Cory

I find that the crinum and tiger lotus want to feed from the substrate, so I use root tabs there. Water sprite wants to eat from the water column. The fertilizer listed doesn't have nitrogen so you'll need lots of nitrogen going in from fish food to keep the water sprite happy.

I have found this in the settings and have disabled it 😉 the users can now ask questions without future harassment via email.

@Bailey_C here is how I grow brine shrimp to adults.

looks like a good find. Now to see how much they bow filled with water

It breaks down faster than harder woods like mopani. If you have plecos they'll chew on it. Sometimes cholla wood is called pleco chews. But for the price, usually you get your value out of it.

In my testing I've seen a snail shell or two in the heaters. Nothing that ever caused a problem like you're saying. My guess is that it was a chain reaction. Snail gets in and dies, gives off the foul smell, attracts more snails, they die, give off smell, attracts more etc. Usually a rinse and a little bit of time gets rid of snail smell. They smell the worst when they die.

Each one is different. They try new things, and change each event. Different vendors show up. So lets say 40% is local. A business in Florida, isn't likely to show up in Dallas, but may show up in Chicago. I still believe if you're local, it's absolutely worth a 1 day visit. Shopping, speakers, stuff to look at etc. You get out of your house and get to nerd out. If it's a flight, and hotel etc. That's much harder to justify for most people.

interesting, is this bike inflater thing a common thing?

If you're trying to maximize, you'd figure out your dose, and then dose daily. Really you'd want to dial in your dosing based on what your plants etc. It's a bit like saying, I have a 2000 sq ft house. How much food should I buy for the week. It depends more on, how often are people are eating at home. How many people are eating a home? Are they teenage boys or elderly? This is why there is a 1-2x a week to start. From there you adapt based on what the water parameters are saying. Might takes 3-4 weeks to figure it out.

It comes with extra o ring seals in the box. I've never had to replace one yet in 2 years. The working pressure is from essentially 0 to higher than would ever be used on an aquarium. I'd have to dig way back in the emails, the operating pressure can go high so you can run up to 6 outlets. We invested extra to have this ability.

Unfortunately the app developers of the review software still haven't fixed the problem. We've been chasing them on this. Other things still get updated while we wait on others to fix their internal bugs.

TLDR. People change way too much water too often. They are fanatical about changing 25-50% of water per week to remove nitrates. Then they dose easy green to replace the nitrates. People are glossing over the fact that food they feed, other products they add etc are adding minerals and nutrients to the water and would rather blindly change water and dose instead of balancing a system and supplementing what their aquarium already has with how much it needs from the easy green.

Is there anything else plugged in, in these tanks? A stray current could possibly cause this? I haven't seen this before. And to have it isolated to those tanks, something must be doing this as the odds of 2 out of the insane amount of heaters we have sold being defective for you. While the chance isn't zero, odds are something about these tanks in general is causing it. Gotta keep playing detective.

Yeah, chances are it'll work.

For paracleanse. do a treatment, wait 2 weeks do another treatment and observe. This gets the eggs that hatch out inside of the fish in the second treatment.

I recommend Crushed coral as well. I find aragonite to slow to react. Takes much more to accomplish the same effect. Also equilibrium affects hardness but not pH.

Sounds like you've sought the advice of a bunch of things and are now confused. If you were standing here in person, I'd ask, why do you need to do all of this? You have live plants, why do you need to cycle the tank? You're seeking an ecosystem, plants consume waste. Then I'd show you a video on cycling an aquarium with plants. Then I'd say, it's a great idea to quarantine new fish, once your plants are thriving and processing waste for you, using the meds will be much easier as even if the beneficial bacteria that has established suffers some setback, the plants would pick up the slack. Btw, the plants brought in the bacteria you needed. Then I'd say, i'd wait 3+ months to add the shrimp so that you have a well established layer of mulm and micro organisms to support the shrimp between your feedings as they like to eat all the time. The fish poop will establish this. Lastly on which dechlorinator, pick one. We don't sell fritz guard because most people don't need an aloe conditioner. It is 5x less potent than fritz complete. I've personally never encountered any problems between any medication and dechlorinator. I've used them all a bunch. Lots of companies like to scare you into only using their chemicals etc. Work on growing plants for a month or so, when you're getting decent growth, and have stable water add some fish. I'd probably wait till you came back into the store and mention how the fluval stratum is going to be fighting you on pH and you might want to use some crushed coral to combat that as it'll continually drag down your pH.

I haven't done a salad spinner, however I have seen a washing machine dedicated to sponge filters. No soap, just warm water and spinning them dry.

In my experience it spreads itself. A video will come out in the next month showing that. You can trim and plant stems as well, but I find it to be frustrating as it doesn't root very easy with this method. From the picture, I think it might be struggling to get enough light. You may want to trim the plant, each time you trim, you're training it to stay low and it spreads faster from what I've seen.

Thanks for mentioning it, I have our developers looking into it.

Ours are another source, and ours are actually a higher hate rated guaranteed to us, but we put lower on the can because we want to under promise and over deliver. I doubt most places are doing their cold storage correctly because its quite costly and in general, the cost of eggs has gone up a decent amount over the last few years. We pay to get the highest hatch rates possible. People like Dean rely on these eggs every day and so do his fry. We extensively tested vs every other major egg we could find. Dean has been hatching brine shrimp daily for 40 years. We simply used him to make sure we had the best thing on the market. We focus on best, not on cheapest. In a day in age where we have less time than ever, a batch of brine shrimp needs to work. A failed hatch is sometimes the difference between life and death of a spawn of fish. Something we don't take likely. It's unfortunately you're not having luck with the other company, I never want another hobbyist to have wasted money. I do hope you find a good outlet for them. I wish we could bring the price of our eggs down, but really we are fighting the price going up. If we can find a way to scale it down, we will pass it along to customers.

Chances are, almost any light would grow the plants you currently have. That being said, the color of light makes a big difference in how fish look. The amount of light becomes more important with higher light plants

The simple answer is, the online store and retail store are one system, they share inventory etc.

I'd test the water, as long as there isn't ammonia or nitrite you're fine. Some tanks react differently, but usually I find once your bacteria has been through the med trio once it's more "stable" if you need to do it in the future. I actually think it just comes down to how established the tank is overall the conditions before treatment. A neglected tank could have a different reaction than one that is serviced regularly etc. For your tanks, I'd say it's just a bit of bacteria die off, and the white is the bloom of the new bacteria.