My pleasure Tom. And perhaps you could share some of your scientific understanding with regards some of the biochemistry etc. Not my strong point I'm afraid.


I asked how the substrate could remove nutrients from the water and apparently help prevent algae.

Answer (paraphrased) - The clay particles in the substrate are positively charged with cations (typically with K+, H+, Ca2+ etc.) - these cations can be exchanged, so that the clay particle can take up for example an ammonium (NH4+). The plants can through their roots release H+ to the clay particles and instead take a K+ or an NH4+.

What I understand from this is that, for example, ammonium that we know is a big algae trigger (20x more than NO3) is converted by the substrate by releasing the H+.

Another thing that was mentioned is suffering plants release nutrients from their cells into the water, and this can cause the algae.

So does this mean that even plant deficient of nutrients or light ("suffering") release their own store of nutrients? Why is this? Is is CO2 related? i.e. low CO2 starves the plants, especially in high light, causing the suffering and therefore the release in the stored nutrients. The plants don't grow leaving the algae to instead.

My last question related to the actual bottles of the new AquaCare Plant Nutrition+. Is the NP seperated from the other nutrients? I understood that Fe and PO4 oxidise when mixed in solution.

Answer - The bottle only has one section, and it contains also K2PO4 as P-source, while N comes from NH4NO3.