Hello,

This is where my 75 gallon excel tank is as of today. This was taken after a small pruning. The hygro and wisteria on the right were growing out of the tank. The pictures aren't great due to my stupid auto focus lol. Any suggestions on scaping, or what I can do to grow the more demanding plants. I have a lot of weeds now which I am fine with but some plants people call easy are giving me trouble

I want to fill up the front but have been unable to get anything small to grow well. I tryed dwarf sags on two separate occasions but one group stopped growing (When I first started tank lots of stuff stopped growing lol) and a second group developed a black color around the edge of the leaves. I'm not sure if I burnt them with excel or if it was BBA or what. I still have some sags in there in the right corner and they are multiplying so we'll see.

I just ordered some baby tears, and micra umbrossium(<-Spelling?) so we'll see if I can manage to grow either of those. I also had some troubles growing L. Repens. Theres a small plant in the front left corner but that's all that is left. I usually run 160W of T12's but cut that down to 80W because I'm only there one day a week now until the construction is done. Surprisingly the plants have been growing very well since I turned the lights down.

Another small issue is my rotala seem to get brown gunk, I'm guessing diatoms, on the leaves. It may also be die back because when I order my plants I think they usually get grown in a high light high CO2 tank and then have to adapt to my lower tech tank.

Dosing schedule is:

1/2 teaspoon of Equalibrium
1/2 teaspoon of KNO3
1/4 teaspoon of KH2PO4
8 ml kent plant nutrition (switching to TMG this week)
and unfortunately right now only excel at weekly water changes. I'd say about 60ml I use the cap on the 2 liter bottle so not real sure.

The dosing was loosely based on the excel tank article. I try to go a little overboard on the nutrients and I do about 60% water changes weekly.

Any suggestions for improvement are welcome.
What I have grown succesfully is largely attributed to this forum so thank you!

80 watts is barely enough for a 75 gallon tank, and it will not be enough for any but low light plants. That may be your problem for now. 160 watts would be enough, but I doubt that you have reflectors for those bulbs, so that isn't anything like an AH Supply light kit with excellent reflectors. My Excel bottle tells me to dose a capful of Excel daily in a 45 gallon tank, so that would say you need about 2 capfuls a day for a 75 gallon tank. This will give you a slow growth, relatively low light tank. If you want to make the plants grow faster, and grow more demanding plants, I suggest buying an AH Supply light kit, at least a 96 watt kit, for example. Then, if you use presssurized CO2 you will be up to speed.

Do you think the 96 watt AH kit will give me better usable light then the 160 Watts of t-12? I would actually probably go with two 55 watt kits since the tank is 4 foot. The kits are pretty cheap so if you think it could give me better growth on some of my plants I would be all about it.

I turned the lights down just to discourage algae as I can't really maintain it how I would like right now.

I am pretty certain that about 100 watts of AH Supply lights using their reflectors is more effective than 160 watts of T12 bulbs without reflectors. As I recall, they find that their kits produce around 1.7 times as much light as bare bulbs do, and the compact flourescent bulbs themselves are more efficient than T12 bulbs.

I'd stick with this routine for now, once you are there more, say 3x a week or more, then add more light.
Wisteria will do well for you here.

Add plenty.

Regards,
Tom Barr

New pics of my tank. I changed some plants out and got different wood. I'm at home full time now so am planning on devoting some more time to it. I'll be done with school this summer and would like to upgrade then but we'll see :-) Student loans will have to paid first i imagine :-(

I think it can be challenging to grow many ground cover plants with low light. They usually are more shaded than the rest of the plants, and some of them will start growing taller to get up to the light if the lighting isn't high enough for them so they turn out not being ground cover anymore. For some good low light foreground plants to use instead you could try a bunch of smaller crypts, they should grow fine in that lower light and won't get tall although they will be slow growing.

Hi Crazymidwesterner,

Looks great. I wish more would post their results using Excel only tanks (including myself, maybe soon). Please keep posting your results.