Posted 22 March 2011 - 07:06 PM
For the plants I mentioned, a good quality light bulb around 6000-10000 Kelvin will work,
you can also use Hagen Powerglo which is 18000k, but has good ranges for plants as well and makes fish have great colours.
You will want around 0.25-0.5W per Litre if you can find it, you shouldn't need anymore light than that for the plants I mentioned, anymore you may find you get alot of algae, rapidly.
If your using T5HO, you might be able to get away with 0.25-0.3W per litre, if your using normal T8 or T5HE (also known as LO) then 0.5W per litre would be better. I wouldn't exceed 0.5W per litre with T5HO, you may find that Anubias and Java Fern don't grow quickly enough to soak up the extra light vs nutrient load. Mosses will grow quicker under more light. But quicker means more maintainence, as well as more likely to have algae issues.
You won't need CO2 for any of those plants, although some will do better with it, it isn't neccessary.
I find good quality light makes more difference, you can also add a small amount of micro fertilizer (Seachem Flourish) once a week this will help the plants establish.
you don't need to dose macro nutrients (EG: Nitrogen or phosphates)
Liquid carbon suppliment probably won't be that helpful with these particular plants. (Like Seachem Flourish Excel or Dino Spit)
You can attach moss to rocks, or if you have a foam wall you can thumb tack the foam to the wall, once the moss attaches after 4-6 weeks you can remove the thumb tack as it may begin to rust, i try to make sure the thumb tack is not made with or from copper.
if you don't have a foam wall, you can get a $3 roll of gutter guard from bunnings, and make a square up that covers a wall, then add moss across the whole square, then put a piece of mesh over it (so a moss sandwich) and zip tie it all together, then simply use suction caps to hold it on the wall, after 2-4 weeks the moss will start to come out of the mesh, after 3-4 months the mesh should be hidden by the moss.
Juls
