Regardless, however, I expect your calcium/magnesium hardness is the culprit. Do you see any cloudiness when adding bicarbonate? If you have to frequently add bicarbonate, you may be using to much CO 2. If you experience problems growing certain plants, that may also suggest excessive hardness, since many plants prefer soft to only mildly hard water. You may want to test your water for calcium/magnesium and alkalinity. Even without the addition of Flourish Iron™, do you sometimes see a white (chalky) film on the surface of the water? If so, that would support the presence of high calcium/magnesium. I suspect that your water is exceptionally hard (contains a lot of calcium/magnesium) and that you may also have a high alkalinity (carbonate content), and that the addition of Flourish Iron™ (by an ion competing mechanism) pushes the calcium/magnesium carbonate in the water beyond saturation, resulting in the precipitation of calcium/magnesium carbonates. It is also unlikely to be a direct carbonate precipitate. Since the cloudiness was caused by a white precipitate, as you confirmed by testing, it is not an iron precipitate. Flourish Iron™ does not normally cause cloudiness unless used excessively, and even then the cloudiness is very mild. Sizes: 50 mL, 100 mL, 250 mL, 500 mL, 2 L, 4 LĪ: This is a peculiar response. In addition, ferrous gluconate has the added bonus of being a source of carbon. In fact, ferrous gluconate is better suited to foliar feeding than is iron-EDTA owing to the relatively weaker iron-gluconate bonding vs. Despite what other manufacturers may intimate, gluconate is not harmful to plants or fish. Plants are able to much more easily derive a benefit from Flourish Iron™ because ferrous iron gluconate is already in the ferrous form so they do not expend energy reducing it. Our approach is different in that we use a complex (not chelate) of ferrous iron in Flourish Iron™.įlourish Iron™ is a highly concentrated (10,000 mg/L) ferrous iron gluconate supplement. (1) Iron-EDTA bonding is very strong, thus very little of the iron will be available to the plants over a given time frame and (2) Physiological energy must be expended by the plant in order to extract the ferric iron from EDTA-iron and then convert (reduce) it to the ferrous form. While this does keep it soluble, it has a couple of drawbacks with respect to foliar uptake of iron. To overcome this precipitation, competing products employ a chelate of ferric iron: iron-EDTA. Once this occurs, foliar absorbtion becomes impossible. Ferric iron, however, is only soluble below a pH of around 5.5 but if the pH is higher than 5.5, which more than likely it will be in a planted aquarium, the ferric iron will become insoluble and precipitate, settling in the root zone. Ferrous iron, the preferred iron form and is soluble in water at any pH. The iron will be in one of two oxidation states: ferrous having a +2 charge, or ferric having a +3 charge. When choosing an iron supplement, it is important to know the distinction between the two forms of iron. If the deficiency is severe and prolonged, each new leaf emerges lighter in color than the preceding leaf. Because plants use iron to produce chlorophyll, a lack of iron results in chlorosis, or yellowing, of the younger leaves. Therefore, deficiency symptoms appear first on new or young leaves. This means that plants cannot divert iron from older leaves to new ones.
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