation (with a little restyling: the translation was even a bit worse)

Nitrate.
In 1 litre drinking water a maximum of 50 milligram is allowed. At this quantity negative impact on health has been excluded. Dutch drinking water contains in reality almost always less than 25 mg/l nitrate. Nitrate does not disappear by cooking water. Maximum of 50 mg takes into account baby' s who get only bottle feeding and are sensitive for nitrate. Baby' s can drink tap water therefore. Exception on that rule are baby' s with serious flatulences and bowel impairments infections with nitrate reducing bacteria. These nurslings must use nitrate arm water with a nitrate concentration lower than 25 mg/liter. Also in some bottle water nitrate levels is too high for these baby' s. consults therefore the doctor or the dispensary.\

greets,

yme
 

Philosophos

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I didn't know you were from outside of the US; there was no country listed under your name. Regulations vary a lot throughout the many countries in Europe, some of them are very strict, others look like Belgium's; some of the dirtiest water in a developed nation.

Just out of curiosity, are flatulent babies a common problem over there?

-Philosophos
 

yme

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hihi.... could very well be... it is not really my area of interest :D


greets,

yme
 

Philosophos

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I like to use products that will take care of both chlorine and chloramine for any tap water, regardless of the listed levels. There's no sense only treating for chlorine, since you may not get any real notice if there's a change in your water to using chloramine.

-Philosophos
 

guy tillmans

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Yes i checked it again. , The wter company tested in juli and it was 32 mg/l no3. The minimum??? value is 25 mg/l and the max value is 35 mg/l (range). Could this issue cause my fuzz and thread algae?? Because i also add kno3 with EI standard for a 80G tank. My Hygrofila stricta, all leaves have stunted curled leaves. No normal leaves. Why i don't know, and if they reach surface and are " airborn" they are normal, how do you explain that?
I will make a refference solution to test tapwater for no3. But if the watercompany gives me the values of no3 , i can rely on that,though?
Here are the results of my watercompany.The last column is the realtime measurements in ppm or mg/l

thanks
guytillmans
 

Philosophos

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Your water company uses better testing methods than you or I have. You should have enough nitrates to do EI without the KNO3.

I doubt excess NO3 on its own would induce algae without CO2 being limiting. The leaf stunting is probably a result of low CO2; when your plant gets out of the water, the air contains all the CO2 that it needs.

-Philosophos
 

guy tillmans

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Philosophus thanks

I wil focus on co2 again( and again and again....) But what would you dose in this case (micros and micros) ? (my tank 80 G 1.5w/g t8 bulbs). I think i'm of the road with dosing.
Now i'm trying to hammer the algae whit 2 a 3 Black out periods,advised by tom.
Tomorrow i will post somepictures of the plants.
 

Philosophos

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I know how frustrating CO2 perfection gets. It's the sort of thing you can have almost perfect, but almost isn't quite close enough.

When it comes to exact quantities of compounds by volume, I'm not so great; I use weight and liquid dosing. That being said, I can give you some target ranges and ratios for ppm, and you can do the math for tsp if you're dry dosing.

NO3: Taken care of by tap
P: 1-4ppm should do
K: equal to or higher than NO3. You have a lot of NO3 in your tap, so 30ppm K+ would work.

Mg: Your tap has enough
Ca: Maybe try targeting 5-10ppm of a more bioavailable source to see if it makes a difference. Use CaCl2 or CaSO4 depending on what you want to do.

Fe: .1-8ppm depending on who you talk to and where you look. If you can establish .5ppm or more, you definitely won't have deficiencies.

-Philosophos
 

Tom Barr

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Philosophos;41759 said:
your tap has nitrates at 30ppm? You should be contacting someone about that, given the EPA max for drinking water is 10ppm.

Your Mg levels are plenty high enough; I wouldn't bother to add more if you are.

-Philosophos

I believe that is NO3 as NO3, not N- NO3 as 30ppm.
10 ppm = 44ppm for NO3.

Regards,
Tom Barr
 

Tom Barr

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Get some K2SO4, dose that by weight/volume like you might if you used KNO3.


I've run NO3 up pretty high for several weeks to see if there was any adverse effects on a well run aquarium, never was able to induce any negative effects after 8 weeks at 80ppm.

10ppm or more certainly is non limiting for any and every alga I know of.
Plants might do a bit better at say 20-30ppm than some species.

So anything higher is really just excess, but obviously cannot be feeding algae nor harming plant growth either. Hydroponic solutions run around 200-300ppm of NO3 and what are often used for growing aquatic plants.

Hard to see where folks get the rational for limiting algae, or stunting plant growth by excess ppm's.

I guess they just make it up and see if they can find some more "me too!" folks to join in with them.

Anyway, I'd refocus on the CO2, and stability factor.
Light seems good, 1.5w/gal of T8 lighting well spread over the aquarium sounds pretty good to me.

It's not pushing growth or demand much.
So getting good filtration, good CO2 and good circulation should not be that difficult.

I've wondered if repeated prunings, uprooting might be some of the issue for some folks. I did this a lot, and rarely ever just topped plants and left the bottom remaining.

Now I tend to a mixture of both topping and uprooting.
Perhaps less uprooting will improve things also.

You can always look at the aquarium with respect to CO2 this way:
do a large water changes in the morning, then look at how the aquarium is doing later that night after 6-8 hours of light.

Is the aquarium doing this on the non water change days?
Why not?
Same nutrients, same light for the most part right?

What else is different?
1. Perhaps you clean the filter, wipe the glass, clean that day.
2. A big issue I believe, is that the plants' boundary layers are disrupted and then cleaned by the current and wave action with a large water change. Some leaves are exposed to the air.
3. CO2 rich tap water, other dissolved gases bubble and break up the boundary layers, and add more CO2. The sticky gas bubbles attach and pull off algae on leaves.

If you do a large water change each day, for say a week, or do them say 2-3x a week, the aquarium should really look good, clean and the plants should grow in very nicely.

Seems excessive and it is. However, it's done more as a reference as to what could be.

You do this to see where the CO2/current, filtration, CO2 delivery system could be improved somehow, without harm to fish.

It's not a simple thing.

The water changes also help to get rid of some nagging problems, or keep them at bay until you get around to addressing the root issue. Same with limiting nutrients, or doing a blackout 3 days on/ 3 days off etc.

Adding Excel or Easy Carbo does a similar thing.

Since more water changes requires work/more effort, it's a temporary management tool. Once the aquarium starts to look good and seems to be on a good path to recovery, you can reduce the work.

Once out of balance, we have to work 2-5x as hard to get it back to the nice state we find that looks nice and is easy to care for and garden.

My own dutch style tank is getting there very quickly.

Same management things I suggest here, fixed that tank.
I had GDA, GSA, Green water and Spirogyra recently.

Sorry, no magic cures.

I wondered a lot about what was causing the issue with that tank vs the others.
If I did not have all the past experience, and reference tanks to compare to, I'd be very interested in seeing about less nutrients. I'd be very tempted to suggest that route.

Fortunately, in my past, I tested nutrients very well and effectively on a reference system and I have several tanks running to compare to. It all you have are assumptions, one aquarium, no way to obtain a reference aquarium(which is why you have issues and where you want to get to and be able to have enough control to make such a stable algae free aquarium), I think it's very hard to know what to believe.

I went through that phase myself.

All I can say is to approach it like a research test, make everything else independent, then test on a referenced tank if you want to see/test.
If all you want to do is to have a nice planted tank, then focus strongly on CO2 and use low light (you have that), a good sediment with some nutrients, and dose the water column.

Good filtration, good current and good gardening.

That's most of it right there.

Regards,
Tom Barr
 

guy tillmans

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waardes1.jpg picture by guytillmans - Photobucket
Hi Tom and others

The nitrate was measured in no3, ppm, as you can see above (right column).
About co2 : i made a drop checker reference solution just as you discribe on this forum , 4 kh. (my water is 3 actually). It turns yellow, not lime, yellow. my ph is 6.8 . Compared to co2/kh chart , i should be low in co2, but my drop checker tells me it is not.! Ichecked the solution twice. Fish have no rpoblem or strange behavior.
 

dutchy

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Ph 6,8 with KH 3 is not that much CO2. I'm using Ph 6,7 with KH 7. Don't rely to much on your dropchecker. Add more CO2 and watch your fish. If they start to surface, back off just a little bit.
 

yme

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@guy:

If you are ever near amsterdam, I could measure your CO2 level with my oxyguard CO2 meter.

greets,

yme