gardenman

I got my Timex/Sinclair at K-Mart in the watch department on sale for like $79.99 at the time. I think I had to pay around $50 for the 16 kb expansion module a bit later. That was around 1982-ish. You can get a lot more memory for the money these days. DIgital watches were pretty trendy at that time and Timex figured that a digitial watch was just a small computer, so they hooked up with Sinclair to make a home computer.

My Timex/Sinclair 1000 is still in my basement and my TI is (I think) in my attic. They were neat little gadgets and a lot of fun. Not quite up to modern standards, but fun. Great learning experiences.

The Timex/Sinclair 1000 for me and the TI-99/4A. I used to love programming those guys. Kids today are spoiled with nearly unlimited memory to play with. Try writing programs for 2 kb of memory for the Timex/Sinclair 1000. I did break down and buy the 16 kb expansion module for the Timex/Sinclair 1000 later to make my life easier. The TI-99/4A was more fun. (It had color! Whoo-hoo!) And more memory. Not a lot more, but more.

I keep a Fluval breeder box set up on my tanks with some plants/moss in them and a snail or two. Lots of life tends to appear in the box and then trickle into the tanks. I just add a flake or two of food to the box each feeding and the snails eat most of it. Is it enough to feed the tank? Not even close, but some live food trickles in all the time this way. I get detritus worms, daphnia and God only knows what else in that water. Here's a photo of my ten gallon tank with too many Neon Swordtails and Super Red plecos in it and the breeder box with some java moss in it and a few snails. The Fluval breeder boxes use an airlift tube to gently circulate tank water through the box and then back to the tank, so some of the life in the box goes out with the water.

Many, many years ago we were having a big family dinner for a holiday (Thanksgiving I think) and everyone was seated at the table when our cat Sandy managed to fall into the fifty gallon tank as she tried to get closer to the table and then shot across the table scattering plates, food, and drinks as she tore off. Yeah. Not the ideal way to celebrate a holiday. We ended up spending lots of time cleaning everything up and ordering a pizza.

Plain old petroleum jelly works also. I use it on the o-rings on my canister filters.

I don't see any roots in the photo, so that could be the issue. It's living off the stored nutrients rather than pulling nutrients from the soil until it sets roots. They tend to root rather aggressively, so a lack of roots would tend to imply something in the tank may be nibbling on the roots as they form. My best guess would be your snails are nibbling on the roots as they form. Putting a cage of some sort around the bulb until it makes good roots might help matters. Some plastic needlepoint canvas (cheap at Walmart) could make a nice cage to go around the plant until it's got more of a chance to get established. Light and water would still get to the plant but the cage would keep the snails out.

I use a Mr. Coffeee coffee grinder and it's great for the job. It'll take any sized food you want to throw in and turn it into dust if that's what you want.

I use HOBs, canisters, and internal sponge filters and all use sponges as the filter media. The Aqua Clears use a sponge. I have sponges in my Penn Plax Cascade canisters. Even my K1 fluidized filters use a sponge as a prefilter. I use quilt batting as a fine filter after the sponges, but the primary media is sponges. It's just a question of how you get water flowing through the sponges. Canisters do it one way, HOBs another, internal sponge filters (the round guys or the Matten filter walls) yet another way. When you watch videos of people who make a career out of raising fish, sponge filters are what they typically use.

The advantage to a wet/dry filter is the increased oxygen exposure of the media. Koi fanciers often use Bakki showers which are kind of an extreme wet/dry trickle filter. The fluidized filters using K1 or similar material and using air to fluidize it give you the advantages of a wet/dry filter with no dead spots. They're largely the best of both worlds. You can even add a fluidized chamber in a sump, so they're becoming more the norm. The massive volume of air to fluidize the K1 balances out the aeration one gets with a trickle filter with much less risk of dead spots.

To some extent it depends on the plecos and the fry you're growing out. There are plecos that are more carnivorous and might hunt down and eat fry. (It's a fish eat fish world out there.) Snails are generally safer as a cleanup crew.

There are those on the lunatic fringe of aquarium keeping who make dedicated streambed tanks for hillstream loaches. They install a false bottom that's open on both ends and then insert the high volume gyre pumps under the false bottom to create a very swift current through the tank. Water goes in on the left side of the false bottom, travels across the bottom and then shoots out of the opening on the right hand side of the false bottom. Screening keeps the fish from being sucked under the false bottom and it's said to replicate an actual hillstream loach stream. They're pretty neat to look at, but probably more ambitious than what you're looking for. Adding an airstone would be much easier and likely suffice.

Regarding the air pump placement, I might worry about condensation affecting the pump longterm if I kept it too low. Your loop is essentially a lower pressure compressed air system like those used in commercial garages and some woodworking shops. Those systems are prone to moisture issues. Some use water traps to catch any internal condensaton while other systems use complicated air driers. If your pump is the lowest thing in the sytem guess where the condensation will go? Inside the pump. If you want to research this more, look up "pressure dew point" and you can find lots of interesting information. A fish room will be a pretty humid place to start with and pressurizing the air will wring that moisture out and it will condense on the inside walls of your PVC loop and then get pulled downward by gravity. If your air pump is the lowest thing in the system, that condensation will accumulate there. It could be a problem over the long term and shorten the life of your pump. Compressor manufacturers have lots of information out there on how air pressure and temperature affect the dew point. You'll be keeping your fish room at a pretty warm temp with pretty humid air, so the pressure dew point in your loop system will almost certianly generate substantial condensate over the longterm. It's got to go someplace and if your pump is the lowest point in the system that's where it'll go. It's safer to keep the pump high so the condensation gets pushed into the tanks instead of into the pump.

Yeah I agree with the others. The male will just claim a cave and sit there at the entrance fanning his fins to display to the female. They're not overly aggressive at all. If a female is ready to spawn and suitably impressed by his fanning technique, she'll enter the cave and they'll spawn.

A bare bottom tank has less surface area for bacteria to grow. An inch of gravel in the bottom of the tank would likely increase the avaiable surface area for bacteria by about sixteen-fold or so. A typical ten gallon tank is about ten inches high, ten inches front to back, and twenty inches side to side. Each ten by twenty surface is 200 sq inches and then the two sides are 100 sq inches so you've got 600 square inches of bacteria inhabitable surface area. If you add an inch of 1/8" diameter, perfectly round gravel then each piece of gravel will have a surface area of about 0.051". It will take about 195,000 of them to reach a depth of one inch. (Or so my math says.) Then 195,000 pieces of gravel with a suface are of 0.051" gives you about 9,945 additional square inches of surface area for bacteria to colonize. So, in a bare bottom tank you've got 600 sq inches of space for bacteria, but in a tank with one inch of 1/8" diameter gravel you've now got that original 600 sq inches plus an additional 9,945 sq inches of gravel surface area. And bear in mind, these are all balpark figures. Gravel isn't perfectly round, where it meets other surfaces bacteria may have a hard time growing, gravel isn't uniform in diameter, etc. But, it gives you a rough idea of how beneficial gravel can be in giving bacteria a place to live. A bare bottom tank will always be harder to cycle than a tank with gravel or substrate. There's just less space for the bacteria to colonize in a bare bottom tank. If you use smaller diameter gravel you increase the surface area even more. If the gravel has some porosity you increase it even more. Glass just isn't an ideal surface for bacteria to live on and that makes cycling a bare bottom tank more challenging. It can be done, but it's always going to be harder and arguably less stable. Just sunlight hitting the glass can damage bacteria living on the glass. Bacteria tucked away in the gravel would be safe from the sunlight.

What you're looking for in an undergravel filter substrate is surface area. More surface area gives more places for bacteria to colonize giving you a larger pool of bacteria. Lava rock being somewhat porous does give you decent surface area. Sand gives you lots of surface area. (Which is why it's used in fluidized sand bed filters.) Bigger, nonporous pieces of substrate give you less surface area. I've seen reverse flow undergravel systems used in marine tanks where the water flow is so high that the sand bed of the tank is at least somewhat fluidized. This can create issues with sand being overly mobile and sucked into filters and damaging pumps. If you're going to understock the tank, it doesn't really matter what you use. One highly spoiled betta in a 125 gallon tank won't matter. If like most fishkeepers you're more inclined to overstock the tank, then you'll want a finer, more porous substrate that gives you more surface area for bacterial growth.

The challenge with custom stands is that most local fish stores here sell the tank/stand combos. They won't even sell you just the tank. The custom tank builders tend to build big tanks and use steel stands that they custom build also. Once again, you have to buy the combo. If they'll sell you just the tank without the stand, they'll void the warranty since you're not using their stand. If you have a well-equipped woodshop then consider adding acrylic tank manufacturing to your skillset. It opens the door for a custom tank/stand combo business. Much of the wood working equipment can be used in tank manufacturing also. There are lots of videos out there on acrylic tank manufacturing. If you've got a very well equipped shop with a CNC router table of sufficient size and the right bits, it gets even easier. The CNC router can do all of the cutting and even the edge polishing so all you need do is weld everything together using the right solvent. Plop down the sheet of acrylic (cast acrylic of the right thickness.) Set up the CNC machine and then just let it go. Pull out some clamps and tape when it's cut. Set everything up in the right place and weld the joints. Even if you just break even with the tank but make a decent profit on the stand it's not a bad idea.

For java fern and most mosses, you don't need CO2. Just 60 watts of lighting on a 240 shouldn't cause you much trouble in terms of algae growth and that lighting shouldn't over stimulate your plant growth. How long will a half liter of CO2 last? Forever if you don't use it and you really don't need it with those plants and that amount of light.

What I'd recommend is looking for a line that you love, but that has room for improvement. Maybe they need a stronger caudal peduncle, a wider body, a larger fin, more colorful females, or something else that's doable but missing in the line now. Then work to add that whatever it is to your line and make it your own line. You really want that vision of the perfect guppy and to work to achieve it. Maybe you want to add dumbo ears to a line that doesn't have them. Buy a dumbo eared male/female and pair them off with a fish in the line that you love. Then sort out their fry into dumbo eared versions of the ones you love and over time you can create a new line that's uniquely your own. I've always thought that if I opened a fish farm and bred livebearers I'd go for two extremes, giant and dwarf. (In addition to color, conformity, health, etc.) Livebearers tend to vary a bit in size naturally, so I'd try to create giant and dwarf mollies, swordtails, platies, guppies, etc. Breed the large ones to other large ones. Breed the little ones to the littlest ones. I suspect you could create giant and dwarf lines of livebearers pretty easily. I've seen pond-raised sailfin mollies that were about eight inches long and they were awesome! Nano tanks are pretty popular these days. If you could create dwarf livebearers that were the size of the small fish used for nano tanks, you could find yourself with a large market. (Live births might be tricky if the fish got too small though.) Imagine a school of ten to twelve inch long swordtails swimming in a large tank. Pretty neat, huh? I think such a project could be doable. It would take time and lots of culling but it just might work. Getting larger livebearers might be easier than getting smaller ones due to live birth issues, but I think both would be doable. A fish farm that came out with dwarf and giant livebearers could make a lot of money. (Until others bought breeding pairs and started selling their fry.) For a while though you'd be in good shape.

Infusoria cultures tend to boom and bust. They reproduce so quickly that they'll rapidly consume the food/oxygen available and then some will die and ammonia will spike, then more will die and then they're all dead. They're not the easiest fry food to culture successfully over the long term.

I bought one from the Coop back in January that's done nothing. They sent a replacement that's done great. It seems to be very hit or miss with the bulb plants. The first one is still hanging around the tank and not rotting, but also not growing after eight months. It looks the same as it did when I bought it.

Frogbit is intersting for me. It's taken over my rain barrels that are in full sun. It's absolutely thriving there. In my tanks it gets maybe dime to quarter-sized but out there it's much bigger. It might need more light. I don't think it's a nutrient issue as my rain barrels only have rainwater which is nutrient poor. More light seems to be better.

My thoughts exactly. The pool should have a filter. Use it. A shock treatment with chlorine should clear things up pretty quickly. Mosquito fish are carnvores (they eat mosquito larvae) so they'd be prety inefficient as algae eaters. Mollies are more herbivores and are somewhat native to the southern states. As livebearers they'd reproduce to use up extra food. If I absolutely had to go with a fish, it would be mollies. They're cheap, can get fairly big in larger pools (6"-8" for the bigger sailfin mollies), are relatively native so if one escapes you won't get killed by the authorities. They're also pretty tough little fish. There's likely some hiding out in that nearby ditch where the snail was found.

For the little guys, the French-style green beans are best. They have a hard time working through the bean skin on whole beans. When you talk about seasoning the 29 gallon tank. I'd have lights on it 24/7 to grow as much algae as possible before you move the babies over. They'll be very happy with the algae. Once you have fish in it you can go back to a normal light schedule. And 30-40 baby bristlenose can stay in a ten gallon tank a long time a long as the tank has adequate filtration. Around Christmas things might start to get a bit crowded, but you've got time before it becomes a huge issue.

You have to be careful on sites like Aquabid, e-Bay, or Etsy these days as some sellers are now simply buying stock from overseas instead of selling stock they bred themselves. Instead of buying a locally bred fish you can just be buying the same fish you could get at Petsmart. It's often cheaper, easier, and more profitable for sellers to just buy and resell fish than raise them. This is especially true of adult fish. Those selling fry are typically selling fish they've raised, but the adult fish sellers, eh, it gets a bit iffier buying those. There are people who made a reputation breeding their own fish and selling them who now have pretty much abandoned breeding their own and just buy wholesale and resell. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, unless they're misleading the buyer. Some guppies from Israel or Indonesia may be better than stuff raised locally. You just have to be a smart consumer.