Greta

Mine did exactly this for eighteen days after a repot and then stopped as if someone flipped a switch. I did nothing except leave it alone and resist the urge to keep intervening, which was the hard part.

On density, cuttings are the cheap way to get there. Half a dozen pothos cuttings from one plant cost nothing and will root straight into the background. There is no reason to plant sparsely when the plants are free.

One clarification since people mix these up. White fuzzy strands on wood are almost always harmless saprophytic fungus. What you would actually worry about is fuzzy patches on a living animal, black growth spreading across the glass and silicone, or a persistently sour smell from the substrate. None of those describe what you have.

A slight earthy mushroom smell in a new tank is fine and expected.

I want to gently push back on the framing rather than the observation. When people have tried to pin this down carefully with probes and a defined endpoint, the results scatter badly, and a lot hangs on what you count as frozen.

A crust on the surface is not the same as a frozen block. Hot water often crusts earlier because the surface sheds heat fast while the interior is still warm, but total time to a solid tray can go the other way. If you repeat this, decide your endpoint first, and I would use something like a skewer will not push through the centre.

None of that makes what you saw wrong. It means the interesting question is which endpoint and which freezer, not whether water is breaking thermodynamics.

Quarantine it now if you have not already. Four months in the house means anything it arrived with has had time to walk to the neighbours. Check every plant within arm's reach, especially any with tight growth points, and keep the monstera in a different room until you have gone two clear weeks with zero sightings.

The spoon under a tap is in the same category. It shows something real about a jet clinging to a curved surface, but it is not a wing, and presenting it as one causes more confusion than it clears.

Leave a gap rather than sealing it completely. Total coverage gives you stagnant air, condensation running down the glass and the fungal problems people complain about a month later. The goal is slowing the exchange, not stopping it.

This is the correct reframing. I know people who can derive a t test and still cannot tell you why a study with 30 self selected participants means very little. The reasoning skill and the computation skill are separate things.

That works right up until it fails while you are away and the whole house has no DNS and nobody can tell you why the wifi is broken. Fixing the writes is a one afternoon job that you only do once.

Lighting matters too, embarrassingly. With the sun in front of you it is obvious, with the sun behind you the same fog is nearly invisible. I chased this for a week before realising I walked east on one day and west on the other.

True, though I would still fix it properly. Spin up current does not go away just because the monitor did, it just fits inside the budget on a good day and not on a warm one.

I will make the case for LECA, because it is not just about weight.

It is faster to install, there is no cutting, and the irregular surface holds humidity and hosts microfauna in a way a sealed void does not. In a tall tank where you will be misting heavily, that buffer is worth something. It also cannot sag, and a badly supported egg crate under six inches of wet substrate does sag.

That said, if your cabinet is ordinary and the tank is tall, weight is a real argument and I would probably still go false bottom in your specific case. Just do not treat LECA as the amateur option, it is a genuine tradeoff.

The wait until spring advice is really a proxy for wait until the plant is growing. If your pothos has pushed a new leaf in the last month, it is growing and the calendar is irrelevant. If it has done nothing since September and is also dropping leaves, then wait, because a plant with no root growth cannot colonise new soil and the soil just sits wet.