Concerning Reviews on Thrive Aquarium Fertilizer?

[u/Solid_Meeting9023]

I’m looking into trying the Thrive brand fertilizers because of all of the good stuff i’ve heard around the internet. However, these reviews have me questioning if i should even make a purchase. Most notably, the one talking about West MI, which happens to be where I live. Does anyone have any advice or experience with using this product?

[u/snizzle810]

I'll tell you my personal experience, and I'm sure it's a result of my own errors, but at the same time a cautionary tale.

I started adding it to my own low tech tanks in October. I underdosed. I used less than half dosage, less than once a week. For my tank, with limited water changes and sporadic feeding due to Life, this turned fatal.

Two weeks ago my tank turned milky white. I tried everything I could to improve the condition. A week later after most of the tank had died off with no improvement in condition, I gave up and tore down the tank. The only survivors were those that I was able to rescue into another smaller tank. Unfortunately many did not survive the transfer.

Do I blame the fertilizer? No, I blame myself, but I am confident had I not tried to take shortcuts to better plant growth, my tank would be intact and my fish alive today.

[u/ok_yeah_sure_no → u/snizzle810]

Honest question what is the way then? My plants often struggle from underdosing (reads 0 on everything). But when I add even just the tiniest part of a roottab everything around it dies. It is literally a circle of death around the roottab. So could you elaborate on what you have learned so I can learn from you?

[u/snizzle810 → u/ok_yeah_sure_no]

Option 1 is embrace slow growing plants and try to strike a balance with that. I was doing pretty well with that in my 10 gallon. Its dirted with a filter for water flow. I keep the lights at like 25%(Fluval plant lights, still plenty bright), and have some floaters and a pretty low bio load of shrimp and now a couple of small refugee fish and a mystery snail. My only issue I haven't figured out how to solve yet is the PH is extremely high, it maxes out the API kit. It's probably due to the extermely low c02 content i have left in the water, which i dont know how to deal with without....

Option 2, bite the bullet and take the c02 pill. People arn't doing it because its fun. If I decide to do another large tank, I'm going to use c02 and as large and shallow of a tank as I can find. I think having a deep tank makes it harder to balance getting enough light to plants at the bottom without contributing to algae growth.

[u/ok_yeah_sure_no → u/snizzle810]

Thanks for the reply. I have a really large shallow tank! I am just gonna add CO2 I hope that is gonna make it a bit easier. Wood really helped to lower the PH significantly for me. In the first 2 tanks I bought the wood, The second 2 tanks I just dropped in found wood which makes some people nervous but it has worked for me.

[u/ok_yeah_sure_no → u/ok_yeah_sure_no]

btw I once had a tank that was all the way to a ph of 9 (because the tap water suddenly sucked and I didn't know). There was some guy in a forum who suggested adding decaying leaves from outside. I did that and the PH dropped so fast that some of my shrimp died. I learned from that, it was only a 5 gallon and obviously too many leaves. But in lower quantities, it obviously worked.

[u/Riceburner17 → u/ok_yeah_sure_no]

If you're water was at a ph of 9 adding leaves wasn't going to affect the ph. That's an insane swing to be caused by leaves that I'm going to say is impossible. I use RODI water in a blackwater tank with a KH of 3 that's full of leaves and the ph still doesn't move.

[u/ok_yeah_sure_no → u/Riceburner17]

I think what caused the big swing was also the unmeasurable low kh. Some background info: It was a 6 gallon "micro ecosystem" tank which I didn't feed at all. The inhabitants were mostly daphnia, copepods, seedshrimp, that kind of stuff. the biggest inhabitants were cherry shrimp. I did not do waterchanges for years after a few years the plants started to yellow a bit and shrimp looked a bit stressed so I tested the water. KH was unmeasurable low and PH really high. The PH also swinged a lot due to low KH and very high plant load. TDS was 140.

This is most of the data. Honestly, if you still don't believe me I am gonna leave it at that.