You want to use as much pressurised CO2 in your tank as possible without causing distress to your live stock. CO2 will make or break your tank and I want you to give you the confidence to use it as it should be used in a high tech CO2 tank. In some cases your CO2 levels will be A LOT more than you think. If you have no live stock you can really have some fun and crank it up. You'll be amazed at how well your plants will do when you're let loose...
Most of you are using drop checkers now which is great and just what I have been advising. But many of you get too hung up on the colours - remember the colours are only indicating a pH level change (they don't really measure CO2). However when your drop checker is showing green (pH of 6.8), you 'probably' have good CO2 levels, but I would like you to take it one step further because in some cases your drop checker may need to show yellow. This is fine as long as your fish/shrimp are fine. If they're showing any signs of distress, lower your CO2 levels.
You really need to maximise the amount of CO2 you can pump into your tank so it will take a bit of playing around but the effects are tremendous and your tank can look like the inside of a champagne glass.
2 comments
Agreed. I’m currently running at around pH 6.8.
Hi,I would just like to say,your comment about pushing drop checkers into the yellow are bang on.when i started injecting co2 I struggled for a while using a checker so I started testing hardness and ph. This showed me that there was no where near enough co2 going in so I cranked it up,hey presto!the checker turned yellow .I was concerned about overdosing at night and didn’t want to just turn it off because of the ph swings so I got a ph controller to do all the work for me,now my tank runs between 6.8 and 6.9 day and night with happy neons ,shrimp,snails and plants. If you inject co2 you really should get one,best thing I ever did. Great site with brilliant advice by the way. Thanks.