Cheap plants, less nitrate! POTHOS
- Thread starter F1 VET
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I tinted the back with g5 (5% visibility) but still
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That should help...I just put pothos into my tank the other day, I'm hoping they take off soon
Got some pothos (or what I believe to be pothos) from my uncle's pond tonight. What you guys think?
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I tried a plant in each one of my 450 gallon ray tanks. Im seeing no difference in nitrates so i will be pulling them out. Maybe for my bioload i would need like 10 plants in each tank to see a difference...
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How do you know if your pothos are taking to the tank water? The roots on mine is a bit darker then when I pulled it from the flower pot.
Here's a calculation I did for another thread when someone asked how about a "pothos to gallon" ratio. As you surmised, what you need is a "pothos to food (protein)" ratio. If you can calculate the amount of food you put in the tanks weekly, you can determine the ~effect of one plant. Of course, the plant needs to be actively growing to have an effect. I also noticed that in a drip system thread you seemed to indicate you drip 50 to 250 gpd. If you average 150 gallons per day per tank, you'd have to add a lot of food to the tank to see an effect.
The way I approach it is pothos per grams of ammonia. So, conservatively, 1 moderate sized plant = 6 grams or ammonia per week. Amount of protein fed is therefore the driver and not the tank size. Tanks with a few small fish will need much fewer pothos than the same sized tank with many large fish, especially if the small fish are adults and the large fish are still being fed for more growth.
You can do a rough conversion of the food to nitrates by converting the amount of food fed to dry weight, multiplying the dry weight by % of protein, then converting the protein to ammonia.
1 lb of food = 453 grams. You can convert it to dry weight by looking at the moisture content. 10% water content means that 453 grams gross is ~408 grams dry. If protein is 50%, then 408 grams dry has ~204 grams of protein. Protein is around 16% nitrogen (it varies) and nitrogen is around 82% ammonia, so 204*.16*.82 ~ 27 grams of ammonia.
Do that in grams. Calculate the amount of grams of ammonia added between WC and divide by 6. (Note that this assumes you do weekly WC. If you do 2 WC per week, divide by 3, if one WC every 2 weeks, divide by 12, etc.) That is approximately the number of moderate sized pothos plants the tank can support, as long as every thing else is kept constant. Moderate is an approximation for a plant with ~ 8 leaves. Faster growth means more consumption so a slow growing pothos may not consume as much as a smaller fast growing pothos.
So for example, if one were feeding 3 lbs of 10% moisture, 50% protein food weekly and doing WC weekly: 3*453*.9*.5*.16*.82=81 grams of ammonia / 6 = 13.5 pothos. Let's assume there are no other items removing nitrates (other than WC.) In that case, 1 pothos, might not make much of an impression.