Many thanks Tom and Carissa. Yeah, the smell is like bad rancid coffee that has been sitting in the coffeepot all day. Also, a bit like that smell when you go into a hair salon and are waiting for a haircut and they are perming someone's hair and you get that strong pugnent smell from the chemicals they use for the perm. Lol, my coworker told me that perhaps Amano is using coffegrinds in the Aquasoil and that is why there is the coffee smell.

I have not tested ammonia as I suspect the levels will be high. This is what they say about aquasoil I and II and state that you need to do frequent water changes and not add fish for a month as the ammonia is supposed to take that long to level off. So far, it has only been about 4 days since I set up the tank. On the positive side, I am beginning to notice some new growth with some plants while others continue to die off. My biggest concern was the Saprolegnia fungus as this can spread to fish and cause problems if it takes root in the tank. I manually removed the dead plant matter and as much of the fungus as I could. This stuff scares me. Just out of curiosity, I hit it with some Hydrogen Peroxide to see what would happen. With the first dose, I got some bubbling, but the stuff was still intact and not phased one bit by the peroxide. After 2 days, it had not changed and was still alive. Then, I gave it a second shot of hydrogen peroxide. This time nothing, not even any bubbling, the stuff was not phased at all. After a month and before I add fish, the plan was to add a UV sterilizer. I did not want to put a UV Sterilizer in this soon as I did not want to intefere with natural bacterial colonization. Hopefully once the UV sterilzer is running, it will kill the Saprolegnia fungus spores and keep them from spreading or targeting my fish.

By the way, here is the tank as it looks now.

Hopefully, the plants will grow and fill in. I added some more floating cardamine as I had no fast growing stem plants other than the ambulia and hygrophilia polysperma to put in.