Which Plants For My Spare 27 Litre... (low Light)

[DevUK]

Hi all. I have a Superfish Aqua-40, 27litre tank which I want to set up with some plants and a sand substrate. My problem is it only has an 11w white and blue light built into the hood. Doing the WPG calculation it gives me a measley 0.7 WPG! The tank dimensions are 11" wide x 12" x 12".

With some plant substrate under the sand and perhaps CO2 (maybe, not sure) will I be able to grow much?

 

[nry]

That tank should actually give you around 2wpg but that doesn't seem to work for small tanks, you need more wpg to get the same effect as you would from a larger tank. 27 litres is ~6 UK gallons, 11/6 is just under 2.

 

[lljdma06]

Hi all. I have a Superfish Aqua-40, 27litre tank which I want to set up with some plants and a sand substrate. My problem is it only has an 11w white and blue light built into the hood. Doing the WPG calculation it gives me a measley 0.7 WPG! The tank dimensions are 11" wide x 12" x 12".

With some plant substrate under the sand and perhaps CO2 (maybe, not sure) will I be able to grow much?

I think you might have done the calculations incorrectly. You have 27l, which is roughly ~7g. Divide 11W by 7g and you get roughly 1.5WPG (Wattage divided by gallons), which is certainly more than .7WPG. This is still very, very low light for a 7g. My 8g has 3 WPG and I treat it as a low-light. Nano tanks work differently regarding lighting and often you'll need more lighting to achieve the same results you would get in a larger tank with less WPG. In my signature there is an easy plant list, but you will be limited with your stemplants. Really pretty much H. polysperma and Egeria densa would be the way to go with stemplants and crypts, mosses, ferns, and anubias would be great choices as well. Expect extremely slow growth, but I see no reason why you can have a charming aquascape if you make the right plant choices.

IMO, you wouldn't need CO2 for this system, but the ferts under the substrate would be great. Just bear in mind that crypts really don't like to be in a compacted substrate, which sand is prone to do, so make sure you stir the sand around regularly. If you're not going to inject CO2, I'd personally go for good water circulation throughout the tank(which is good for CO2 systems too), but couple it with some descent surface agitation. I find that the increased surface agitation in my small tanks helps with gas exchange and I think this, in part, may help plant growth in my non-CO2 systems.

Good luck to you and have fun!

llj