Cardinal Sinner:
Before you go out and spend your hard earned cash on a pressurised system, be sure that your tank setup justifies the outlay.
Apart from Co2, some of the things you'll need to think about are ........
What type of planted tank do you want ?
Do you want a 'high tech/high light/high fert' (and usually high maintenance)tank, or a lower/medium tech tank. You can have a very nice lower / medium tech planted tank, but your choice of plants will be slightly different...... not worse, just different !
Have a look in this months Practical Fishkeeping Magazine ..... there's a very good article on it
If you are going for a lower tech planted tank, you probably wont need quite so much CO2, so the Nutrafin kits (or a couple of 2ltr pop bottles) might be enought to give the plants a boost.
How much lighting do you have & how much do you want ?
Usually referred to in Watts Per Gallon (US Gallons). For a high tech tank you'll need over 2WPG, thats over 100w of lighting on your tank !
If you bought your tank with a hood and build in lighting unit .... it's probably less than 2 wpg, so you'd need to make some changes, this can be expensive !
How many plants and what type ?
From your tank pic it looks like most of your plants are attached to bogwood etc - Many of these types of plant will do very will in lower light (the ones in your pic look quite healthy), and there are others that do will grow in lower light, they just tend to grow slower.
Have a look here (
Tropica ) and you'll see the lighting requirements for the plants.
Some types of Hygrophilia polysperma, Anubias and Cryptocoryne are all options
What type of fertilisation will you use ?
Some high tech methods (EI) can require 50% water changes per week .... that's quite a few buckets on a 50gallon tank !
None of the above is intended to make things complicated or put you off .... just to help you make sure you've got a plan for the tank. Hope it helps
Cheers
Al
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