volunteered to help with school tank. not too much experience

Hi guys,

I'm currently going to community college where there are a couple of tanks on show in the hallway. There's one freshwater planted tank, 90 gallons, and it's in a pretty poor state. Apparently it used to be heavily planted until an algae/snail/power outage completely decimated the plants. After keeping the algae and snails under control, plant growth remained stunted. I volunteered hoping that I could change it around. Unfortunately I don't have that much experience but I want to see if I can help. They tell me there's about 4 bulbs over the tank, 36 watts each, 2 at 5000k and 2 at 10000k. If that's true, there's not much light to begin with, so I'm looking a low light setup (I think the 10,000 don't help plants at all?). The tank has several siamese algae eaters, a dwarf otto, and trumpet snails, so they should help.

Since it's deionized water I was thinking I would start off by dosing epsom salt for magnesium and calcium carbonate for kH and gH. Set up DIY Co2. Dose CSM + B and potassium for micro and macro (there's plenty of fish already in the tank, so I hope phosphorous and nitrate are covered). Cut back water changes to 2x a week.

Plants I plan to transfer from my tank are anubias, java, crypt, and anacharis.

With a tank like this where I have no history what do you guys recommend? If it helps, I'll be going back Monday and I can probably take a few pics to show you the tank.

the substrate I think is eco-complete which I only know from others is excellent (I use fluorite), but the person whose responsible for the tank hasn't been vacuuming the substrate because its very fine, so its end up all getting sucked away. Does anyone have this experience with eco-complete?

I haven't tested the water parameters yet but I hope to do so when I get back there Monday.

I don't know the light cycle. I would like to change the bulbs but I don't know how I would ask the school to raise the money for it.

Well here's a picture of what the tank looked like when I first saw (in October) and here is another picture of it several months later (January). Not much has changed from the January picture except I threw in a few more plants like giant hygro, rotola indica, and dwarf hairgrass. The 2 swords I bought from mgamer2000 melted completely and something makes me doubt that I'll see them again (not his fault of course ).

What's caused the plants to grow since I've volunteered to start taking care of the tank is the fact that I've been dosing fertilizers. However, the only thing that's really growing as you can see are jungle vals and anacharis. Right now I'm starting to suspect that the anacharis is sucking up completely any of the nutrients from the other plants as plants I've put in there are growing incredibly small leaves.

There was approximately 250 W sitting on this tank. 130 W 6,700 K and 130 W 10,000 K. I cut it back to 130 W 6,700 K as I thought that was overkill.

I'm very frustrated with the tank and unfortunately I'm only there twice a week to try things out with it. Also my professor just put in 6 discus, so now I'm afraid of changing the water parameters too much without killing the fish. Naturally, though, everyone at the school is super impressed even though it's not very pretty if you actually had any experience with planted tanks and looked at it up close. I am hoping to move plants more toward their assigned roles like foreground and background. First, though, I need to expand the number of species of plants I can grow in it specifically.

My plan is to hook up some DIY CO2 (i know i can't get anywhere near desired CO2 ppm but the school doesn't have the budget to buy a co2 tank) and to trim the anacharis back. Afterwards, I will put back in the 130 W 10,000 K and hope more stuff grows. I hope I don't have to replace the eco-complete which is 2 years old since I know fluorite pretty much lasts forever.

bump

well here's an update. I bought a 10lb CO2 tank for $30 and the rest of the necessary equipment from Rex Grigg to make a pressurized Co2 system for approx $60. I experimented with various plants like dwarf hairgrass and amazon swords which all failed spectactularly. Then I bought some dwarf sags and those have done a very good job filling out the front of the tank and added to the plant diversity in the tank.

i'm planning to leave for New York in August afterwards the tank will have to be maintained by the biology stockroom ppl. I'm hoping the plants don't die afterwards but I decided to take a picture to remember everything by.

i guess the turning point was co2 injection. i've also realized that the jungle vals need to be thinned out constantly or else they block out any light from reaching the bottom and that's preventing any plants from going in the front. i do dose regularly (or at least tell the stockroom ppl to).