Hi Tom

Thanks for your speedy reply , perhaps I was unclear in my first post in My Walstad style tank I went for about 5 months at a time without changing my water, however testing it a couple of days after a water change the results I mentioned in the begging of my post were what I found.
I experimented using floating plants to cut down the amount of light reaching the bottom of the tank, so although I experienced moderate algae, many of my plants seemed to melt a couple of weeks into my experiment and I had very little or poor growth with the others, leaving me in the end with only Amazon swords and vallis.

The water test results at the bottom of my post are from more resent testing of my tap water (I have now started to change my tank water more frequently as I started to looking into different methods of running a planted tank set-up) from two different sources, In which I was unsure as to the effect or importance such a low GH would have on PH and the importance, or lack of, in my chosen plants ability to cope with soft water in combination with my planed EI, CO2, ADA aqua soil approach. Would they be able to uptake nutrients as easily, and would one water type involve less chemical dosing than the other.

Thanks again for you time .