o boy i must be way off the mark then, my hc wont pearl at all.

Also at 2 wpg of compact PC and pearling can go to the substrate level.
But usually it is seen in the top 1/2 of the tank on L aromatica, L Repens, Sunset Hydro, D sag., A Reineckii and a few like Echinodorus x barthii only pearl on the underside of the leaf. C Bacopa hardly ever even at the surface??

Biggest thing I've seen is keeping up with the CO2 as the tank grows in and this can exceed the green DC reading.

My plants pearl alot but i have had 2 weeks to finetune everything slowly every day.

Tank: 450L
Light: 4x 80 watt
Plantfood : 25ml Tropica fert every day.
co2: around 30-45 ppm. dropchecker is green on edge to become yellow.
Filter: Fluval FX 5 restricted flow and i use a diy spraybar so my plants just about moves in the tank.

Fert is probobly not enough but for the moment thats what i use.

This setup works for me it has taken me about 1 year to get to this point and about the latest 2 weeks to finetune (there went my vacation).

Something is not being met and I say it's Co2. Why? As long as you truly have good concentration of Co2 in the water you will get pearling even if lighting is under 2wpg. You will not get the crazy bubble action as most see under higher light setups but you will definitely get consistent bubbles . <--- This has been my experience which I still do today.

Now with all that said and factoring the specs above for what I assume to be your 60gal tank with 130watt to get the 2wpg; I say you need to work on Co2. Up your BPS (bubbles per second) rate, forget what your DC is showing you now because from all that I've read it's either not correctly placed in your tank or you have a wacky solution throwing you off.

Tell us a little more about your DC? Which type, glass, red sea, homemade? Did you make your KH solution? Where is it placed in your tank.....etc??

my dc is a redsea, i use their bromie blue, and mixed my own 4 dkh, i used a serena KH kit to check. I purchased some distilled water and added about 1/8 baking soda, then kept diluting the mixture till the serena kit measured 4 dkh on 3 consistent tests. the checker is on the right front corner and my spraybar is on the left side. I did notice the checker went from yellow to blue when i did a water change yesterday. It changed in about 5 mins, seemed a bit fast, also went back to geenish yellow in about 20 mins.

i cut out a few leaves yesterday that were infected with bba and did not notice any bubbles comming out of the newly cut stalk. I know in the past when co2 has been good there is a solid stream that comes out. Ill up the bubbles today and see how the fist react. I never have any misting comming out of my inline co2 reactor so i must assume its 100% dissolved into my water.

I dont have a degas line on my inline rector. Does it matter if you degass it later in the day? Does the co2 somehow get replaced later in the day or does the pocket of air strickly stay co2?

One thing i did not ask is, do you guys use carbon? I use it and was wondering if it binds or removes any of the macros or micros?

This is normal



This is suspect and I agree regarding the speed of change.


This is also suspect.

With those rapid changes I suggest you purchase a correctly prepared KH standard because yours it definitely off. Making a KH standard requires a little more precision than just adding BS into distilled water.



I use Carbon (Matrix Carbon) and Purigen and experience no such issues

thanks for the updates mrkookm, i think ill order some 4dkh stuff to compare with mine so at least ill know if im right or wrong. and for what its worth i might as well since i will be using a drop checker for as long as i have my tank.

any way the stuff that redsea included is not bromie blue?

There's nothing wrong with using a lab prep'd KH standard, I use it and I highly suggest you do the same. You are too new to Co2 to have an inaccurate gauge for Co2 and as you can tell, it's not an easy task to get it right as a newb

I got mine from Billionz website, but there is another source over at Plantedtank.net (Orlando from Green leaf Aquariums).



I'm not familiar with their stuff but I would hope so. Maybe someone else can chime in with that confirmation.

I disagree about the KH standard. If your KH test kit is good, making your own by trial and error is an adequate way to get the 4 dKH water. Just be sure that you use distilled or deionized water. Any error in the KH of that water results in an equal error in the ppm of CO2. This is not a problem if you get within 10-20% of the right KH. After all, the best a drop checker can do is get you to within about 20 to 40 ppm of CO2, because very small errors in reading the color of the drop checker make a big difference in the CO2 ppm.

All we are doing with a drop checker is working around the problem that so many of us had using the pH/KH/CO2 chart to measure CO2 - that was where those measurements indicated that we had 100-150 ppm of CO2, but we still had bad BBA and no gasping fish, indicating that our actual ppm was closer to 10 than 100. Precision in measuring CO2 ppm just isn't available for less than $1000 or more.

I made my own 4KH water. I don't care that much about getting exact results - just so I can see if it's going up or down. The bba tells me if it's going TOO low....which consistently happens when I get to the darker green/blue green area. So I think my homemade preparation is fairly close. My plants tell me which color I want my drop checker...when it's greenish yellow, they grow like mad. That's all I care about. Good to change out your solution once in a while though, if in doubt. I haven't changed mine, though, in months, and it's still working just as when I first put it in.

I put carbon in my filter a few months back. I have no idea if it was coincidence or not, or what happened, but within days my hygrophila polysperma, which I haven't been able to kill for over a year of experimentation and messing around with co2, lights, ferts, etc., suddenly started developing strange new growth, it looks like parts of the leaves were actually chewed off (but they weren't). After a week or two, can't remember exactly, I put together that I added the carbon right around when this started. So I removed it. Since then, doing lots of ferts and upping co2, it's just now starting to come around and grow normally again. Coincidence, possibly, but I won't be attempting carbon again anytime soon. As a sidenote, my tap water has 0 GH and KH, and I have to add magnesium/calcium each water change for the plants. Not sure if there was something else there that was CLOSE to deficient (since my tap water is so devoid of anything), that the carbon maybe pushed over the edge into major deficiency? Anyway, I'm not risking it again. Also I should note that I decided to start using spring water instead of my tap water, it was really after I did the first water change with this that my hygro started coming around a bit more. Many people report having no problems with carbon, but many people also have fairly hard water that probably has a lot more stuff in it than mine does naturally.