tolstoy21

I have this problem with fluorite sand. Yup it’s a pain. I tend to just keep the mag float away from the bottom of the glass and clean that with something else, when needed.

How long has the tank been up and running? Edit ~ I see you answered that, about a month. Did you ever see nitrite readings?

I have the opposite problem with my well in New Jersey. 0 KH, 8 Gh. Ph is 5.0 straight out of the well. No sodium, but I do have traces amounts of arsenic and a ton of nitrate. Kh will influence your Ph in one direction or the other. Kh and Gh don’t necessarily have a direct relationship. Gh has no influence on your Ph. Does your water run through any type of filter? I have a calcite filter in my home to boost the Kh to about 8 so my tap water isn’t too acidic and corrosive.

The answer to the is equilibrium cloudy question is YES YES YES. When I used it in the past I would premix mine in the change water a few days in advance, circulating it with a small powerhead. This helped a lot. Adding it directly to a tank had horrible results in terms of cloudiness. Equilibrium is a good product otherwise. Worked well for my planted tank. i use salty shrimp for caridina tanks.

Yup! Totally how it happens. I'm sure there are more quietly hiding, waiting for a morsel to float by. Glad to hear your colony is starting to take off. BBS is a great food for them. In the meantime, if you crush flake food up very fine, they will take that as well. Anything small enough to drift their way so they don't have to stray too far from their hiding place.

Everyone who has replied has good advice. I keep mine at low to semi moderate flow. Water slightly acidic, java moss, java fern, leaf litter, driftwood, 76-78F. All my females like the Coop apisto huts. I keep a bare bottom tank (underside of tank bottom painted black) and allow the decomposed leaf litter to accumulate a bit so there’s a good population of infusoria and copepods and other tiny life for the fry when they emerge. I let the sides and back tank walls get pretty gunky with bio film and algae (except hair type algae cause that stuff gets out of control). My belief/observation is that the apistos like foraging through the mulm and litter that accumulates. However, I do keep the water column itself very very clean and fresh. Not the most attractive setup, but it’s worked well for me. (My java ferns can get quite gunky and gross in this setup, but I rotate those in and out of a caridina shrimp tank to clean them up. They do an amazing job!)

Windex. On acrylic tanks I use an acrylic specific cleaner. I also spray it on a rag if the tank has an open top. If it has a glass lid, I just spritz the glass a bit. I’m not overly careful when I do this, nor overly careless.

The tricky things with these fish is that a lot of times, when you are eagerly waiting for them to spawn, there are fry in the tank already! The are very secretive and masters at hiding. Sometimes, I'll walk by my tank and think, many why don't these things breed more? Then a few months later I'll be like HOLY MOLEY where did these all come from! To me, personally, the key to success is having way more shells than you think you need. I keep the bottom of the tank covered, literally edge to edge, in shells, some piled on top of others. I've seen pictures of this fish in the wild and the lake floor where they live is just thick in endless shells. When there are this many shells there are lots of places, nooks and crannies, etc. for the fry to hide in and thrive. And my belief is that this amount of cover makes the multis more likely to breed (but that's just 100% pure speculation on my part). Anyway, good luck. These are a great species to keep. Love them!

I haven't seen what MD tanks has done, but this is essentially where this all started for me. My water-change system was born out of me trying to figure out how to more easily change water in a 125g in my home. This all started with the brute can in the basement, a wifi plug, and that long run of drain pipe. Basically I wanted to be able to trigger a large water change from my phone, pump water from my basement up to the first floor, and then have the waste water flow back down to the basement and into the utility sink. I think I documented that system somewhere on this forum. I used to fill the brute can with RO water, and remineralize that for use with my display tank. But making RO got expensive as I was burning through too much resin. All of this was just to remove nitrates from my well water. So took some time to do some research and figured out how to rig up those de-nitrate filters and make a DIY solar-salt recharge system so I could recharge and run the same resin for years without having to replace it (and without having to by an expensive commercial unit). That was what got me first tinkering with all the stuff. Once I knew how to filter/treat my water in a more cost effective manner, and to easy water changes I thought . . . .. hmmmm now what i need is MORE TANKS!!!! The I built off the original system I set up accommodate for the breeding rack setup. At this point, I think I'm going to take a lot of the lessons learned from V1.0 of all of this, and move onto v2.0. This next iteration is going to be less low-budget but its going to be as DIY as I can make it, because I'm not sure what I enjoy more, the fish or the tinkering and building. I'd really like to build and utilize a single sump system for an entire wall of tanks, and have the waste water cycle through a trickle tower setup that empties into a semi-attractive-looking sump/basin/mini-pond kind of thing filled with tons of floating plants and cherry shrimp. (Kind of like a giant refugium). Auto-water changes will happen via the sump/pond, instead of going into each tank. Anyway, the idea is floating around in my head. I'll just have to spend some months thinking through it and then start building. My goals with v2.0 are to continue down to an easier, self-maintaining system. And to make everything a little more photo-worth and less crazy-old-man making a rube-goldberg-machine in his basement. I want to show it to non-fish people and have them say "Wow, this is nice" rather than "My god, what is that contraption!"

Pex has come to replace the use of copper in water lines in homes these days, given the cost of copper, and the ease of use of Pex. The only caveat to working with Pex is that the crimp tool you need can run $50 or more bucks. But that, and an inexpensive Pex cutter are the only tools you need. I'd imagine most new residential construction uses Pex over copper, but I could be wrong.

I'm going to quote myself here, cause I find this typo hilarious!

This is my budget solenoid. This is plugged into a standard outlet timer to pump water into tanks on a schedule. The whole kit-and-kaboodle. I feel like I just hijacked this thread, so unless you all want more details, i'll end here.

I do run everything through a sediment filter and nitrate filters (my well water is very high in nitrates) Over flows on back of tanks. These go into the waste line (PVC) that emptied into a sump/tote. Sump pimps water across my basement, to my utility sink.

I have two different spots in my setup where Pex transitions to RO line. The one with the Y fitting goes to a tank I have upstairs as well as to my Brute can where I stage water. The other picture, where it has a 90 degree elbow is where it feeds my breeding racks. This is the RO tubing strung above the rack and a drip emitter over a tank. Up stream of all this, on the other side of the basement, I have a flow restrictor/pressure valve. Where I tapped into my water supply, before my water softeners, so I can pull straight well water.

If your water lines are pressurized in any way, I'd go with like 1/2 inch Pex over PVC. I actually prefer Pex in most scenarios, as its cheaper than schedule 40 PVC and waaaaaay easier to work with. For a drain line to your waste water, you'd want PVC, as it allows a larger diameter. But you won't need schedule 40 for this and can go with something thinner walled. Honestly, I see so many builds that use PVC for water-in and I never understood why. In my experience, I've always worked with copper (expensive, harder to work with, don't recommend at all) or Pex, which I love. PVC is good for waste lines, and sure it can be used for incoming water, but it's just a harder to work with, rigid, and requires solvents to glue. In my setup, I run Pex right up to where the tank rack begins, and then step that down with a sharbite that adapts the Pex to RO tubing. From there, tapping new lines into the RO tubing is a piece of cake. Just snip the RO tubing anywhere and insert a push-to-fit-T fitting. This way I can easily add or remove water feeds to tanks as needed. No glues, no solvents, not sawing PVC, etc. Just snip, snap and done! For drainage, I use soft tubing, leading from the bulkheads of the tanks to a length of PVC that empties into my sump bin (aka plastic tote).

Cool. I'm at this point where I can't reasonably set up any more tanks without enclosing the space so I can heat that, and not run individual tank heaters. Maybe by the beginning of summer I'll start down the part towards rigid foam insulation for my exterior walls and then frame out the rest to give myself a small room. I think my space will be about 10x14' in the end. My biggest challenge right now is that my basement has a lowish ceiling. So getting three shelves out of my racks is going to be either tricky, or not feasible.

When you say not 'close by' does that mean there is at least a sink available? Do you have a sink somewhere in the vicinity? Where there is a will there is a way! My sink is on the other side of my basement. I pump waste water to it automatically with a utility pump/float switch I picked up at HD. Very easy, not too expensive to setup. I'm actually about to embark on a project like yours. I laid out a little chunk of change for the original 'fish wall' setup, even while going as minimal and cost effective as I could. I've come close to recouping those costs, but since I didn't keep very good records during the first two years, I can't be sure if I broke even or not. For my next phase, I'm just going to go slow. I plan on only using money earned from selling fish. At this point, if this part of the hobby can't sustain itself, then I'm not doing it right and probably shouldn't go any further in terms of personal expenditure. But this means expansion will be on the slow side. In the end, I'll just have an enclosed space similar in size to yours, with a work area outside it to do boxing and shipping. If you want to compare notes, happy to do so. I'm lucky enough to be pretty good with home-renno, plumbing, electrical, and where I need help, my father-in-law pitches in, as he's very skilled in this kind of stuff. (Outside labor is always a huge expense if you have to go that route). However, there are still easy ways to achieve results (safely) without being that good at any of these. A lot of the things I've implemented don't take a lot of know-how to do, and are easy and not super expensive to implement. For phase 2, I'll probably do things a little more $$$ as my wife wants the setup to look nice and not look like a crazy old man's Rube-Goldeberg Fish Machine. She's a stickler on the whole 'fit-and-finish' aspect of things. 🙂 Anyway, thanks for sharing your build!

L397s are very nice and easy to keep. However, they poop a TON OF WOOD daily. Every day I'm in my fish room, I look into their tank and sing to myself -- "How much wood would a pleco poop, if a pleco could poop wood?" !! 😊

I'd definitely check the GH/KH (I think GH being the more important of the two) and also maybe try feeding something with a ton of calcium in it. I feed mineral junkie, but you can also use things like TUMS or an egg shell that's be crushed to fine powder with a mortal and pestle. Certain veggies also have decent amounts of calcium in them.

I only strain when I'm emptying out the whole hatching container (typically at night). In the mornings, I just use a pipette and collect brine (once they have settled to bottom of container) and just squirt that directly into tanks, salt and all. So in the AM no straining. In the PM straining.

Wished I could find wood like that near me. If I search the streams and ponds here, all I'm likely to find is trash!

The RO tubing and fittings are much less expensive on Amazon than places like Lowes and Home Depot. The big box hardware stores charge waaaaay too much per fitting. Wiring that specific solinoid was super simple. The two wires just needed to be put into a replacement lamp plug that clamped on and screwed shut. No master electrical certification needed!

Yeah it would seem that rillis are selectively bred from Sakura and/or orange pumpkin shrimp. My 'all orange' shrimp look more Sakura to me than 'pumpkin'. Not sure if 'Sakura' and 'Sunkist' are the same, but this is what the culls look like. They are very nice, but if I want more rillis, I need to relocate them to their own population. I think you'll find that your shrimp population will start out slow and then suddenly grow exponentially (if they are happy with their environment and free from predation). If everything is to their liking, you should be well into the hundreds of shrimp by the end of this coming summer. They have a tendency to breed less in the winter months and then go into full swing once the spring hits. It's very exciting when you see those first teeny-teeny-tiny shimplets on the glass. Makes you feel like you've done something right!

Ok amending what i just said above. . . . Maybe all that info is overkill for your situation 🙂 as this is your first breeding tank! So, yeah, crushed coral works and is a great first thing to try. Good luck. Ask a lot more questions here if you have them!

Agreed on the above. I have this problem with ramshorn snails (should have never intentionally introduced them!) If you want to remove a good portion of the snails you currently have in an effort to lower the amount that can immediately reproduce, a good trick I found online is the following -- Put a slice of zucchini on a fork into your tank and leave it over night. In the morning it should have bunch of snails grazing on it. Remove it carefully so as to not knock too many snails off and dispose of both the zucchini slice and the snails. Keep repeating this until the number of snails are visibly reduced. Just don't leave the zucchini in too long or you're just feeding snails! If you do that, and follow what Guppysnail mentioned, you should be in good shape after a little bit. There are always going to be snails, and that's good, but if there are a ton, something out of balance and there is too much of something in your aquarium for them to eat and thrive on.