tolstoy21

Hmm, maybe give yourself some a little more space from the edges? I think the recommend spacing is half the diameter of the hole your drilling. Or this one could have just been a fluke and bad luck.

Just curious, what size is your cracked tank? I can’t not crack ten gallons. I’m cursed when working on those!

I have a ton of sloppy-work aqueons. None leak. I find these tanks reliable even if the people putting them together didn’t do their best job at making the seams look nice. Anything on the glass itself I just remove with a razor.

Maybe shrimp pellets will have the opposite effect and satisfy their urges to otherwise snack on the living shrimp! Also, seeing how fast fish shrimp will consume other dead shrimp, maybe you should worry about encouraging their cannibalism. Or, more likely, you have nothing to worry about.

This happens to me. I’m suddenly like, “hey did I put a bunch of otos in here this year?” I think sometimes the other inhabitants eat up their fallen comrades faster than we realize.

I think dragon stone is supposed to be inert. I have it in a crystal red shrimp tank and it doesn’t affect the water chemistry that I’ve experienced. However, I’ve seen videos where people discuss knock-off dragon stone that’s not inert, but to be honest I don’t know a lot about that.

I’m curious to know the KH for the water taken before it goes through any filtration/softening. Same reading as before? Also your softener should have a bypass that allows you to disable it temporarily if you needed to do water changes from a sink in your house.

I don't 100% disagree with that statement. But I do find that more people, when thinking about fish, either conflate the two, or are thinking of KH when they are thinking of 'soft water' fish. Which is why i said I believe 'most' people (at least what i see online) mean KH (correctly or incorrectly), because 'soft' is almost always brought up in the context of Ph, except maybe when talking about plants. Again, why it's confusing to most people and context dependent in the general conversations we see online. For instance, and this is just a snippet of something one can easily grab online; examples abound -- 'Carbonate hardness neutralises acidity, water with a high carbonate hardness tends to have a pH around 7.5 to 8.5 and that pH will be stable. Such conditions are a precondition for those fish from hard water environments, such as Rift Valley cichlids and Central American livebearers, but can cause problems for those fish that do better in slightly acidic water conditions like South American tetras' The above mentions Carbonate hardness, acidity, PH and hard water in the course of two sentences. So what does a beginner do with that information other than be stumped. 'Hardness' in this snippet is context dependent; it seems to imply carbonate hardness. I think? Maybe? The Rift Valley also presumably has a high GH, right? Now I'm confused! I think its easier for a beginner to grasp the following -- The KH number affects my PH. The GH numbers represents the quantities of some important minerals dissolved in my water. Fish and plants prefer the values of both to be in a specific ranges, but these numbers are independent of one another. Fish that we don't consider 'sensitive' or 'hard to keep' or 'expert-level' usually adapt to a much broader range of GH and KH values. I don't mean to suggest you implied differently, but just to give an explanation on why I tend to usually think of water hardness as KH when I think of fish keeping. My experience tells me that when keeping 'soft water' fish, acidity is a more important factor than calcium and magnesium levels, in general, except where extremes of GH are concerned. I get it that for beginners, it can be confusing, especially when you read stuff like the above that appears to blend the terminology in way that does not add the clarity needed by most people who are new to aquariums.

Yeah honestly Ive seen it refer to either GH or KH (or both), depending on what I'm reading, or the context in which it's being used. Both KH and GH have 'hardness' in their name, but their individual influence on water is different. For aquarium use, I usually consider hardness to be in terms of KH only because what I read online in relation to 'soft water species' of fish is normally used in reference to PH levels, which is determined by the amount of buffer provided by KH. On he other hand, if someone asked me if my household has hard or soft water, I'd probably say hard. But here I'm assuming I'm being asked about the mineral content / GH. As an example, my well water naturally has KH 0 and GH 8. So is that hard or soft? Both? Neither? I have a water softener to reduce my household drinking water GH to 0. But I also have another filter that boosts the drinking water PH into 8s by boosting its KH. Which of these two waters (my well water or my tap water) would a tetra prefer? Which is hard, which is soft? Personally, my feeling is that for the beginner trying to understand hardness in relation to achieving something specific with their tank, the phrase just doesn't convey enough information to be 100% useful and accurate. It's like trying to unravel the meaningful use of TDS as a measure without understanding what the TDS measurement represents other than 'dissolved solids'.

GH and KH both refer to aspects of water hardness. To me, for aquariums, the important, high-level take aways are these: When aquarists mention 'soft' water, they are mostly referring only to KH and its effects on influencing a water's PH up or down. GH is important to have for healthy plants, as it contributes minerals they require for growth. You can have both low KH and high GH, or vice versa. Knowing what range of each a specific species of fish can tolerate is a good staring point, as well as knowing some fish species are more adaptable than others. GH and KH can be lowered (simultaneously) but diluting the water with RO or distilled water (water that has been stripped of all mineral content). GH and KH can be raised by adding mineralizers or buffers. Here you can adjust either to your liking. In the end, taking steps to adjust water hardness creates work and sometimes expense and isn't always 100% necessary for the average fish keeper keeping common, adaptable fish. I don't think KH 6 and GH 12 are super crazy high readings, all of my fish live in GH 8 and do fine (except the dead ones😉 ). Id maybe want to know what my PH was as a result of having a KH of 6. PH is the more important reading. And if that's not super high or super low, i think you should be fine.

Not much new to report other than fish have put on some size and probably need to be separated into 2 tanks. Eating mostly flake and nano pellets now, with some frozen daphnia. Just figured I'd post to give a brief update. This is about the 1 1/2 half month point I think.

My guess is what effects plant health when a softener is involved is the lack of calcium and magnesium. One would have to restore the GH in 'softened' water with re-mineralizers to the same degree one would have restore the GH in RO water (in RO water you typically also restore the KH). In my experience, I put more sodium in my tanks when I squirt in brine shrimp water into them multiple times a day than a softener introduces and my plants are happy (and I raise my brine shrimp in the same solar salt). All my tank water goes through a nitrate filter that is recharged with the same solar salt solution as a water softener and I have great plant growth. The tank below is being delivered 'sodium' ions all day long, every day via a drip feed of water and my plants grow fine. I have no doubt softeners can affect affect plant health (my 'softened' water has zero GH). My feeling is that a lot of folks just attribute that affect to the wrong cause, because sodium = bad. But they forget to think about what degree of sodium actually = bad, and what degree is completely negligible. This then gets passed around the WWW as conventional wisdom, but when I actually look at this through the lens of my experiences and then really think about the subject to any degree, that 'wisdom' does not feel like it lives up to the evidence test. I could be very wrong about all of this, but in my experience with using brine to recharge water filtration media, I have yet to see the resultant addition of sodium to any of my tanks impact plant health, when the plants needs in terms of GH, KH. light, and ferts are being met. I actually do bypass my softener in my house for tank water because I don't want to have to pay $$$ to restore the GH back into the water. So I'm not at all opposed to someone not using softened water. I'm just not yet seeing the 'sodium' being introduced as a byproduct of recharging ion-exchange resin as being impactful to plant or fish health in my personal experience.

@darkGScoring the wood could help, but honestly, I just scraped java moss off the back glass of my aquarium last week. I guess it was able to grab hold to some micro scratches in the glass. @Hobbit And to re-iterate your frustrations with gluing it, it does the same thing to me. I'll glue a clump and like 99% of that clump never really attaches. But if all you get is one piece to catch hold (and more than one will), trust me it will eventually cover the entire piece of wood, if it's encourage to grow laterally via frequent trimming. I think the goal is to just get some little bits to attach here-and-there across the wood, and that becomes the foundation for what will come. I rarely have an entire clump adhere to a piece of wood the same way an entire square of sod will attach to dirt in your yard. (That would be amazing if it did!) Spending the time to tie it down before putting the wood into aquarium probably also helps as the thread creates more possible attachment opportunities for the moss. On the other hand, if you tie it too densely hoping that a big mat is going to hold, this sometimes has the opposite effect because the moss making contact with the wood gets shaded by the moss on top of it and dies off instead of growing into the wood itself. The smaller and thinner the clumps you attach, the greater chance they will succeed. And, it just takes time.

Your picture looks pretty much like my experience of moss on drift wood. It takes time and not all of what you glued will grab hold. Have patients and eventually one tiny piece will take hold and that can wind up spreading and covering the driftwood. Also, as @Yannisaid, trim it when it gets stringy like that. That’s how it naturally wants to grow. Trimming will encourage it to thicken by forcing it to branch out. And as it thickens it tends to grow more laterally and this gives more opportunities for it anchor itself. To get that carpeted moss covered look, you have to trim on a routine basis, and just wait it out. I’ve had moss on this wood in the pic for well over a year and it grew stringy like your pic (I wanted it to grow stringy so I could collect the moss for propagation to other tanks). It wasn’t until I started trimming a month or so ago it that it started to really cover the wood. But I still have some time, growing and trimming ahead of me.

RO is not good for plants as it has literally nothing in it. They won’t live in RO that has not been remineralized (that is, had the GH restored by a product like Seachem Equilibrium).

Water softeners don’t put salt into the water in any quantity that will affect plant or fish health. However, they will strip out GH. That’s what they do, the pull the hardness out of the water. The are called softeners, but they don’t make the water soft in the way we aquarium people think about softness it in terms of low KH and PH. Instead they pull ‘hard’ minerals out of the water that would otherwise wind up on our drinking glasses and bathroom fixtures as hard water spots and despots. Softeners don’t impact KH, they impact GH. The recharge cycle of a softener dislodges the spots on the softener’s resin beads that are occupied by the captured calcium and magnesium. It does this by displacing those with sodium ions that are provided by salt. This way the resin is cleaned so it can trap more of your waters natural hardness. And yes, those sodium ions eventually make it into the water in the tank, but they don’t make the tank or your drinking water salty in any appreciable way. (We had a thread about this a few months ago). I’d test the Gh from wherever you get the water your putting in your tank. If you have a softener, I’m going to bet it’s near zero.

Yes. I believe it’s calcium and magnesium. A GH test won’t tell you how much of each you have. I just figured if your GH was zero, like if the water went through a softener, you’d have something to work with.

I’m a big fan of floss too. Other than that any inexpensive ceramic bio media or coarse sponge in my go to. My box filters have ceramic media in them really just to keep them from floating. Their main objective is to hold inexpensive polyfill. I rarely clean media, occasionally squeeze out the sponges, and the floss or polyfill I toss when those gets full and look like their doing more harm than good.

I’d say start at ten gallons. If your do things right and your shrimp thrive, they will fill up a 10 gallon in less than a year. Once a colony gets going, the population grows exponentially. Floating plants help a lot in terms of keeping the water stable as you start reaching a nice density of shrimp.

For a lot of stem plants you sometimes want to prune back harder than you think because the plant is going to send new shoots out of the top most leaf nodes left on the plant. This will thicken the plants up, but if you trim too high, your encouraging that growth to start higher and not lower. The look in the end tends to be very top heavy, with bare bottoms. Pruning heavy might make your tank look barren at first, but if you have patients, the plants fill in nicely over time. Also, take the trimmings you cut and replant those in and around the pruned plants. When I had a lot of stem plants I would cut them back by about 2/3 their original height. For things like swords and crypts, I just remove overly large or old bad looking leaves.

I’d s start by checking to see if your lacking nitrogen or magnesium. Try doing a water test to see what the nitrate levels are, as well as hardness (GH). if these are rooted plants, maybe try some root tabs. My sword plants started yellowing as they got bigger until I replenished their root tabs.

Guilty as well. I sometimes think I keep fish to just to have something to plan and build.

I think they'd be fine in a breeder box if they have plants to feel safe, like a nice clump of java moss or any other floating plant that provides cover and grazing places for the shrimplets. Also, make sure there is food available for the babies who tend to spend their initial days hiding in the plants and will either need bio film there to graze on, or food to make it to them via water flow. As @JettsPapasuggested, in the tank itself, loose rock piles are great hiding places for baby shrimp if you don't have thick plant cover. The 'swimming more than usual' might be what's known as the 'happy dance'. This is when the females are ready to breed and the males go crazy and swim around like love struck nuts looking for a date. Shrimp breeding activity tends to ramp up as the winter turns to spring. Could be that you're just witnessing that.

Haven't read this whole thread, but I would imagine, yeah they are theoretically possible. Realistically, however, the tanks most of us usually want to keep tend to require water changes. And yeah as @MJV Aquatics suggests, nature changes water. Right?

I put mine horizontal, near or behind the filer. But, if your flow is good in the tank, you can put it anywhere that's not a dead spot.