MrWestCoast

usually their poop is tiny little chunks that are dark in color. resembles fish poop. maybe it ate some remains of a plant that didn't fully digest?

I got these little buggers as hitchhikers on plants and they spread like fire. I can't use traps, loaches, assassin snails as I have red cherry shrimp in this tank. I'll just pick them off manually when i do water changes. won't fully get rid of them but at least i can control the numbers.

I have one of the cheap ones that was in the tub where my canister filter used to be. Glad I had it, because my canister leaked! Those things are super loud.

Send a clear picture of the discoloration to UNS and see what they say.

I have red cherry shrimp in a 2gal jar with Hornwort plants. no airstone, no filter, no heater. the shrimp are thriving and reproducing. I do of course have a LED light over the jar for the plants.

I have bought from trinsfish and aquahuna before. they both use usps priority mail to ship fish. a lot cheaper than UPS/FedEx overnight!

AQQA makes a good heater. My Fluval E-series failed 2 years ago and was replaced with AQQA. It's pretty accurate within 1 degree.

I wouldn't do a "deep cleaning" at this point. Just lightly clean your substrate and do another 50% water change. Too much cleaning can cause more issues when you're already dealing with a mini cycle. Increase your water changes to 7-10 days. You'll be good to go.

Put it on another leveled surface to make sure it isn't your desk top that is warped. you can even put the tank upside down in the same spot and see if the wobble is still there.

Yup, steps 1, 2 and 3 are correct. Some people add enough prime to treat the amount of water they take out while it's filling back up, and then hit the tank with more prime for the volume of entire tank after it's fully filled. I feel like that's a waste, especially in smaller tanks where it only takes a few minutes to fill the tank. On large tanks that take a while to fill up, I can see it being a good reason to use prime while filling the tank and again after it's fully filled, especially if your county uses Chloramines to treat your water.

You do want to treat the whole tank even if you only change 25% of the water.

What you can do is test for ammonia 24hrs after using prime to see if the test kit is testing true for ammonia.

You can do either water changes or the seachem stability individually, but not together, as daily water changes will cancel out seachem stability. I personally would just add double the dose of seachem stability daily for 7-10 days. The beneficial bacteria will start consuming ammonia. By the way, if you're using Prime, some ammonia test kits will read a false positive. I don't remember which test kits specifically, but might have been the liquid master test kit?

Should be fine against load bearing wall. Make sure you place the tanks across the beams in the floors.

Platys are the same way, I can literally scoop them up with my hand.

I have two Fluval U series internal filters and pretty happy with them. Very quiet and have a pretty good flow. Internal filters dirty up rather quickly and you will have to perform maintenance every other water change. I like the fact that the Fluval U series can detach from the suction cups mount rather than having to detach the suction cups from the glass when you want to take it out for maintenance.

The canister might be sucking in air and creating an air pocket right where the motor meets the surface of the water in the canister. Do you have some silicone grease or plumber's tape? Try greasing the main gasket or sealing the seam of the motor/canister with plumber's tape.

No high pitched sound coming from my 300w AQQA heater. It does make a slight click On click Off sounds when the heating element turns on and off.

The instructions on the bottle states 1.25 g treats 300 gallons. New formula?

Trying to figure out a dose for a 40gal. I emailed seachem and asked for a dose to treat for Chloramines as that is what my city uses to treat our water. However, looking at the water report, the city only uses 0.4-0.5 mg/L of chloramine. Anyways, I got a reply from seachem and was told to use 0.16 grams for 40 gal. I do 50% water changes every 10 days. Would I use 0.16 grams for 50% water change? By the way, what does 0.16 grams covert to one of those measuring spoons? 1/32, yes? Hopefully someone here is in the same situation and has figured out a proper dose.

That's perfectly fine. Fill the aquarium near full and look at the water line making sure it looks straight.

Nothing, I repeat, nothing will survive Silver dollars. Not even plastic plants. When algae starts growing on plastic plants, SDs will nibble on it and you'll have tiny bits of plastic floating in your aquarium. I have tried all of the suggested plants like anubias, amazon swords, african onion plant. Nope! demolished within hours of planting. I did notice that my spotted SDs don't care for plants or veggies. My regular SDs destroy everything 🙂

Possibly neon tetra?

Just a quick update... Filter still leaks with a new gasket and silicone grease. It starts leaking 5-10 minutes after unplugging it. It leaks from both sides underneath the two large clamps. My guess it the clamps are no longer able to clamp down the motor unit to the body, and not able to make a good seal. 🤷‍♂️ With that said, I'm going to order some sort of internal filter and let it run with the Cascade 300 HOB I currently have running in this tank.