It's a good idea to start your CO2 roughly an hour or so before your lights come on. The reason for this is simple.
When your lights come on, you want your plants to hit for floor running. What I mean by that is you want your plants to begin growing instantly. As the CO2 build up over the 60 minutes before the lights are on your levels begin to rise (remembering the carbon dioxide has been off for maybe 16 hours) and your plants take complete advantage of this. Good levels of CO2 and lighting (don't forget your fertilisers) = happy planted aquarium.
By contrast, having your CO2 come on when your lights start up, you delay the growing process as it takes roughly 1 hour for CO2 levels to hit that perfect 30ppm level.
In addition, turn your CO2 off 1 hour before your lights go off. There will be sufficient CO2 in your tank for that time for your plants to continue growing.
When do you turn your CO2 on and off?
36 comments
just ordered Neutro+ and also Neutro CO2
many thanks
Hi
I have a 300l tank quite heavily planted with jbl co2 system. have set up timers as you suggest today, and drop checker shows green, co2 bubble counter is now on around 2 bubbles per second, have green hair algae on plants? what am I doing wrong?
I have huge problems with green spot algae in my tank. After reading a few of these articles on here iv reduced the lighting from 9 hours to 8 hours and iv moved the drop checker down to the bottom left corner rather then top right.
The main problem i seem to have with my Co2 drop checker is it always seems to be blue to dark green on a morning (cant really tell what it is) and then by the time the afternoon comes, its yellow.
Lights come on at 10:00am and go out at 6:00pm now but i did have this before and granted green spot algae was less but i still had it appearing after a week.
Co2 comes on 2 hours before the lights and goes out 2 hours before the lights turn off as well running roughly around 1.5 bps using an atomizer.
im afraid if i move the drop checker to the bottom left corner of the tank it will most certainly be blue and increasing the Co2 amount will end up being too high for the fish?
It’s a case of trial and error Craig, but if your dropper is blue in the morning then I suggest your water distribution isn’t up to scratch. Improve that and it should go green quicker.
If and only if that doesn’t have the desired effect then you need more CO2. But remember 95% of all algae related issues are down to not enough CO2 – simple as that.
Hi, I’ve just set co2 system up on my tank. I don’t put the lights on til around 5 til 11pm because the tank is in a well lit room next to loads of windows. But I’ve been running the co2 from 10am til 10pm. Do I need to have have the lights on earlier.