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Pepere

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Everything posted by Pepere

  1. I agree with the cories. They are so good at stirring up the bottom Re suspending detritus to give the filter another chance to clean it up…
  2. My take is that cleaning substrate with an Under Gravel Filter is akin to cleaning out a canister filter. Yes you are removing some nutrients from the substrate that plants can use, but you are also removing waste organics that algae thrive on as well. And plants can do just fine fir the most part with water column fertilization and inert substrate.
  3. Another week, another photo… mostly for myself so I can document progression for myself… If you look closely in the left rear you can just barely make out a new addition behind the Corymobosa Compacta. It should look pretty good as it fills out and gets height. sneaking around the corner to get a better view until it grows.
  4. I always marvel when I read of someone having spent money to get duckweed. In the past 2 years I have never bought it but have worked at eliminating it from a tank or two at a time at least 4 times… once was the incredibly pernicious super tiny version of it…Wolfweed iirc…or wolfia or some such name…. The stuff just mysteriously shows up in a tank…. It is almost enough to think the stuff mysteriously spontaneously generates itself into life…. Or floats in on air currents… I wonder how anyone can sleep at night, having charged money to someone selling it to them….
  5. I never saw any bacteria in a bottle product give any results that convinced me the purchase price was worthwhile. i tried multiple bottles of multiple products. I have spent my last dollar on such products.
  6. Your top tanks are higher. Do you have flourescent lights overhead?
  7. It sound like it is just noise then. If there is nothing conductive in the tank… Or it could be the meter itself. But I am very much a fan of titanium ground probes and regularly tested GFCI circuits… and if the GFCI ever trips work to determine why. They can trip from artifact as well… Sometimes the feed wire going in to the GFCI needs to double loop through an RF ferrite core choke…
  8. As a general rule unplugging one item at a time while testing flow to ground is a good way to determine offending item. and ensure meter is set for ac voltage of course… current can flow on a ground wire itself and be both ac and dc current…. Can be due to induced voltages from inductive kr capacitive loads near wires… last night I pulled a spare grounding probe still in the package. On the package it specified to ensure outlet powering aquarium is protected by a GFCI circuit…
  9. How are you measuring the voltage leakage? Is it voltage leaking to ground? All of my tanks have ground probes in them and are powered by GFCI protected circuits and I trip and reset the GFCI on the first Saturday of every month after ensuring that tripping has shut the circuit off. In all of my tanks I actively work to minimize energized conductors submerged in the water. The only cutrrent carrying conductors in my tank are for the heaters, and those are energized and de energized by an Inkbird controller so they are not energized all of the time.. Canister filters do have conducters near water yet they are isolated by a plastic wall around the impeller, and while I havent opened the powerhead on them, I would hope that they are well bedded in epoxy… I have had more conductors immersed in water before, ie internal filters, hobs, powerheads, but I am much happier with them gone now… In my opinion everybody should have both a grounding probe in the tank and the electricity to the tank should be GFCI protected. And you should trip and reset that circuit every month. Tripping it exercises the mechanism to prevent it from freezing in place, and if either it fails to shut off or can not be rest lets you know you should replace it. If you only have GFCI, you could have an exposed hot conductor in the tank with no issue to trip the circuit… until a path to ground makes itself available. Now from my perspective Zi am much happier having a grounding probe providing that path to ground to trip the GFCI circuit instead of current passing through my body to a ground source.. If you only have a grounding probe, the circuit breaker will not trip until you exceed its rating… Somewhere in the neighborhood of 2000 watts. It is possible to suffer a fatal electrocution at under a watt iirc. For those that do not know, A GFCI is designed to trip when the amperage returning on the neutral terminal is more than 4 milliamps lower than the amperage leaving the hot terminal…. 0.004 amps time 120 volts is about half a watt… To those relying on a tingle when you have your arm in a tank to alert you to check for faulty equipment, be advised that the threshold for possible fatal electrocution is not a lot higher than the threshold of feeling that tingle… Another reason for a ground probe in addition to a gfci circuit is that power can be leaking out a faulty hot terminal at one sideof the tank and go through a faulty neutral at the otherside, and the gfci doesnt care. It only cares about electricity not coming back through the neutral .. stick one hand near the hot, and another near the neutral and lazy electricity that always wants to find the easiest way home might find your electrolyte filled body a more suitable and hospitable path home… Murphy is a clever fellow at finding new ways to ruin ones day… Former ABYC certified marine electrician and instructor. Former Paramedic
  10. One of our members on the forum did some testing of the ammonia test strips. I had reported finding the reported ammonia levels with the test strips being substantially lower than api test readings. I had purposely dosed water with 4 ppm ammonia using Fritz Fishless fuel ammonia. The API was reporting consistent with dosing and the co op test strips was reading much lower. Bottle 1 of the API test kit is apparently a base to raise the ph of the test water so all ammonium will convert tofree ammonia to give a total ammonia level. when the member, and I forget exactly who it was, but ifmemory serves me correctly it was @Biotope Biologist,tested a sample with the co op test strip that had base sufficient to convert all ammonium to free ammonium iirc the two tests correlated well with each other and with dosed ammonia. That evidence tends to argue the Co op test measures free ammonia and not total ammonia. The problem is that the amounts listed on the label and the advice is for total ammonia and not free ammonia… I havent heard if the co op ever followed up on this question.. all of the above is from memory of the thread, and at 58 years I am starting to trust my memory less than I used to. For myself, because the API test results correlate nicely with water dosed with a known amount of Ammonia it is the one I trust and use.
  11. Have you measured phosphate levels in your tank water and source water?
  12. Yes. I originally set up this tank with ugf plates. I have converted the air riser tubes to use co op Easy Flow kits. I have an inch or so of Safe T Sorb on top of the plates capped by 2-3 inches of Black Diamond Blasting Sand. My main filtration is by a Fluval 207 with a spray bar for better mechanical filtration and water flow and to use an inline co2 diffuser. Once I went with co2 it just made sense to me to have better flow to keep the bubbles in suspension.. the ugf plates provide nice back up biofiltration via a simple battery back up air pumpin case of an extended power outage. In event of an extended power outage I can simply give the canister filter a thorough cleaning out to reduce ammonia spike from decaying dead beneficial bacteria and allow it to reseed while the ugt continues to maintain tank. It is a nice redundancy.. I also have a suction cup mounted double sponge filter in the tank. I have it therein order to have a fully cycled sponge filter on hand for back up use in a quarantine tank.
  13. I have the hinged glass lids on my tank and as such I run two lights on each tank, one over the back glass panel and one over the front. having two lights you can place lower light plants under one that you keep dimmer…. Or in the case of a 48 inch light on a 60 inch long tank, put your low light plants on the ends…. Or you can have your low light plants in the understory shade from taller plants. My thoughts on the black background is that it reflects less, light back in to the tank..
  14. this is the last photo I had taken of this tank before it devolved… I had removed the Val as it was overpowering the tank and the AR melted away and I chucked it. Meanwhile the Anubias and Java moss had completely hidden all the rocks and were the main focal point. today I decided to start with a blank slate. I pulled the plants and set the, m in a bucket and proceeded to remove 5 gallons of substrate. Scrubbed the rocks clean and soaked them in peroxide, sloped remaining substrate and capped it with coarscblaxk sand and started returning rocks and replantine chosen plant samples. A lot of Anubias were parked in a quarantine tank while I decide what to do with it… Here is what I am starting with…
  15. I wish I could take credit for the placement… however it just happened to be the only open spot in the tank when I planted it….
  16. I bought 3 of them at the same time. One died within a week,, the other one flourished, and this one struggled… After several months I moved a tiger lotus that was near it and went heavy root tabs around it and it started to perk up…
  17. When I get a 75 gallon, I intend to run 2 50 watt heaters controlled by one Inkbird. That was if one 50 fails in the off position, the other one will continue to provide some heat even though the other has failed. Considering that the room will be 70 degrees, 1, 50 watt should be able to keep the tank consistently above 73.
  18. I use the inkbird as the controller and the heaters internal thermostat as a redundant safety. I do it this way for a few reasons. 1.) I run a 2 degree variance with my Inkbird. Ie it energizes the heater when the temp drops to 74 and deenergizes when the temp rises to 76. This results in fewer cycles per day and the on time for the heating element is longer. I suspect each heating cycle turning on and then off weArs in the element more than simply staying on for a longer period of time, and in the case of a bimetalic strip opening and closing contact in a greater, every time that contact opens there is a spark that erodes the contact…. Ie, I think running this way males the heater last longer. Granted I use it to control co op style heaters with electronic switches and that is less of an issue.. 2.). With the co op style heater, the internal clock for end of life display only accumulates time when the unit has power flowing in to it. 3.). I minimize the amount of time I have energized current carrying conductors immersed in my tank. The heater is the only thing in my tank that has a wire carrying current. If I look at the controller and see the tank temp is 75.8 I am much more likely to stick my hand in the water without unplugging the heater and just unplugging the canister filter. I do admit it would be safer to unplug both and then make sure both are turned back on after,.. Those are my reasons for using the Inkbird as the controller… But I think it is great for people to use an Inkbird using either strategy. Either way you get a backup thermostat to reduce the risk of overheating the tank…
  19. This is my story to a T as well…. Though I must say I never watch KG tropicals anymore. While I find I don’t agree whole heartedly with a lot of Aquarium co op advice, I love a lot of their products and love buying from the Co op…. If the co op is selling a product I want it is my first choice company to purchase from by a longshot…
  20. Weekly water changes and then dosing tank to same fertilizer and hardness levels if you supplement those. Manual removal of as much as you can before the water changes.. weekly substrate cleaning, regular filter cleaning. If dosing easy iron, back off on that some.. patience and time.. it can take weeks… As with all Algae, prevention is easier than treatment…
  21. It is a Pink Flamingo Crypt. While it is growing well now, it sat and struggled for about 8 - 9 months with old leaves melting away about as fast as new ones would sprout before it finally started to take off..
  22. Or you could opt for a spraybar.. If you go for a t, the feed wants to go into the bottom of the T and hit the back of the T and diverge left and right, so that you get mostly even flow out each lily pipe..
  23. Your canister filter should have a means to adjust the flowrate.. Alternatively you could plumb in a splitter and have 2 lily outlet pipes.
  24. Done by a Masters grad student in Biochemistry. No magic bullets to instantly kill it off. No dim your lights tweak your ferts, get algae eating animals… Rather reducing the conditions that makes your tank too inviting to BBA… just 10 and a half minutes… Very well worth watching a few times…
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