u/EphemeralAttention

I'm trying to start up some chlorella cultures using aquarium fertilizer salts (I can mix these to make a very close facsimile of BBM), but I'm not planning to run any CO2 injection. If anyone else here has similarly running a culture without CO2, how did you alter the water chemistry to prevent pH spikes, nutrient precipitation, and flocculation of the chlorella? My first culture attempt did great at first but then failed rapidly (overnight), with all of the algae clumping and falling out of suspension into a dark green carpet on the bottom of the jar overnight. I'd like to figure out how to address the issue and prevent it for another attempt.

So, I have aphantasia, which means I can't picture things in my head. Because of that one thing I struggle with is trying to get a sense of how my scape is going to look after the plants grow in and the tank matures a bit (this is not helped at all by the number of plant sellers that plaster photos of emersed growth all over their site. 🙄

For everyone else, how do you approach planning out your design? Do you sketch it out, print out photos of plants and stitch them together ransom-note-style, or have you found any software that helps in this regard? Other than the tropica website, are there any other resources you use that have sample layouts and photos of how they might turn out? Just curious what everyone else is doing to see if there's any techniques i might be able to borrow to help my own process.

Has anyone actually used WeekAqua lights? I keep seeing posts here in Reddit claiming some pretty impressive improvements in how the tank looks vs how it looks when lit by <insert competitor brand> lights, but I've never heard of them before and am very suspicious that these posts are just a low effort bot spam marketing scheme.

Has anyone actually used them, and if so, what were your opinions on them? Include your Reddit name in your comment as proof you aren't a bot. 😂