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Cory

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Posts posted by Cory

  1. Well fertilizer is like maintaining a bank account. If you want to keep 20 dollars in your bank account, and you're putting in $1 in each week, but spending 1 dollar each week you'll never get there. So I myself dose heavily to get to 20. Then I can monitor how much the tank is consuming. If we find out we are spending $7 a week, I'm gonna need to make sure I put $7 back in each week. Water changes would be like giving money away to charity. Giving 50% of whatever I have away each week. If I start with $20, spend $7, I'm left with $13. I give half away to charity. I'm left with $6.50. Now I spend $7 this week and am out of money. Without the water change/charity i'd be at $13, and have an additional week to bring in the difference.

     

    I find most people try to just put in the right chemicals, when they could be looking at their ecosystem and tweaking it. An example would be with potassium you could work in some banana baby food into repashy. Or if you had pacus, just feed them bananas. Now this isn't 100% practical for everyone, but if I had a tank that was light on phosphate, and high in nitrates, i'd make sure I was feeding more flake food and less frozen food.

    In another thread, someone said they were dosing micro nutrients twice a week for their planted tank, this is why I let the brine shrimp water into my tanks as i use marine reef salt which is full of micronutrients. While Dean, rinses his brine shrimp, and doesn't want ammonia and the nutrients because of his small plant loads, I want the opposite knowing that if I rinse all of that off, I am dosing more fertilizer and other nutrients to make up for it.

    I try to blend the line between what nature does and what is visually acceptable to me. A rotting banana  in the corner of my tank won't look very good, but  in nature it would work. Every aquarium is different, even in the same fish room. I enjoy tweaking that system to be optimal while "adding" the least amount of raw chemicals.

    I strive to put the least amount of things into my aquariums. Even in the ponds that have never had a water change, they've gotten Easy green maybe 5 times in the 6-7 months they've been setup. There is tons of guppy grass in there and they produce a ton of fish. However at the warehouse, I dose fertilizer daily as that is what it takes to provide healthy plants without fish to possibly bring disease. In my 800g, currently there is only fish poop from the fish from before, no fertilizer in over a year. However once I add fish and push the plants to grow more than they are, I'll start dosing lightly as plant bio mass will increase. 

  2. 1 hour ago, MickS77 said:

    If you really want to crank up the Nitrate I would get a bag of dry Nitrogen fertilizer and dose that too.

    In my experience, Upping just nitrogen will just expose other deficiencies. For most people this is a water change issue.

     

    For reference my ponds with thick plant growth have never had a water change.

     

    The goal is a balance of nutrients, simply changing water or adding one specific macronutrient doesn’t solve the equation for most people. A tempered approach of studying how your tank is getting there works well long term as then you understand how the tank is running. 
     

    my first step would be getting nitrates to 20ppm and the. Watching how many days it takes to consume that. From there you can adjust lighting, water changes, dosing and plant types to get the desired result.

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  3. 14 hours ago, Devlin Mc said:

    dude this is awesome! now that its really booming after 30 days and the numbers are only going up by thr day, at about what day do you think youll need to start feeding? or do you think the foliage breaking down will sustain until the winter?

     

    also this is the nerd in me tryna maximize outcomes, do you think there are things you could feed to maybe gut load them in a sense? like feed them nicer things than foliage waste or do you think it wouldn't really matter much for the nutritional transfer from brine to fish.

    You can definitely maximize here, but for me I like it to be super easy. I sprinkle fry food and green water in there to feed them.

  4. From my testing over the years, there is a chemical in a lot of the common dechlorinators that kills the daphnia. This is why "aged" water is recommended. I don't know which specific chemical it is. It would be worth someone figuring that out I suppose as new clean water would be much easier with the right dechlorinator. 

  5. For me I think it's algae scraping. This is why I moved to way more ponds. Feeding, trimming plants, changing water, sponge filters, all fine. I think I'm still traumatized from like 10 years of hundreds of tanks at least once a week in a fish store setting 😛

  6. These forums have moderators, and over time we'll be adding to our current staff with volunteer moderators. The majority of moderation will happen automatically. Depending on the Rank of forum poster you are, is how much weight your actions will have. 

    As an example, someone who has been around a very long time on the forum, when they flag a post as inappropriate. It will be removed from public view until a moderator can take a look at it. If you are new to the forum, your vote may count as One of 3 or 5 votes needed to perform the same action. Likewise to avoid trolling, someone who is a long in good standing member, would need more votes than someone who has been on the forum for a couple of days. 

    This removes a lot of the day to day moderation tasks and places it in the hands of the forum users. As a group we can decide if something has gone too far off track. While I hope this is rare, there will always be disagreements that pop up and might get a bit heated and people need to cool down. 

    You'll notice that upon sign up, users have to accept the terms of service now. Also we have guidelines on the menu for posters to follow. This will evolve over time and just because something isn't there, doesn't mean it won't be against the rules. At the time of creating this post, I realize I forgot to say nudity isn't tolerated. Clearly this would be against our rules but wasn't posted yet. 

    Here are some of the Rank Levels, these can change if I need to adjust, also please don't "chase" these ranks by spamming comments. We have an active community with meaningful content.

     

    screenshot-forum.aquariumcoop.com-2020.08.10-13_16_23.png

  7. I definitely run into this. I’m a firm believer that if you’re tank doesn’t interest you, sell the fish and get something that does. 
     

    this is why the 800g goes through changes. So that I can experiment. I love tacos, but if I eat them every day after a few days I need a change. Doesn’t mean tacos are any less good, only that I need variety. 

  8. 7 minutes ago, Edward Steven said:

    I usually get great packages from the Coop, but today's showed up in a box smaller than I've ever received before. I had a dozen plants, 4 sponge filters and a big bag of root tabs stuffed into it with no room for anything like padding.  Most of the plants were smashed and folded over, tons of broken stems. I hope there's a new guy or something in the packaging department. 

    (Hand in picture for size reference and to block my address)

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    Please reach out to customer service, we'll replace the plants and an investigation will go into how/why it was packed through video. Every package is video taped. I'm sorry you had this experience and we'll be sure to work towards it not happening again. 

    **Edit** Also couldn't find your user name here as a customer in our database, so that's why you'll need to reach out to us. Unfortunately I can't find the order to start the process on our end. 

  9. I can only speak from my experience, when collecting corydoras in the amazon rainforest, I personally never found water that was that low in pH. Most corydoras were at 6.8 to 7 from what we were testing and catching. If your corydoras aren't wild, they are likely bred a much higher pH closer to 7.2 at farms. Everyone's experience will be different of course. 

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