gardenman

I agree with everything Big Green said and would add that painters tape will help ensure good, clean lines when resealing. It lets you decide in advance exactly where you'll be putting the silicone and then gives you sharp, crisp lines afterward. Once you've sealed the tank, simply remove the tape while the silicone is uncured and you'll be in good shape.

There are joys and heartbreaks in fishkeeping, just as with just about everything else we do in life. My oldest cat is in decline now and I dread the day she's gone. But I've treasured the good and bad times with her. Losing any pet should hurt, if not you're not as human as I like to think most of us are. Fish are a little trickier to maintain than some pets and not as difficult as others. If you get joy from keeping fish, then you should keep fish and just accept that death happens. (Deaths in tanks are a fraction of what takes place in the wild though. It's been estimated that fewer than 1% of the fish born in the wild survive to adulthood.) You've given a nice home to a betta who otherwise might have died in a jar at a pet shop form neglect. You're giving him the best life you can. That's all you can do. Enjoy him while you have him and take joy in him.

The two millimeters on each side would add up to four millimeters if the bulkhead was all the way to one side. That's 0.157" (a tick over an eighth of an inch, about 5/32's of an inch) which is still much smaller than any bulkhead gasket I've seen. My gut says it's a bulkhead issue. If the bulkhead got over tightened at some point it's possible a hairline crack developed where the bulkhead meets the tank. The design of a bulkhead is such that you're trying to pull that inner face through the tank to compress the gasket. If you pull too hard (overtighten the nut) it's not impossible to crack that section and cause a leak.

The weight issue is why a garage makes a great fish room. If the garage floor will hold a car, it'll hold however many fish tanks you want to plop down on it. Things get iffier with interior structures. Even if the floor doesn't break, a large amount of weight in one spot over years can slowly deform the wood, creating a permanent dip in the floor. Wood is bendable and over time with a large load, even the strongest wood will deform. Weird things can happen when wood gets overly stressed. If you want to learn more, Google "wood creep" as that's what deformation over time with stress in wood is called.

The 2 mms shouldn't be an issue as the gasket is wider than that. There's a reason it's leaking though. The question is, what is that reason. Can you see where the leak originates? Bulkheads are typically injection molded and it's possible there's a weak spot internally in the bulkhead. Maybe a fine crack where the bulkhead meets the tank. My big suspicion would be a defective bulkhead. When you talk about grease, I 'm assuming you coated the gasket with petroleum jelly. It's a very safe item to use to seal bad gaskets. If that didn't work, I'd suspect an issue with the bulkhead itself. A new bulkhead would likely solve your problem.

I like the idea of using the output from a canister filter to feed the reverse flow UG filter. Use the gravel bed as your biofilter and the canister as the mechanical/chemical filter. It would take a bit of siliconing to lock the output hose into the UG input, but it would be doable. It would create positive pressure under the gravel bed with a constant flow of water through the gravel bed. The backpressure on the canister filter pump might shorten the canister filter lifespan a bit, but spray bars also create backpressure on the filter so I'm not sure how much of an impact it would have. That's the approach I would take if I were doing one today. Canister filters have gotten pretty cheap and an approach like that might be ideal.

My tanks get freeze-dried tubifex worms every afternoon around four or so. The fish know it and stake out the area where I put the cubes. As soon as I open the top they're all heading that way for their afternoon meal. I use six cubes in my fifty, and two in the twenty and thirty. Just one goes in the ten. I've had no issues doing that and I've been doing that for a couple of years now. I buy a half pound of tubifex worm cubes at a time.

If you put a bucket of water outside for any period of time, life will find it. Mosquito larvae are a great food for angelfish and as far as I know, mosquitos are everywhere. More buckets of water mean more live food for your fish. I use a brine shrimp net to scoop up lots of live food from my rain barrels for my tanks. I've got daphnia, mosquito larvae, and God only knows what and all else in them The fish like the live food though.

You want easy answers to hard questions. There are no easy answers. The preferred temperature for fish varies from fish species to species. Some like to be kept cooler, some warmer. Even a general statement like "normal room temperature" is pointless as many people keep their homes at different temps. I've known a few people who keep their homes in the fifties or sixties year round which is cooler than most tropical fish could tolerate. I've known others who keep their homes in the eighties. How often should water be changed? Once again, it depends. If you have one neon tetra in a 125 gallon tank, the answer is never. That tetra would die of old age before his water would need to be changed. Put a hundred neon tetras in a five gallon tank and you might as well hook a hose up and be changing the water constantly. What to do if the fish get sick? Find out what they're sick with. You've got bacterial illnesses (often treatable if caught early and you choose the right antibiotic,) fungal illnesses, parasitic infections, and viral infections. All pretty much need to be treated differently. Some can't be treated. What fish are good for a beginner? A properly informed beginner should be able to keep most fish alive and well. I would steer them away from the monster fish like red-tailed catfish and the like, but the reality is good fishkeeping practices will let pretty much anyone keep pretty much anything alive. Bad fishkeeping practices will kill even the hardiest of fish. What should happen if all of the fish in a tank die? Remove the dead bodies. Clean the tank. And figure out what went wrong. Did the heater malfunction? Did the filter malfunction? Was there an ammonia spike? Was it caused by a disease? Was it caused by negligence? Once you know what happened you can take steps to prevent that from happening again.

Five is a lot. I would worry about internal parasites being the cause with that many deaths. I'd probably treat the whole tank to be safe. With just the corys dying it would seem to be something they were coming into contact with more than the other fish.

Until they fully absorb the yolk sac they tend to cluster together. Once that's gone and they have to eat it's every pleco for themselves. They really spread out then and keeping track of them is a lot harder.

I've been intrigued by the idea of using a jar to hold the DIY generated CO2 then having a powerhead with the venturi air intake placed up high in the jar to atomize the collected CO2. Diffusing the homebrew CO2 can often be a challenge, so this would help to solve that issue. It might be the most efficient way to utilize home brew CO2. It would probably be a bit noisy but it might work out pretty well. You wouldn't need an especially large jar/collection chamber as the CO2 would be getting dispersed as soon as it was released. You don't want to connect the venturi input of the powerhead directly to the CO2 outlet as it would create a vacuum, but sharing a space with the collected CO2 could just work.

How many corydoras died? One is not an issue. Fish die. Often for completely unknown reasons. It happens. If you've lost several, then it's more of a concern. Internal parasites are often an issue with corys. They live on the bottom and most internal parasites get passed through feces and the corys are down where the feces are. It's easy for them to pick up an internal parasite where a top dwelling fish like a hatchet fish or butterfly fish might be less inclined to encounter the parasite. IF there are significant casualties, I'd suspect an internal parasite. The paranoid part of me worries more about your tank being supported by two separate platforms. It's working for you, but it would scare me. Any difference in the height or stability of one of the two platforms could create stress on the structure of the tank which could lead to problems down the road.

I use a coffee grinder and grind up whatever the parents eat for the fry. I can get an insanely fine powder doing that. If the powder is fine enough it more or less stays suspended in the water column and moves with any current often tricking fry into thinking it's alive and moving. I typically grind up flake food, freeze-dried tubifex worms, some granular food, and an algae wafer or two. For baby plecos they just get whatever the adults get. Instead of whole green beans though I'll go with the French style ones as the baby plecos have a hard time with the green bean skins.

I bought ten cherry shrimp a while back and they were small so I put them in a breeder box to get some size on them. Three died after two weeks but the other seven were fine. Then they started to go missing. I have a fine grate over the outlet of the breeder box, but they were apparently squeezing their way past it into the big tank the breeder box hangs on. I now have one cherry shrimp still in the box. The ones that escaped into the bigger tank are unaccounted for. They could be alive and thriving (the tank is heavily planted with lots of java moss) or they could have become swordtail food. I'm leaning towards the latter. My swordtails are voracious which is why the shrimp were in the breeder box. The one shrimp still in the breeder box is very happy though. He gets all the food to himself now.

I find the TetraColor Tropical Granules sink very quickly and enough get past my swordtails for the corys to have their fill. All my fish seem to like them also.

On my fifty gallon tank I have a sponge filter, a knockoff Ziss-type filter, and a Penn Plax Cascade 1500 canister filter. I like all three options for different reasons. The knockoff Ziss filter is easiest to clean. Just unscrew the base, pull out the sponge (while the filter is still running) give it a good rinse and then back in it goes and back on goes the base. No muss, no fuss and I'm done in a minute or two. Sponge filters take a bit more work to clean, but they're not horrible. The canister filter is a lot more work to clean, but it's not horrible, It takes me maybe twenty minutes to clean it completely. If I had to go with just one type of filter, it would probably be the Ziss knockoff. The K1 type media has an impressive amount of bacterial growth on it and it's arguably the easiest of the three to maintain. It's also the noisiest though and if that's an issue for you, you might want to go with another option.

Synodontis cats should do well in those conditions also. They live among African cichlids in the wild and those are high pH and high hardness water conditions. Cory cats are South American and they tend to be in softer, more acidic water.

Pretty much every marine reef aquarium has a sump and they almost all use wavemakers, so there shouldn't be a major issue. Now, having said that, if you have a drilled tank and the feed to the sump is fairly high up in the tank and the wavemaker will make big enough waves so the feed hole to the sump is occasionally out of the water, that could be an issue. The term wavemaker is used pretty generically these days, but a true "wavemaker" is a series of pumps (at least two) on either side of the aquarium that pulse on and off and create a back and forth current, much like waves along a coastline. They're wired together and typically have a controller of some sort. You can find true wavemakers that create six inch or larger waves which could affect flow to a sump if not properly accounted for. If you're just using one pump to increase circulation, it shouldn't be an issue.

He opened the store and has been showing some unboxings and whatnot. He's not as active (by a long shot) as he was, but running a store will do that to you. He's been having issues getting quality fish also. I believe he mentioned in one episode that most of the cory catfish he was getting were very small and dying. He's probably being kept too busy to shoot and edit too many videos right now.

In my limited experience with the 6500K daylight LED bulbs in an old incandescent hood, they worked great, but were much shorter-lived than expected. I was replacing them every three months or so. Whether it was the horizontal orientation, or the lack of ventilation, they didn't come close to getting the 50,000 hours one would typically expect from an LED. After a year or two I ended the experiment and just bought a cheap LED fixture instead. It ended up being cheaper than replacing the bulbs.

To me, there's ich and then there's ICH. If a single fish has a single white spot in a crowded tank, I'm not overly worried about it. I'll buy an apparently healthy fish from that tank and treat it. If every fish in the tank has ICH and a lot of it, then no. I'll walk away. Ich is treatable and often just a sign of stress. And fish go through a lot of stress in the retail sales process. A minor ich issue involving just a few fish wouldn't scare me off if the fish I was interested in appeared to be healthy. In a perfect world you'd want every fish sold to be perfectly fit, disease free, well nourished, and stress-free. In the real world, you'd be hard pressed to find one fish in even the best pet shop that was in that condition. I'm not a huge fan of the tank to tank filtering systems many shops use, but the reality is most shops and staff will cross contaminate tanks anyway, so you might as well have them all connected. It probably won't make that big of a difference. Many tank-to-tank systems use UV sterilizers where individual tanks don't, so you could argue that a tank-to-tank system is safer overall. (Assuming the UV bulb is working, the water flow is correct and the bulb is reasonably fresh.) Net dips aren't always used between tanks. Even when they are used, the dip solution gets diluted every time a wet net is dipped back into it. A fresh net dip solution might be 99% effective. By the end of the day after hundreds of fish have been caught, it might be mostly water and completely ineffective. With each use a wet net goes in, drops off water and dilutes the net dip solution while carrying some of the net dip solution back to the tanks. Even if the net dip is perfect, if the clerk gets their hand wet moving between tanks and doesn't disinfect it, they can spread whatever issue one tank has to any other tank they dip their hand into. I don't mind some dead fish or minor disease issues in pet shops. It's pretty much the norm. It's almost impossible to totally prevent issues from arising.

One of the big issues for many newbies is a desire to keep the tank immaculate. They think a cleaner tank is better and will scrub the filter and even boil sponges and the like to sterilize them so the fish live in a cleaner, more sterile tank. As a general rule for aquarium keepers, dirtier is better than cleaner. We've been conditioned to believe bacteria are bad when for aquariums they're essential and vital. The reality is our fish tanks should be more focused on keeping bacteria alive and well and the fish are just how we feed the bacteria. If we take good care of the bacteria, the fish will be fine. If you plop fish into a sterile environment, they'll be dead in short order. When dealing with newbies, there are two key points. One, chlorine in tap water is deadly. Two, dirtier is better than cleaner. It's very rare for a tank to be in trouble because it's too dirty, but very common for a tank to have issues with being too clean.

It's not a bad job on my Cascade canisters, I'd just never thought it would be necessary. The hoses have a valve on them that you shut and then unscrew the hoses from the canister. I then just carried them to my sink and plopped them down there and reopened the valve. I then started to push in the brush and within a few inches of the brush entering, black slimy gunk started to emerge from the other end of the hose. Yikes! The hoses were nearly completely blocked with gunk. Once I had them all brushed out I then held them up under the faucet to flush them and then reinstalled them on the filters. I knew the flow rate had been lower than normal and while the impellers looked fine, I'd just assumed they were worn or the motors were having issues of some sort. I was getting ready to order new impellers when I opted instead to try the long hose brush first. I'm glad I did. It turns out the impellers are fine and it was just gunk in the hoses that was causing the slowdown. Lesson learned. The gunk in the hoses was probably good gunk/bacteria as the water quality was great, but it was slowing things down too much.

If you keep a healthy, established, planted tank with at least some livebearers in it, you're doing a pretty good job of creating a "natural diet" environment for your fish. My tanks are teeming with life. I keep my breeder boxes hooked up on the tanks even when they're empty and the water in them just teems with life. A close look at the water in them (which slowly circulates to and from the tank) shows all kinds of small stuff moving, jerking, swimming, or crawling around in them. All that life came from the tank. You don't see it as much in the tank as the filters tend to filter it out and the fish tend to eat it, but it's there. The livebearers produce fry, most of which end up in another fish's belly. Egg-scatterers like tetras and the like provide extra nutrition by scattering their eggs that the other fish enjoy consuming. Algae is a natural food source. If you add a few shrimp to the tank the shrimplets become something of a delicacy for the bigger fish. My fish still get prepared food (flake/pellets/Repashy/freeze-dried) twice a day but truth be told, it might just make up half of what they eat in the course of a day. The rest of the stuff in their bellies is stuff they found in the tank. My fish are constantly on the prowl for food and pecking away at something. They don't just recline in a lounge chair and wait for me to open the top and drop in some food. They don't have to. There's always something to eat there in the tank with them.