Kim

Tried this morning. Skimming plus the no plunge trick got rid of nearly all of it and the last mouthful was drinkable for once.

One honest warning about the hand grinder route at espresso fineness. It is 40 to 60 seconds of real effort per 18g dose, every time, and if you make two drinks a morning some people quietly stop bothering after a month. If that sounds like you, weight the split toward a used electric grinder instead even if the burrs are slightly worse.

With crypts and swords as your main plants, root tabs, easily. Both of those are root feeders and in inert gravel they have nothing to pull from. A box of tabs is maybe 12 dollars and lasts a ten gallon most of a year if you are placing three or four at a time near the root masses.

The floaters are the exception since they feed from the water column, but floaters in a low tech tank grow on fish waste alone in my experience.

Every three to four months, marked on a calendar. Waiting for symptoms means you are already a month behind, since deficiency shows in new leaves that take weeks to appear.

Check how much light is actually hitting the sand rather than the top of the tank. Hairgrass is the plant most likely to fail from a tall tank or from stems shading it. If your floaters have thickened up in those eight weeks, that alone could explain the stall.

On the noise: a circulator is roughly fridge level once you put a lid on the container, and most of what people hear is water splashing at the surface rather than the motor. Foil over the top plus a folded towel under the container kills nearly all of it. I have run 36 hour cooks in a small flat without waking anyone.

Two things that are also normal and worry beginners: white streaks of coagulated protein in the bag juice, and the meat feeling oddly soft when you poke it through the bag. Both fine. The things that are not normal are a bag full of liquid that smells sour, or a bag that has come unsealed and taken on water.