Building an over-engineered Dutch aquascape
This is the ongoing record of a nineteen-species 90P built around automation, instrumentation and a habit of measuring the things I would otherwise guess. The tank is unfinished. The record is not.
Follow the journeySee the tank now
PAR Survey Findings
I bought a PAR meter because I thought my six-year-old light was wearing out. About four weeks after planting, the plants near the ends looked less colored up than the ones under the middle of the fixture. That is an impression formed early in a grow-in, on fresh aquasoil, while everything was still adapting, and it is what sent me to buy a meter rather than a conclusion I could defend.
Nineteen underwater readings showed something else. The original Solar RGB still produces strong center output after roughly six years of use, but PPFD distribution across this 90P is highly uneven. Nothing in the tank reads below the working range for what is planted there.
Two qualifications belong with that, and the survey states both. Every reading is taken at canopy height rather than at the substrate, which is several inches closer to the light. And the working ranges those readings are compared against are this project’s own targets, because the four most cited sources disagree about what a planted tank needs by up to five times, and the only per-plant table among them was produced with a lighting manufacturer.
That result changed the project from a tank dashboard into a record of decisions that could be checked, and it stopped me buying a light that would not have fixed anything.
24-Hour pH Profile
Every published figure on this site is drawn from the same record. Below is the most recent complete 24-hour cycle: pH sampled at approximately five-minute intervals and averaged hourly, with the photoperiod indicated. Values are read from the database at request time, not transcribed.
The software keeping this record · Why pH drop and not a ppm figure
Current Status
Current
Grow-in, shaping the first Dutch streets and establishing repeatable maintenance
The tank is through the early establishment phase and the standing PAR survey is now reproducible. The current work is less about adding hardware and more about shaping the Dutch layout, making fertilization repeatable, and watching how plant form and coloration change as the canopy rises.
Working on now
- Establish the Dutch street shapes through repeated trimming
- Make fertilization repeatable
Next actions
- Document the next major structural trim
- Repeat PAR after meaningful canopy growth
Latest entry: Two meters, one water, two answers
Instrumentation
The aquarium can run without most of what surrounds it. The extra instrumentation exists because it produces a record: temperature, pH, conductivity, outlet states, maintenance, photographs and hand measurements that can be read together instead of remembered separately.