Journal 20 Gal + 15 Gal Bucephalandra Recovery Tanks [Very high light, high co2]

[snowballs99]

Both tanks contain a lot of bucephalandra stems I have recently melted by feeding my caridina tanks with mulberry leaves. I have no idea what the heck happened but all buces melted in those tanks heavily over 3 days with every other plant + shrimp being fine. Don't wanna risk the plants dying so I'm throwing them back into high tech for a few months to recover.

Set Up:
Both tanks uses heavy co2 misting
Horticulture LED lights (dimmed, so probably 25-30 watts?)
Will steadily increase light weekly if I see no issues, max is 40 watts.
Dual sponge filters. (Air bubbles help prevent co2 gassing, also seems to really help stabilize tank, so less algae)
1 Internal filter with an atomizer for misting.

Regime:
All tanks get a 30-50% water change, twice per week.
Micros dosed daily (unless I forget, which happens fairly often.)
Macros Front Loaded and only in new incoming water.

6 Gallon bucket water change:
~350tds (Using seachem equilibrium remineralizer)
~22ppm KNO3, using KNO3 + KH2PO4
~40-50 ppm Potassium due to remineralizer
~4-5GH

Buce Lottery Colors
Lots of buces, various names, collected over the years. A lot of them were ultra rare and I cannot buy them anymore. Most of the ultra rare I probably accidentally killed from trying to grow them in a "no filter, no co2" style tank. Either way, not much color in low tech, will see what lottery colors we pull once they get going with better colors in higher lights + co2.

Both tanks are planted tightly front to back with bucephalandra. Kinda hard to see it all with moss blocking the way, but my view will be your view.

Random Mosses
Some mosses I've collected as well, honestly I grow a lot of them free floating so they kinda look the same. We will find out how they look after I attach them to something.

15 Gallon, very aged sand + pebble tank.

20 Gallon long, aged aquasoil I pulled from an existing caridina tank.


Wanted to take some macro shots, but does anyone know how to take an angle show on the glass without distortion? I have a DSLR long tube lens that works under water but color rendition is really bad.

Why so much moss?
Mostly to help stabilize the tank and to reduce light bleed. Less surface for algae to grow.

 

[snowballs99]

My favorite stem is actually Bucephalandra Rosemary, and a nano metallic purple bucephalandra with very thick and prominant iridescent bubbles on the leaves.

I have no idea where either of those plants are in this tank, or if they still exist in general. Will need 2-3 months for them to grow out before I can distinguish them. Most buces grow in my low-tech tanks seem to all be green with smaller sized leaves. Pray they are still alive.

This was a photo when it was last seen, with pinkish led lights. Please still be alive in there.

 

[snowballs99]

2 week update
Removed most of the moss now.
Reduced light a tad bit as well to make sure everything's good.



Tuffs of hair algae and black beard algae on buce leaves. Killed them with excel dip. Pretty easy and straight forward. Buces are extremely tolerant of high concentration excel dips.

You can see the algae turn colors.



Previously melted buce also recovered with new leaves.


Everything looks good so far.
BBA phase should pass as the leaves adapt to new EI parameters. And after u kill the remaining algae with excel of course.

 

[BranchScape]

What is your excel dip setup? Bowl that is 50/50 excel/water or 25/75 and how long?

Looks like a cool wabi kusa ball setup of moss and buce.

 

[snowballs99]

What is your excel dip setup? Bowl that is 50/50 excel/water or 25/75 and how long?

Looks like a cool wabi kusa ball setup of moss and buce.

I don't have exact measurements but u can be pretty wrong and it will still work.

1.5 capful of metricide 28 (1.4x excel concentration). Cap the same one on the table. Maybe 10ml?

A regular mug of water.

I soak all infected buces for 3 minutes and pull out. Even nano species are fine. Moss do ok with it as well. But I only keep 5-6 species.

It's more gentle on moss than hydrogen peroxide which I've killed a lot of moss with before in the past.

Mini pellia moss example will also melt after excel dip. But that's fine, that moss has been a cancer on my tanks. Other liverworts probably hate it as well. The thicker the leaves of the plant, the more tolerant of excel they usually are.

 

[snowballs99]

Update:

This tank is getting a worrisome amount of BBA . Typically these tanks should be super steady by now esp on the small amount of light I am using.

Its either crowding/flow/CO2 issue. So I just improved all 3 and will reduce each one later on once the issue is fixed.

Sponge filters swapped out for internal filters I already had lying around. Flow is now 3-4x with no dead spots.

Also removed 1/3 of the buces to another tank to reduce crowding.

ALso doubled my Bubbles per second on the CO2 as well.

I tend to run into algae issues always when dosing EI, but rarely when doing lean dosing.

 

[snowballs99]

Still getting a lot of black brush algae. Things got worse after swapping to a yugang diffuser. Atomizer seems to have a much faster reaction time and can be on same time as light. Yugang seems slower to build up.

Gonna turn on CO2 3-4 hours before photoperiod to compensate.

 

[Mr.Shenanagins]

Gonna turn on CO2 3-4 hours before photoperiod to compensate.

This right here is pretty key. I think most running a reactor have theirs injected 2-3 hours beforehand to ensure optimal co2 concentration before lights on.

 

[snowballs99]

This right here is pretty key. I think most running a reactor have theirs injected 2-3 hours beforehand to ensure optimal co2 concentration before lights on.

I've pretty much got 0 new algae now, should be completely algae free after i excel dip off the old ones.

I can't say it was solely turning on the reactor sooner, as I have multiple tanks which I change at the same time. Another 10 gallon with the same reactor on earlier still has algae issues. The other tank however is only 1 month old, this ones close to almost a year, so it seems to stabilize a lot faster. Both have sand substrate with pebbles mixed in.

I'd say switching over to a leaner dosing with apt 3 seem to also reduce algae a ton.
I can go a lot longer without having to do water changes with lean dosing, which preferred at this point.

 

[snowballs99]

Introducing my new bucepehalandra sp. Fuzzy pink



90% of the way to algae free. I should be fully clean by the end of the month now.

 

[snowballs99]

Gotta plead guilty here.
I ended up putting the buces from the 15 gallon tank with sand substrate into a caridina tank with aquasoil + bell/yugang diffuser.

I noticed 20 gallon long aquasoil tank just had better growth of pretty much everything, and the 15 gallon tank with sand felt like im constantly walking on a wire.

For the sand tank, It's just really easy for things to go wrong. Filters get clogged super often, waste constantly settles on top, requires weekly water changes or things start getting cloudy. Buces also don't seem to grow as steady. This seems like a tank that actually needs a strong canister filter, or oversized filter to run properly. It also brings me a bit of stress as I'm a bit paranoid of missing fertilizer dosing.

For the aquasoil tank, waste just seems falls to the bottom of the tank instead of on top of the soil, which actually makes the tank more stable. Particulates, dust also settles at the bottom, which means more water clarity with less filtration. The aquasoil tank now is just powered by 2 internal filters, both 5 watts each and honestly isn't moving that much water, but everything looks very healthy. I'm also fairly certain I can forget to dose this tank for 1-2 weeks and be fine.

Overall, I'm slowly moving towards the thought of "Just let your substrate capture the waste since that's where 80% of it ends up anyways. Gravel vacuum 1-2 times a year and move on".

This has led to convert the caridina tank into one with a UGF filter + bell/yugang diffuser to see if it works. My past experience with UGF filters have always been basically 0 maintenance but with ultra clear water.

 

[snowballs99]

Text Info Dump Below

Ok, I did more some experimenting to fix the BBA algae issue I kept having, fixing, then coming back again. Need big changes at this point.

1. I removed 80% of the livestock from the tank. Now it just contains and caridina shrimp and 3 amanos + pest snails.
2. Reduced photoperiod to 6 hours. (8-9 hours before)
3. Did a gravel vacuum and added some old dried aquasoil so the layer is now atleast 2 inches thick everywhere. (This should give waste more areas to sink out of sight and removed from the water column).
4. Removed half the buces from the tank into another to prevent over crowding.
5. Tank is now 95% bucephalandras and a few eriocaulons.
6. Doing very lean dosing since theres no actual nitrate sucking plants competing for nutrients anymore.
7. Am using 30 watt leds over a 20 gallon long, good coverage, no spotlight effect. (Before was 10 watts, low algae, but little plant growth)
8. Added a tetra 40 whisper filter as it seems to have 3d printed plastic portion that's really good at breaking up surface film, and the flow from it is much smoother and distributed.

So far it's been around 2 weeks. Tank has been incredibly stable despite such a low plant mass. No new algae has been spotted, none on glass either.
Will try to get a photo up, but tank looks very bare.

Man I really didn't think I'd have to make a tank this clean just to grow bucephalandras. Such picky plants.

Good news is that a lot of the buces that have been sitting dormant for a month have actually sprouted from new leaves.

 

[snowballs99]

This is an older tank I used to have with exhausted controsoil. I mixed in 20% apt feast and moved some buces in.

I think I added plants and shrimp after like 7 days and a few water changes.

Aside from the algae the buces already had this tank is actually really clean.

Mosses grow a lot faster here.

Newer buces leaves are also growing with pretty good color and size.


I only dose this tank once a week, like 3ppm nitrates. I only do water changes if tds goes above 200, every 2 weeks or so.

Honestly for how little work this tank needs and how good the growth is, mixing in new substrate every few months seems to be the move.

Co2 isnt even on early btw. Just gets turned on the same time as lights. Needs around 2 hours before that bottle even fills with co2. Photoperiod is 6 hours.

Substrate is carrying this tank pretty hard.

 

[snowballs99]

So couple months ago I swapped to a horizontal yugang reactor instead of co2 misting.

I tried 2 types. This long tube one with a power head and bell diffuser type.

This one for some reason gets constantly filled with oxygen sooner or later and I don't know why. I even removed the filter media from the pump and it's still doing it.

The air never diffused into the water overnight so that's how you can tell.


The plastic bottle diffuser doesn't seem to have this problem. Or it's so little that you'd only have to purge it once a month or so.

I'm going to swap that long tube one over to just a bigger plastic bottle as it seems to work better and I can have 1 less pump working in the tank.

 

[snowballs99]

The best mosses to grow with bucephalandra review. Due to collectoritis, I used to grow a lot of buces together on rocks with bucephalandras to save space.

Top 2 for me is definately regular fissidens and buce moss.

The growth rate is very similar and they actually look extremely natural together. Nothing really "sticks out" and it looks very homogenous.

The nano species of buce look pretty natural on it as well.



Next up is just regular fissidens. They grow probably 2-3x faster than buces so will require from pruning,


This species of weeping moss also looks very nice and fluffy with it, but looks a bit more "exotic". Excuse the picture its seen better days coming off an excel dip.


The issue with a lot of other mosses is they either grow way too to the point where they choke out the buce, or the moss is too unruly/stands out too much when together with the buce.


Triangle moss is pretty decent, but it looks a little too "organized" and fluffy on medium size buces. If the buce is huge though I think it would look pretty good together.

1 moss I think you should 100% avoid together with buces is Mini Pellia Moss.
This stuff will actually grow around and wrap the buce stems, kinda like a vine plant you normally see taking over trees. It is impossible to manually remove from buce after. However, you can kill off the mini pellia with an excel dip and the buce should be unharmed.

 

[snowballs99]

I had recently pruned around 50% of all the buces in my tank after growing them out for a few months.
Wish I took a photo of the pruning but I forgot.

It became pretty obviously that atleast 50% of them looked nearly identical to each other.
This was after putting them in highlight for a month to double check that wasn't effecting growth.

A lot of buces might come with 500 differen't trade names, but majority of them look the same when grown underwater, even in higher lighting + co2.

Currently atleast 40% of my current buces also look extremely similar, but there are enough small differences such as leaf size and new leaf color that I'm willing to give them another 2 months to grow out before culling again.

Overall, in terms of "Unique" looking species, which you can tell at a glance have different color, leaf shape, texture, and plant size, I might have around 20 actual unique stems? This is fine for me and I plant to keep it that way. I've grown to prefer the "Open space" look a lot more now instead of the collectoritis hoarder messy look.

 

[snowballs99]

Aight. Ngl my current buce set ups do not run well maintenance wise.

I need to do weekly water changes else after 10 days algae starts getting bad. My more sensitive caridina shrimp also aren't breeding at all in these tanks, which also sucks.

Testing now a new set up. Putting soil into a ugf box. Running air pump to power box. Basically scooped up soil and placed them into plastic box to act as a ugf filter.

My substrate layer is reduced to around 1cm now.

My past experience with ugf filters have all been very pleasant, plant growth was just slower since they suck at co2 preservation.

Results have been good. It's been 2 weeks and most of my caridina are berried and breeding again. Water clarity is impeccable since ugf filters are so good at polishing.

Regarding algae on buce, it's definitely reduced, but I did get some minor melt just from changing parameters (especially co2) so drastically.

Co2 was also changed from an bell diffuser to a standard ceramic disk diffuser. Ugf just doesn't push enough flow directly onto the bell diffuser chamber for it to work well. It gives enough flow to circulate bubbles from the ceramic diffuser though.

Will post basic pics of the set up now in a bit.

I know I'm ping ponging around but my goal is to be able to go from weekly water changes to monthly. That makes my planted tank experience much better and less of a headache.

 

[snowballs99]

Most of the inspiration comes from the shrimpmania video. I noticed his biceps look better than 99% of other people's and he doesn't even use co2 lol. He also doesn't add ferts either. Uses air pumps for circulation etc. It's basically aged soil doing 80% of the job.


You can look at quite an impressive clump to the left.

Im honestly fine with replacing my ugf box with new soil every 6 months if it cuts down on weekly maintenance. Especially if I barely have to fertilize as well. It's a lot cheaper than replacing soil for your whole tank.

 

[JayP]

I noticed his biceps look better than 99% of other people's and he doesn't even use co2 lol.

Oh, come on! My biceps look better than his and I'm old and fat.

 

[snowballs99]

Oh, come on! My biceps look better than his and I'm old and fat.

Not sure why it auto corrected buceps to that lol.