gardenman

You're on the right track. You just have to understand the relationship between the starting pH and the speed with which the coral sand/aragonite dissolves. The rate of dissolution/solvency varies with pH. Drop a chunk of coral into strong nitric acid and it'll melt before your very eyes. Put the same piece of coral into water with a pH of 7.0 and it'll still slowly dissolve, just much, much more slowly. Imperceptibly even unless you look at it over weeks/months/years. On Instagram nickuhas has a short video of putting a piece of coral into an acid lack in Indonesia and showing the reaction. NICK UHAS on Instagram: “We put a piece of coral from Miami, Florida into an ACID LAKE located in East Java Indonesia. The result is amazing! Thank you…” It's the relationship between pH and the amount of buffer you use that controls the pH and KH. If you have very acidic water the buffer will get eaten up very quickly but as it gets eaten the pH rises, slowing the dissolution/solvency of the buffer and thus slowing the rise of pH. Let's say you start out with a tank water of 5.5 pH. You put in a handful of aragonite and it melts away within days. The pH would have risen as a result. You put in a secnd handful of aragonite and maybe this batch lasts two weeks. Why? The water's not as acidic as it was. After two weeks that's gone and you add another handful and it now lasts a month. Why? The new starting point is at a higher pH. I find in my tanks that the happy medium of buffering and pH happens at around 7.8 pH. The buffer (aragonite in my case) keeps the pH steady about there and the tank stays nice and stable there. The aragonite gets slowly consumed but I just add more from time to time. Everything stays nice and stable.

I've heard that the pH can affect the ability of the sperm to penetrate the egg membrane of some fish. I'm not sure if it applies to Rummynose tetras or not, but I've read that in the past. There's a sperm membrane and an egg membrane that have to be able to fuse and at certain pH ranges they can't fuse.

My well water has a high GH due to dissolved iron in the water, but essentially no KH, a low pH, and also lots of ammonia. It makes life interesting for fish keeping. I store water in old kitty litter containers with some aragonite in the bottom that helps to condition the water to make it safer for the fish. It raises the pH and KH and the ammonia tends to vanish in the containers. It works for me.

Freshwater Exotics, one of the sponsors of the video, have some really good videos of collecting in the wild in Brazil. On one of their discus collecting trips I was surprised to find so many pikes in with the discus. They're not a fish I'd think to combine with discus but there they were in nature living side by side. I'm not sure how that would translate to tank life but it was interesting to see in the wild. They also went collecting once at a low water time and the number of pleco caves in a now exposed mud riverbank was impressive to see. The riverbank looked like a pegboard with all of the holes in it. It's pretty impressive seeing where the fish come from and how they get here from there.

My tap water has essentially no KH out of the tap so I use aragonite either mixed into the gravel or in my canister filters and it does a great job.

For my livebearers, I just add aragonite to either the substrate or canister filter. Two of my tanks (the 10 and 20 gallons) only have sponge filters so they get some aragonite mixed into the substrate. My 30 and 50 have canister filters so they get the aragonite added to the canisters. I prefer the aragonite as it slowly dissolves and doesn't cause wild swings.

With shallow wells, salt runoff after winter storms can make your fresh water brackish also. We like to think our water is always stable out of the tap, but it's often not as stable as we'd like. Here in NJ they like to spray a brine solution on the roads before a winter storm, then dump tons of salt on the road during and after the storm to melt the ice. If you've got a shallow well, that salt can show up in your water a few days/weeks later.

I toyed with a drip emitter sytem for my four tanks a while back and when I did the math and saw that a half gallon per hour drip system for each of my four tanks would use 17,520 gallons of water a year, I decided to stick with the way I'm doing things now. (0.5 gallons per hour per tank for four tanks is 2 gallons of water per hour. 24 hours a day for 365 days and you end up with 17,520 gallons of water a year being used for a ten gallon, twenty gallon, a thirty gallon, and fifty gallon tank.) That's kind of a lot of water. I was planning to just let the waste water ooze out through my open bottomed sump pump well, but asking seventeen thousand gallons of water to ooze out that hole might have been asking a lot. That kind of water volume could have undermined the house foundation over time and caused me very large problems.

It sounds like the tubing you're using isn't rated for the pressure it's experiencing. The solenoid is simply an automated on/off valve that gets triggered by electricity. When the valve is open and CO2 is flowing there's less back pressure on the tubing as the CO2 has someplace to go. (Into the aquarium.) When the solenoid closes, there's no place for the pressure to go so the tubing is expanding due to the increased pressure. There are two real options. One is to replace the tubing with something stronger rated for the pressure it's getting. Option two is to reduce the pressure. Shutting the valve on the CO2 tank itself down more can reduce the pressure in the line and prevent the hose from potentially bursting. A wide open valve on the tank will let a virtual river of CO2 flow from the CO2 tank while shutting the valve down more can reduce it to more of a trickle of CO2. Your tubing should be able to handle a trickle of CO2 better than a river of CO2.

I use the fine sponge filters (the really cheap ones on Amazon) and they have so much surface area and so little suction (using air pumps and not powerheads) that even flake food drifting by doesn't get stuck to the filters. They do an excellent job of providing surface area for bacteria to inhabit, but the flow rate of the fine ones anyway, is so minimal that nothing should get sucked into them. They're pretty bad as mechanical filters but great as biofilters. If you're in doubt, buy as big a sponge filter as you can fit in your tank and use that. A larger surface area would reduce the suction ability as long as the waterflow/airflow stayed the same.

You have to be careful with paver sand as some contains binders that activate when wet to lock the sand together like concrete. The "base paver sand" is generally okay, but the "joint paver sand" is typically filled with binders that get activated with water to lock pavers together. When installing pavers you typically lay down a layer of base sand then install the pavers on top of that, then sweep the joint sand into the joints and wet it down to lock the pavers together. Base paver sand is probably okay. Joint paver sand, is probably not okay. It might be possible to use the joint paver sand to make a sand background on a tank though. Lay the tank on it's back, add a layer of the joint paver sand to the back wall then moisten it and let it cure. It might attach itself to the glass and be strong enough to stay in place. No guarantee it wouldn't leach toxins into the water though. I haven't tried that or heard of anyone trying that, but it might work. It might also be an effective substrate on a high-flow river style tank. It should lock together and not get swept around by the current. Once again though, no guarantee it wouldn't leach something harmful into the water.

If you head on over to Amazon and search for "faucet adapters for kitchen sink" you'll find a wide variety of them including sets that contain a 3/4" to 13/16" and a 3/4" to 15/16".

One of the areas where fishkeeping and gardening merge is how "new" species pop up. I have lots of older books on gardening (dating back to the 1930's) and fishkeeping (1960's and later) and every few years a new fish or plant will arrive and everyone will go wild about it. Then I look it up in my old Wise Gardening Encyclopedia or Sterba's Freshwater Fishes of the World, and find out they're not new. They've been around for a long, long time, just not widely circulated commercially. A seller will suddenly decide,"Hey, let's see if this sells" and the "new" plant/fish will suddenly be a hot item. It's interesting to watch it play out time after time.

It's amazing how expensive they are to buy in pet shops though. They should be pretty much giving them away as easy as the fish are to spawn. Locally they're typically $30-$40 or more each. Guppies are harder to spawn than bristlenose cats.

YouTube has a few videos of high flow rate river/stream tank builds onthere. I saw some a year or so ago where they created a false bottom and used a high flow rate gyre pump under the false bottom to move the water. Here's a link to a video of a similar tank if you're interested. (1) Aquascaping a DBL bottom Aquarium - Step by Step River Stream Flow Tank aquascape tutorial - Bing video

New Jersey has some crazy statutes already on the book. If you go to NJ - Pet Sales - Pet Purchase Protection Act | Animal Legal & Historical Center (animallaw.info) and read section 56:8-95 you'll discover why there are now so few pet shops in NJ. The ones that still exist largely ignore the rules and hope to avoid getting killed by officials. Essentially, "any animal" sold in a pet shop has to have had a vet inspection and report filed within five days of being acquired by the pet shop and before being offered for sale. Read the whole statute and you'll understand why so few small pet shops still exist in NJ.

Good information from everyone. Just one more small note. Bioload makes a big difference. There was a post saying if you took a filter from a five gallon and moved it to a twenty gallon the tank wouldn't be cycled. Eh, yes and no. If the bioload was the same in the twenty as the five gallon you could argue the tank was as cycled as it had been. The secret to keeping fish is to keep healthy bacteria, but the bacterial populations are reflective of the food available to them. If you have one neon tetra in a 120 gallon tank, the tank may test as being cycled (no ammonia or nitrites and slowly but steadily rising nitrates) but if you then add a thousand more neon tetras, the tank will crash. Why? It was cycled for the bioload it was used to , but not the new bioload. The bacteria in the tank will grow rapidly under a new bioload but not fast enough to keep up with large, sudden changes in bioload. If you added one neon tetra a day for a thousand days, no problem. You could double the number of neons each week with no trouble. (Well, it might get tricky when you got to the bigger numbers, but in general it should work.) There needs to be a balnce between the bioload/food availabe for the bacteira, places for the bacteria to live, and the bioload. Bare tanks are harder to cycle as there's less surface area for bacteria to inhabit. A tank with gravel, lots of plants and decorations, driftwood, stones, etc. is easier to cycle as there's lots of places for bacteria to live. And things like live plants tend to come with some bacteria already on/in them. Something as simple as sunlight hitting a bare tank can destroy enough of the bacteria living on the glass to crash a cycle in a bare tank. Sunlight and bacteria tend not to get along all that well. A more heavily decorated tank has more places for bacteria to hide out and survive whatever comes its way.

Daphnia eats free floating algae/green water, but I'm not sure it eats hair algae. You might need another option for that.

Petroleum jelly is good for with leaky seals. Apply some around the seals and you should be good to go.

If you're in the South Jersey area you can grab some from my outdoor tubs. I've got a ton of it that will get killed with the first frost in October. I got mine initially from a seller on eBay with no trouble. Just check their reviews before ordering. It's easy stuff to grow if you can give it enough light.

You might want to drop in some chunkier food from time to time like a shrimp (like those eaten by humans rather than the brine variety) that they can graze on at their leisure. They're carnivores and pretty chunky fish so chunkier food can help condition them for spawning. If all of your L333s are using caves they could all be males. The males tend to be the cave users more than the females. If they're all males, breeding success will be a lot more challenging. One of the ways recommended to sex L333s is to watch which ones go in caves. Males tend to use caves while females don't. Males will develop teeth-like projections called odontodes on their face and pecs also. If all five of yours are in caves and have the odontodes, then you've got a problem.

The shrimp and the ottos doing well is a good sign. They tend to be a bit more fragile. In a stable 78 gallon tank changes to the water quality would be gradual for the fish living in there and they'd adjust as things gradually changed. It's possible a parameter that's now "normal" for your fish, even the more sensitive ones, is too much out of whack for new fish plopped into the tank who haven't adjusted to it. It could be something exotic that's built up over time that doesn't show up on tests. (Fluoride being one possibility. A buildup of fertilizer salts or a fertilizer micronutrient that your fish have adapted to might be another example.) You could also just have gotten a bad batch of replacement fish. It happens. They may have been overly stressed from shipping or traumatized in some other way. I wouldn't worry about it too much. I'd quarantine any new fish for a few weeks before adding them to that tank and then add them one at a time and watch them. If they show signs of stress upon being added then it could be something exotic gone wrong with your tank water that your fish have adapted to. Water is a lot more complicated than we like to think. If it is the water, then a gradual replacement program and maybe altering/stopping any additives (fertilizer and whatnot) could let you gradually readapt your existing fish to better water and make life easier for newcomers.

You obviously also have a bristlenose pleco judging by the nose sticking out of the cave in the first photo. I'd be inclined to go with a species only tank for the L333s. That would take away a competitor for cave space. A variety of cave sizes, shapes and styles would be wise. My Super Reds like to breed in the smallest PVC pipe caves I have instead of the roomier ones. Lots of good food is always a good idea when you're trying to breed fish. Even leftover food lying around for them to nibble on at their leisure is wise. The Super Reds in my tank three feet to my right are still nibbling on the green beans I put in at 6:30 this morning as I type this. (Four hours ago and they'll get more food at four-ish. And I just took a photo as proof that I'll post below.) Adding a powerhead down low to create flow around some of the caves might be helpful also. Assuming you have at least one male and one female (very important for breeding success and not always guaranteed) then in time they should breed. By the way, you're often more likely to get a male/female mix if the fish aren't the same size when bought. If you wanted the five biggest when you bought them you could end up with five of the same sex. When buying hard to sex fish it's wisest to buy a variety of sizes and body shapes when possible. If the seller is online then be sure to ask for a variety of body sizes/shapes. Some sellers will just automatically dish up the biggest fish and if they do so, and there's a size difference between males and females (as there often is) you may find your breeding success to be much more difficult. In a perfect world with five unsexed fish you'd have one larger than the rest, one wider than the rest, one smaller than the rest and one narrower than the rest. Female fish tend to be broader to accomodate eggs. Males tend to be narrower. Some females tend to be larger overall while some males tend to be smaller. It's not a guarantee of success, but getting a variety of body shapes can often help with breeding success down the road.

There's also lots of dwarf water lettuce in those stock tanks that I forgot to mention. Those are just the spillover plants from my indoor tanks that I tossed out there rather than throw away. Floating plants grow like weeds. If you're trying to compete in the online marketplace to sell them, you have to price them low and it's not impossible to end up losing money if enough people claim the plants arrived damaged or dead and you have to refund their money.

The good profit part is iffy. Floating plants are priced very aggressively on most sites. By the time you factor in the shipping costs, packaging, replacing lost/damaged orders, and transport to and from the post office or UPS Store, the profit per shipment starts to dwindle. I've got two 110 gallon stock tanks literally filled with floating plants (salvinia, water hyacinths, frogbit, and duckweed, photos below) that in theory are worth several hundred dollars. But it would cost me close to that to buy the packaging, print the shipping labels, pay the fees to the selling sites, haul them off for shipment, keep some in reserve to replace those lost or damaged, and all of the rest that goes with it. I'll gladly give them away to anyone in the South Jersey area, but shipping them out gets a little too iffy. I understand the theory of selling them at a profit, but when you look at the selling prices for floaters on e-Bay, Etsy, and Aquabid, the profit is slim and the hassle is large.