Robert Keeney

@Ken BurkeThese are albinos.

These are in a ten gallon aquarium.

I have an aquarium with Black Diamond Blasting Grit that has been used since 2013 with no issues. I have had various fish in it, but it has always had corys. Several of them were hatched and grew up in these aquariums. I hatched a lot of ancistrus in this aquarium. I had three set up this way, but I swapped out two for leaks after several years. Black Diamond Blasting Grit is difficult to clean. I never worried about removing metal.

If the door on the shell is closed tight, the snail is still alive. I should have mentioned this earlier.

Mystery snails lay their eggs several inches out of the water. They will climb out of your aquarium, looking for a place to lay their eggs. I have lost many of them. The only way I have found to keep them in an aquarium is a lid with no holes big enough for them to escape. I lost hundreds of them in this outdoor tank before a red-shouldered hawk finished them. Here is an egg cluster.

I currently have 300, 110, and 100 gallon stock tanks. I don't use any filtration but use plants extensively. These all are outside all year round. I like your filter system. It is large enough you could run several stock tanks with it. I will be following closely.

If you have some electronics skills and can solder, wiring up a four D-Cell battery pack should let you run one of the USB air pumps. USB power is 5-volts. A four-cell pack will give you about six volts. The USB air pups are simple, a DC motor and three small rubber/silicon pistons. They don't need any fancy power regulation. Don't skimp on the batteries. D-Cell provides several times the life of a C-Cell.

They are not outdoors this year.

There are lots of plants. Dwarf Sagittarius covers the bottom. Anacharis everywhere so much that I pull it out and throw it away. When the corys were out there last year, there was also a huge amount of frogbit in the tank with roots that go all the way to the bottom. Three times last summer, I pulled out five-gallon buckets of frogbit. There is a large mass of java moss. I don't use filters in any outdoor tanks. Never have and never will. Everything I try outdoors spawns except corys. Give it a try.

When we have heavy storms, the water temperature can drop by 10-20 degrees, depending on the conditions. They spawn indoors after a storm, and it doesn't seem to matter if there is heavy feeding, water changes or temperature drops. Outdoors they don't seem to spawn at all. BTW, I don't have summer tanks outdoors. I have summer fish. I also have fish that stay outside year-round. The aquarium they are spawning in now has black tetras in it.

Have you ever had any corys spawn in an outdoor tank? I have bronze corys that regularly spawn in a heavily planted community tank. Last year I put them out for the summer, expecting I would get many corys when it came time to take them out. I never saw any sign of spawning, and there were no small corys. I put them back in the 40-gallon with the other fish, and they started spawning again. In the past, everything I have placed outdoors has multiplied. They were in a heavily planted 300-gallon stock tank.

If they have survived to this point I don think you need to do anything special. I have some new ones myself.

Black tetras. I keep guppies and variatus in the same aquarium with black tetras over winter. Very few fry escape them. They are cheap and hardy.

I have two Active Aqua Air Pumps, one with four outlets and one with eight. Both are quiet. The Tetra Whisper 10 Air pumps are my favorite. They are cheap, $6 today on Amazon. Quiet and last a long time. I have one that has been outdoors for about a year. At $6, keeping a few spares on hand is easy. I have had noisy Tetra Whisper pumps that were noisy. I corrected the noise by adjusting the position of the magnet.

I mostly use the Tetra Whisper pumps. I only buy the smallest ones, and if I need more air, I add a second pump. I have had one quit and discovered that repair kits cost more than a new pump. I also like the Active Aqua Air Pumps. These are designed for hydroponics. I have a bunch of USB pumps. I stopped buying these because the failure rate was unacceptable. However, they are quiet and small, making them useful in some circumstances. Primarily these get used for collecting trips where they can run off of the USB ports in my truck or a rechargeable battery pack.

I have this is some of my outdoor containers. For some reason it will die out in some of them. When it is happy it will grow so fast it piles up on itself. I have thrown out five gallon buckets full.

I don't use thermometers in my aquariums. I use a laser/infrared thermometer. Point and shoot. For example: https://www.harborfreight.com/121-infrared-laser-thermometer-63985.html Not only can you check you temperature in all of your aquariums rapidly but you will find many other uses for it as well.

That will work. Years ago there was a company that sold a similar system with much smaller tubing. O had one of these and gave up on it because it would get clogged pretty fast. Using larget tubing should help. There are a couple of books titled "For What Its Worth" that have some info about building this type of filter. There are two volumes.

I have java moss outdoors year round in North Florida. I have had ice on the top of the water in my stock tanks. I also have some indoors growing in a jar.

Ye, I was right. I have seen them, but most likely in a magazine. I don't think I have ever seen one in operation. If I were designing one of these I would also add some way to control the flow rate so it could be used on a smaller tank.

I have one of these 300-gallon stock tanks and some smaller ones. Yes, the do bow when filled with water. Rubbermaid stock tanks are made from polyethylene. Nothing sticks to polyethylene, and you can't glue polyethylene. Also, keep in mind that Rubbermaid stock tanks are made of foam. Foam is one of the reasons they are difficult to weld. Unless you have money to burn, I would not try to install a window. If it doesn't work, you'll have a $300 piece of scrap plastic plus the cost of everything else. r

Yes I do. I had a Supreme piston pump for a long time. It was noisy but it might be the best pump I ever owned. It never failed. It blew away in a storm.

I gave mine away. My work kept me away from home about six months out of the year for several years. I gave all my aquariums to a friend. I'll bet you remember Silent Giant air pumps too. 🙂

I never heard of Aquakings, and Superkings until I read about them here. However, from your description I think I have seen them. I had one of the big Dynaflow filters that had two outlets on it on a large aquarium and loved it. They used to make some air driven HOBs the worked quite well.

The Metaframe Dynaflow filters were the best filters ever made for aquariums. Here is why/ They never leak because there is no hole in the bottom. A magnet drove the impeller. They pump filtered water. The filter is fed by a siphon that puts the water on top of the filter media. The pump pumped the filtered water from the bottom of the media back into the aquarium. I never had an impeller jam or get clogged up with gunk. They did not kill fry. If fry got sucked into the filter, they would hang out in the water on top of the filter media until you scooped them out. While they were in the filter, they were the best-fed fish in the aquarium. Unless the siphons were broken when you had a power failure, they would always restart when the power came back on. Dynaflow filters don't run over. Because it is fed by a siphon, the water level in the filter can never be higher than the water in the aquarium. You can always tell when the media needs changing. There was no bypass so the flow would get slower the more the media clogged. When it got too slow, you changed or cleaned the media. You could use any media you like. I use sponges and filter floss in mine. I used sponges well before there were sponge filters in the aquarium trade. A 1/2-inch layer of foam on top to catch the course stuff and filter floss on the bottom to get the rest. The tubing on the Dynaflow filters was bent tubing for the returns and the siphons. It was a standard-size tubing that you could buy and make siphon tubes. Combine this with the adjustable returns, and you could almost eliminate refiltering the water that just came out of the filter. I don't know of any modern filter that can do this. Curved/bent tubing is much easier to clean.