crap

Well, every once in a while if you highly automate your tanks, you will dip your toe into the cold, cold waters or highly automated hell. Welcome in! I’m there right now, and going for a swim…

My lack of posting for a couple of weeks is not for lack or desire. Nor has it been because the tank looks like crap, and I’m just ashamed to show it to you. No. The tank DOES look like crap. And I AM ashamed. But honesty and candor require that I show it to you. But I don’t have time now to deal with picture taking, Photoshop, and all that hoowie. But I’m happy to tell you about the tank.

A few weeks ago I was agonizing over the fact that I let the plants go too long without trimming. And that the deep trimming that neglect necessitated was a really bad bedfellow with the fact that I needed to change a filter. Well it gets worse…

I’ve got a pH controller, and a probe for it that I have mounted in-line, so it is perpetually sampling my water for pH and adjusting CO2 injection accordingly. This particular pH probe - Lab grade from Neptune Systems - was both expensive, and also WORTH it because it has been humming along for almost a year without any significant deviation from my other pH meters. In other words, while the probe vendors recommend calibration on a VERY regular basis (say monthly if you are lazy like me) this little puppy has been RIGHT on target for months on end. And being human, I’ve been ignoring it… as if it would be correct forever.

Well the deep algae on every surface in my tank caused me to quickly surmise that something FUNDAMENTAL was wrong. And at the very least, it was my pH readings, and subsequent lack of CO2 injection.

Now that does not mean that I did not cut my biofilter back too far. I did. A major trim of plants coupled with  a massive plant trim was pure foolishness. But following this up with too little CO2 because of an out-of-calibraton probe was just stupid.

So, my tank looks like crap. Pics to follow soon.

That said, I don’t have a lot of progress to talk about. Nor pics to show you. My extra time - for what little there has been, has been consumed with stupid and time-consuming scraping the sides of the tank to clean the MASSIVE quantities of GDA, and trimming the RIDICULOUS amount of plant leaves of the same affliction. All in all, between the trimming, tank cleaning, and pH probe testing, I’d guess that I’ve wasted AT LEAST 8 hours on this crap.

So much for a low-maintenance planted discus tank.

Will post much more later after I dig myself out of planted discus tank hell.

Cheers - Steve