I have a non-co2 injected 60gal planted tank. It has a heavy plant load and I am wondering if i can use just excel or an elevated dosage of excel to encourage "moderate" (i know i cannot expect co2 injection levels of growth) growth of my plants?

Is this even feasible with proper fertilization and dosages of excel?

Thanks

You certainly could use excel as a carbon source and it would work well. But it would be very expensive to use long term in a tank that size. So I guess it depends on your budget.

what sort of dosing routine are we looking at?

For what it is worth, and this is meant as an anecdotal example, I use Excel as my only carbon source on a 20-long with a 65W power compact (Aqualight). I first started using as per directions on the bottle, which meant 2ml of Excel per day. I now use 6ml per day. Fish{1}, plants and inverts{2} seem fine. I dose KNO3, KH2PO4 and CSM+B as per the "EI Light" article, with a 50% water change every week.

-Jason


{1} Fish: 3 male panda guppies, 1 otocinclus, 3 dwarf puffers, 6 pygmy cories.
{2} Inverts: 3+ asolene spixi snails

I disagree about the very expensive part. You can get 2 liter bottles of excel for about 19.99 at petmoutain.com ( Seachem Flourish Excel Plant Food) I double the dosage daily on my 75 G and it lasts me over three months.

So even if you buy it exactly every three months you are spending maybe 100 a year. I just bought a compressed co2 tank, regulator, hosing, and stuff to make a reactor and it cost me about $300.00 and I still have to buy CO2.

So you can use Excel for a long time before it catches up with the price of compressed and if you mist and burn through CO2 a little faster Excel may always be cheaper.

Excel is a great product but I went compressed so I was less restricted in my plant choice (My vals didnt like excel) and I was looking for slightly better growth. Up to date the tank in my signature has used excel for a carbon source. I recommend it to anyone especially someone just starting in the hobby as it seems to help with algae and the intiial investment is smaller.

I had 160 Watt of t-12's and next to non existent reflectors

dosing for my 75G was:
1/2 tsp of Seachem Equlibrium at water change
1/2 tsp of KNO3-2x a week
1/4 tsp of KH2PO4-2x a week
about 10 Ml of tropica plant nutrition-2x a week

You could probably go with

3/8 tsp of Seachem Equlibrium at water change
3/8 tsp of KNO3-2x a week
3/16 tsp of KH2PO4-2x a week
about 6-8 Ml of tropica plant nutrition-2x a week

Has anyone else had any problems dosing too much excel and killing shrimp? About 30+ of mine turned pink or white and died off. Kinda sad but it was only $6 for em all so i can recoupe my losses later.

I am dosing 3-4x recommended amounts.

I have never had an issue with livestock deaths. I've dosed it with Amano and cherry shrimp, however I have only doubled the amount never went 3-4 X before.

I'm sorry to hear about your shrimp.

I am also dosing plantex CSM+B and KNO3, could either of these be killing the shrimp?

No, these won't kill the shrimp unless you are overdosing by a very large amount, like 100 times the recommended dosage. CSM has some copper in it, so eventually you could dose enough copper to affect shrimp when you go way, way beyond the EI recommendations. And nitrate could do so too, at levels way, way beyond the EI amounts.

Like VaughH said, these are unlikely to be the culprit. However, you could easily kill shrimp (or fish, for that matter) by overdosing excel by a significant amount. I won't venture what that amount is cause it's not an experiment I've done myself, but it's much, much closer to the recommended Excel dose than the lethal doses of CSM+B or KNO3 are to their respective recommended doses. To rephrase that in pharmacological terms, the "therapeutic index" of Excel is narrow.