Hi and Welcome to the Forum
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As for lighting I have a really bright fluorescent daylight (its at least 3ft long) directly on top of my tank.
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I am confused, a 3' light sitting on a little 5 gallon tank, or a light hanging from the ceiling over the tank?
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a sugar/yeast CO2 soda bottle, bubbling through an air wand.
Second, at night i turn on an air pump about 1/2 hour before i turn off the light and turn the pump on again 1/2 hour after I turn the lights back on.
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The air pump running during the lights on time will gassoff (remove) your
CO2. Pushing the CO2 gas through an air wand is probably the least efficient way to dissolve CO2 in a tank. I would revisit that.
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First do I need a heater in my tank? The building i work in shuts down the A/C at night and on the weekends and the temperatures sometimes gets into the mid 80F/30C (i'm in hawaii its hot here) on the weekends and of course when the A/C kicks in the water temp drops to about 65-62F degrees (22 to about 20 cel). I have a small heater that is also a power head to circulate water and its set to about 80F.
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If you are really talking about a 65 - mid 80s swing, and a five gallon tank, you are talking adverse conditions for a tropical fw tank. You need to find a way to keep the temp stable in the high seventies to eighty.
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I was told by the LPS dude to take the charcoal out of my whisper filter and to only use the filter bags. I've been doing this for a few weeks, and clean the filter bag during my weekly water change and new filter bags soak in the tank for a week before I throw out the old bag.
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I have no Idea what the LFS guy had in mind, but running your filter without charcoal is perfectly OK. Why are you soaking the new bag in the tank?
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Before I put the heater in August, the plants were flourishing now the growth has slowed down, it wasn't an immediate slow down. And honestly I didn't notice it until another coworker pointed out that the plants aren't "as green" as before. I've tried adding some liquid fertalizer but it didn't help the plants in the tank and just made this green hair like (on plants) and brown algae (on glass) grow so I stopped that about a week ago. The fox tail seems to have more stems than leaves now and the anachris stem sections seem to have gotten long and spindly between leafy sections.
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Bottom Line: You are not providing the conditions they need to flourish.
Plants have the ability to do what is called "luxury uptake" of their essential nutrients. You buy them, put them in the tank and they look great "flourish" as you called it. Then they gradually go into decline as they have to depend on the conditions you have provided.
No rocket science here, as Pop's says, if the plants are in decline then they are not getting what they need to flourish.
The symptoms you describe are light related, I do not think you have enough. The plants are declining you add nutrients to the water column and the algae do even better while the plants continue to fail.
We can be reasonably sure, with your injection method, that the CO2 is not anywhere near the levels needed to be of any help.
Lets tackle the issues in order.
1. I have some concerns about the temperature fluctuations
2. Clear up the light issue for us, read some of the threads in the planted freshwater sub forum on light requirements for a planted tank.
3. Toss the plants you have now, you will not be able to save them and their continued decline is going to make the algae worse.
4. We can get to the CO2 later you do not really need it now.
As we go forward I think we should deal with one issue at a time, the shotgun approach, a brief touch on this and that, leaves a lot to be desired
Regards,
Jay
