Kim

Surface moisture is doing more damage than you think. Any water on the steak has to boil off before browning starts, which means the first 40 seconds of your sear were steaming, not searing, while the heat kept travelling inward. Pat dry, then pat dry again, then give it five minutes in front of a fan if you are being serious.

Existing spots will not go away on their own, the leaf is scarred. Nerite snails are the only thing I have found that genuinely rasps it off, and they will spend days on a single anubias leaf. Otherwise scrape gently with a fingernail on the older leaves and accept the worst leaves stay ugly until you trim them.

Second thing to rule out, and it takes 30 seconds: check whether your basket is pressurised. The dual wall ones with a single pinhole underneath produce a slow looking shot with fake crema and taste flat and sour no matter what you do. If you can see many tiny holes across the whole bottom, you are fine.

Finer normally slows a shot down, so chasing a shorter time by grinding finer is going in the wrong direction, and they already said finer made it worse.

The temperature was fine, the four hours was the problem. Sous vide is only forgiving on time for tough cuts with connective tissue to break down. Lean chicken breast has none of that, so past a couple of hours you are just slowly turning the muscle fibres mealy.

For an inch and a half breast at 145F I would pull at 1 hour 30, and I would not go past 2 hours 30 for texture reasons. If your schedule is unpredictable, drop the temperature to 140F, which buys you a bit more slack, or plan to chill the bag in ice water when the timer goes and reheat later.

Also cover the bath. A lid or even a sheet of foil cuts evaporation enormously, which on a twelve hour cook is the difference between a topped up bath and a dry circulator alarm at 3am.

Worth confirming that your grinder is really moving. Some burr grinders have several full turns of dead zone before the burrs actually close, and a lot of grounds retained inside means the first 15g out is your old setting. Purge 5g after any adjustment and see whether the numbers change.

Buying two bags on a rotation solves this permanently. Open bag A, buy bag B when A is half gone, so by the time you reach B it has rested a fortnight and you are never brewing anything under a week old.

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.