gardenman

"Lead" plant weights these days are typically made from either magnesium or zinc. I would avoid putting anything metal into a tank including some stainless steel as not all stainless steel is truly rustproof. There are different grades of stainless steel with varying degrees of corrosion resistance. Some people who bought stainless steel appliances are finding out that the stainless steel in their appliance is less corrosion resistant than they'd assumed as it's rusting. There are some very angry consumers out there with that issue. If you have something metal you really want to put into the tank, seal it first. A good coat of a clear polyurethane should do the job. If it's small enough, dipping it in the clear poly and rolling it while submerged to ensure every surface is coated is smart. A spray on coating is the second best option, but getting poly on every surface is a challenge. Then you want it to dry for at least double the cure time stated on the poly container. A good coat of polyurethane should be tough enough to survive even the most determined pleco scraping away at it for years. Poly comes in everything from flat to high gloss to, so you have options in how the finished product looks. Higher gloss typically means harder finish also, so if you want the hardest possible finish, you go with the higher gloss.

As far as I know rock wool is rock wool and there's no special rock wool for plants. Someone, sometime, long, long ago apparently had some lying around and decided to use it for plants and it became the standard. As to where to find it, Home Depot and Lowes both list it on their sites in batts and blankets that you could cut apart to use in pots and it's widely used in hydroponics so look at anyone selling hydroponic supplies and you should be able to find it also. Hydroponics sites tend to sell it in small cubes or larger cubes for use as a rooting medium for the hydroponic plants. Even Wish has it if you don't mind waiting a decade or so for delivery. E-Bay also has sellers selling it for the home hydroponics folks.

There are the smaller, cheaper, noisier, hotter air pumps like the Vivosun line that can supply a good amount of air to multiple tanks. You can recognize them as they're essentially a finned metal heatsink with an air outlet on one end and a cord on the other. If you can live with the heat and noise, they could be a viable option. They're cheap ($30-$80.) Easy to maintain. Many people have found they can simply cut some leftover rubber pond liner to make a DIY new membrane for them. If you've ever installed a lined pond then you likely have some leftover pieces of liner lying around. The heat becomes something of an issue with them. Many people end up training a fan on them to cool them off. There seems to be wildly varying descriptions of the noise they make. Some people claim they're nearly silent while others compare them to a jet engine. The noise can be muffled a bit by adding some tubing to the air inlet on them. They're an option if your air needs aren't too great and you can live with the heat and noise they give off.

The old incandescent light fixtures for aquariums have seen a revival with the arrival of the daylight LED bulbs. You can get a lot of light from those fixtures these days. I was using one on my ten gallon quarantine tank and it was growing everything very well, but the bulbs had a shorter than preferred life due to the heat buildup. The venting that was adequate for the incandescent bulbs wasn't quite good enough for the LED bulbs. (At least in that fixture. It could also be the horizontal placement of the bulbs. Most LED bulbs are used upright so maybe the horizontal placement caused issues?) The bulbs were only lasting six months or so in the fixture then they'd start flickering and having issues before going out completely. I used it for a couple of years then replaced it with an LED aquarium light.

If anything, it looks too good to me. My old Metaframe tanks would get a bit rusty. (The ones with the slate bottom.) Now, I have pretty nasty water so maybe that's why, but it almost looks too good. It's very, very shiny. But hey, for $!0 Canadian (whatever that is in American) it's a pretty good deal anyway.

As is often the case, it depends. Water quality for the infusoria will be the same type of issues we have in aquariums. If the water goes bad, the infusoria will die. The hornwort will help to keep the water a bit more stable by absorbing some of the waste. Starting a backup culture or two is always wise if you're going to be dependent on the infusoria to feed your fish. Then you can push things a bit in your first culture and see if/when it crashes. If the culture crashes ten days after you put in the squash, then try replacing the squash and doing a water change on day seven in culture two. If that works then you know how frequently to change the water and replace the food. Multiple small cultures are typically better than one big one. It gives you some insurance and some food for your fry no matter what happens.

It's a bit the worse for wear after a long winter. If winter was just starting I'd take some time to tidy it up, but the greenhouse plastic will be coming off in about four weeks, so I'm not overly worried about it now.

I used a Goodyear rubber liner. It's still like new. I keep the pond fairly full and there's a 2x10 on top to shield it from the sun.

I built an aboveground pond maybe thirty years ago now and have used a greenhouse cover on it every winter. The coldest water temp I've ever recorded in it was 45 degrees and I live in South Jersey where winter temps are often in the single digits. (It could have been coder at some point, but that's the lowest I've ever measured and I've never seen any ice on it at all.) The old, original cover was made in a sectional fashion with solid, insulated ends and back with a double layer of storm windows facing south. The last two winters I've gone with a hoop style cover made using 1/2" PVC pipe. The pond is made of pressure treated 2X4s and 3/4" pressure treated plywood. It's pretty much built like the walls of your house with 2X4's as the studs. The plywood forms the floor and inside walls. I used joist hangers on the studs to help make them even stronger. Here's a photo of it taken this morning. (Ignore the weeds.)

Alita also makes linear piston air pumps starting with their AL-40 and going up to their AL-200. Oddly enough you can find the largest selection of linear piston air pumps at septic sites. The site septicsolutions.com has an enormous selection of linear piston air pumps including some with dual ports and others with alarms built in to let you know if the pump isn't functioning properly. If you can't find a linear piston air pump you want at that site, it probably doesn't exist. Even if you don't need the capacity of the Medo 40 linear piston air pump sold here, you can always vent off unwanted air. It's better to have too much air than not enough. The price difference isn't that much either over the long term. The replacement diaphragm on the Alita AL15A is kind of pricey. On their site the air pump alone sells for $105 and including the replacement diaphragm moves the price up to $149.90 so you're paying about $45 for the replacement diaphragm. Replace the diaphragm three times and you're paying the same as you would for the Medo with the higher capacity. It's something to think about.

I've never sold plants on any site, but I have bought plenty from sites. Most plants I buy come wrapped in damp paper towels and are sealed in a Ziploc type bag or plastic container. More fragile plants tend to come in a box. Less fragile plants come in an envelope. E-Bay and Etsy are two alternative sites you could use for plant selling also. I mostly buy through e-Bay. They've been around forever and have the largest selection, but Etsy is catching up to them in terms of plants.

Oddly enough, I'm finding frogbit works outside in full sun for me. At least until we get a frost tonight. It may not survive that. I use 110 gallon stock tanks to collect rain water for my garden and when I was getting ready to dispose of my weekly bowl of excess floaters a week ago this past Saturday, I dumped them into one of the stock tanks that gets full southern exposure. The duckweed's not happy. The salvinia is a goner, but the frogbit is thriving. Days have been 60-ish and nights in the mid to upper 40s so it's not really tropical weather, but the frogbit is growing like mad. It does well in my house also, but I was expecting it to keel over out there and so far, it hasn't.

Exactly what I was going to say. Water lilies can get very, very large. If you want a flowering plant, water hyacinths would be a good option. They'll grow rapidly, like really rapidly, and flower from time to time.

I find the cheap air pumps to be pretty easy to repair as long as the coil doesn't fail. I pretty much ignore the air filters and remove them from the start. It's not like there's a lot of stuff in my air that will kill the fish, so off they come. Some quilt batting or cotton could replace them if need be, but I just don't bother. The thing that tends to fail in most air pumps is that little piece of rubber on both sides of the diaphragm. I've found that a piece of a rubber band cut to the right size replaces those nicely. If the big rubber cup develops issues, you can typically repair it with some rubber cement or replace it. Those replacement parts are pretty readily available.

Something that's used for higher-end pond liners is the polyurea spray on coating. (Like truck bed liners.) There are specialty firms that will come to your place with a sprayer and apply it. I saw a demo once where they stacked up concrete blocks with no mortar then sprayed them with the polyurea and they were about as strong as a fully mortared wall. If you can find someone locally who applied truck bed liners by spray, they could likely line your pond at a reasonable cost. The equipment is typically fairly portable. Google "spray on polyurea pond liner" for more information. And Flex-Seal should work also. The cure time for the polyurea is insanely fast. One pond builder used to claim they could fill and stock the pond within an hour of spraying.

I don't have the Ziss one but a knockoff sold on Amazon. It uses relatively common sized suction cups like those used for airline tubing. Just pop out the airline tubing holder and attach the suction cup to the filter. Some hot melt glue can quickly adhere them if the shaft opening is too big, or aquarium safe epoxy putty or gel super glue would also work to attach them to the filter. The airline suction cups tend to be cheap and readily available. Also, heck to be sure your aquarium wall is really clean. It's possible there's some small debris/biofilm built up that's letting the suction fail and the current cups are fine.

The answer to which is rarer, is neither. Both are equally available as far as I know. Both are commonly bred and readily available from a number of sources for similar prices.

Attached garages tend to make pretty good fish rooms. They have a concrete floor, electricity, sometimes running water is already there, or at least nearby. That big garage door can make moving larger tanks in and out very easy. They're also pretty easy to reset back into a garage when you move down the road.

"Natural pleco caves" would generally be mud holes in the side of a riverbank. Most of us don't have mud in our tanks, some silly nonsense about it being incredibly messy and most hobbyists actual want to occasionally see a fish and not just muddy water. There are roughly a gazillion pleco cave options out there. Mine prefer a piece of 1" (too small) PVC pipe with an end cap. They have a slate cave I made for them. They have the clay watering spikes, and larger PVC pipe with end caps, but the males fight for and breed in the little 1" PVC pipe. It really is too small for them, but it's what they like and what they use, so there's that. If you're not breeding them, they'll find a place to hide out. It may be under the edge of a sponge filter, behind the heater, behind a filter tube, etc. so they don't "need" a cave unless you're trying to breed them. If you're trying to breed them, then hit them with a variety of options and see which they choose. Mine love the undersized PVC. Go figure. They can barely squeeze in it these days, but it's what they like.

Nitrates are a somewhat controversial subject. Some sources claim that nitrates as high as 200 ppm are completely harmless for older, established fish. Some people insist you need to keep them at very low levels. My nitrates levels are always sky high. A big part of the reason for that is that my tap water is sky high with ammonia and the ammonia ends up becoming nitrates. I don't find high nitrates to be an issue. Now I'm not keeping overly fussy fish. Mostly neon swordtails (way, way too many of them.) Super Red Bristlenose plecos (once again way too many of them.) And a few assorted odds and ends (panda corys, a lone oto who makes an appearance once every three months or so, a couple of leftover platies, and probably a bit more that doesn't come to mind.) Oh, and lots, and I mean lots of ramshorn snails. The last time I lost a fish was about three weeks ago and that was the first loss in about three months and that was a three plus year old swordtail. (He'd have been four in August.) My swordtails and plecos continue to breed and thrive. (As do the ramshorn snails.) Every week I remove a very large bowl full of floating plants (mostly duckweed, but also frogbit, salvinia, and dwarf water lettuce.) All of the tanks are heavily planted and there are fry everywhere. I just don't worry about the nitrates these days. The fish are doing great, so that's what truly matters. Chasing "ideal" water parameters can cause more harm than the good it achieves. As long as my fish are happy, I'm happy. And my fish are very happy. Two male swordtails are actively courting a young female a few feet to my right as I type this.

I suspect your fish have just matured into adults. Young humans tend to do stupid stuff when they're young and then later in life look back and ponder, "How did I ever live through all of that? What was I thinking?" It's a fish eat fish world out there. (Actually it's an everything eats fish world out there.) Young fish may not realize that but as they grow and mature they start to realize how dangerous the world is and start acting more appropriately. You pretty much see it across the animal kingdom. Your puppy or kitten will do things that an older dog or cat won't even consider trying. Part of maturing is limiting risk and it carries across many/most animal species. Your fish have matured their way past their wild, reckless, youth and are now settled down and living as responsible adults. I suspect a geneticist could find a maturity gene of some sort that dampened down reckless behavior as a creature ages if they looked for it. Very few people, or animals for that matter, behave as recklessly as adults as they did in their younger days.

For me, it depends. As a rule I always temperature acclimate, but there's an exception to the rule. If the fish is clearly in dire distress and the water in the bag is bad, I want them out of that bad water as quickly as possible and even the fifteen minutes or so to temperature acclimate may be too long. Then I just tear open the bag and pour the fish into a net and they go right into the tank. Any fish I get through online sources, I temperature acclimate if the fish are doing okay then plop and drop. I want them out of the bag water and into my water as quickly as possible once the bag is opened. I pretty much plop and drop every fish these days but I tend to buy cheaper fish. If I'd invested more in a fish I might drip acclimate. It would be interesting to see someone do some testing on how long it takes the water in a fish bag to change once exposed to air. Fill a bag with fish, leave them in it a day or two as if it was being shipped and they're in there breathing and pooping away, then open the bag and start monitoring the change in the water when exposed to fresh air. How long is there before the water starts undergoing significant changes? Do you have ten seconds? Ten minutes? Ten hours? I don't know. You could record the quality of the water when you bag the fish, then immediately upon opening the bag, and then at certain intervals after opening until it stabilized. In a perfect world the bag would have something like an IV bag port where you could draw water from it at various times also to see how it changed before being exposed to air just from the fish being in the bag. Testing whether replacing the air in a bag with pure oxygen made a difference or not would be interesting also. A couple of sites I've seen say the oxygen tube should be placed under the water and the bag filled with oxygen in that manner. When I've seen oxygen used to inflate bags it's always just been done from the top of the bag. Testing whether the waste-absorbing filter sponges often used in shipping are effective would be interesting also. Almost everything we "know" about bagging, shipping, transporting, and acclimating fish is anecdotal and seems based on assumptions. Some real research could give us a better understanding of what's truly best. I've poked around to try and find some research and have found an article from the Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant Program at Purdue University that pretty much says what we all assume to be true. There's also an article from the National Center for Biotechnology Information that suggests that breather bags are better as there's less mechanical disturbance of the fish. (They aren't sloshing around in other words.) There's lots of information on bagging and transporting aquaculture fish but it all seems to be more based on "that's how things are done" than any real research behind it.

Ramshorn snails are doing a great job on my algae. Since I've added them I haven't had to scrub any algae off at all. If all else fails try adding a few of them. (Which will become many of them in short order, but the algae will be under control even if the snail population isn't.)

The likelihood is that any driftwood, rocks, etc, you buy came from such a river so no real harm in using it. I just wouldn't count on them being wildly effective in cycling a new tank. A natural river can have lots of other factors controlling the ammonia and other levels that aren't in a tank. A piece of driftwood in a river may have far less beneficial bacteria on it as there's likely a lower fish concentration and less ammonia available to feed it and more things competing for what ammonia is available. We may have a piece of pothos in our tanks to suck up excess nutrients. A river may have a whole grove of willow trees doing the same thing. By the time any water gets to the driftwood/rocks those willows and other trees, or other factors, may have cleaned up all of the ammonia leaving no food for the bacteria you're hoping is on the driftwood/rocks. With no food for the bacteria there's no bacteria that survives. We tend to view things like ammonia, nitrites, and nitrates as problems. In nature, they're more viewed as fast food with lots of potential consumers fighting for them.

I typically only clean the front and sides of algae and let it grow on the back wall. That said, since adding ramshorn snails to my tanks, algae is losing the fight to survive. I bought twelve ramshorn snails (six red and six blue) off of eBay in the fall and popped them in my ten gallon quarantine tank. The tank has needed no algae removal since they hit the tank. In early January I got a plant order from the Coop that included one larger red ramshorn snail that I popped into my larger breeder box. That one snail is now about fifty and that breeder box sparkles. It looks cleaner than it did when brand new. Additional smaller ramshorn snails/eggs were apparently on/in the plants as there's a giant school of them in my twenty high where many of the plants landed and once again, no algae issues. I've moved a few to my thirty high and I haven't had to clean the glass on that even though there are relatively few snails there. (So far anyway, there will be more in the very near future based on how quickly they reproduce.) If you want algae in a tank, don't add ramshorn snails to the tank. They're remarkably effective at eliminating it. I've had nerites, mystery snails, bladder/pond snails, and none have been as effective at removing algae as the ramshorns. I don't know if I've just gotten magical ramshorns or what, but they've been the best algae eaters I've ever seen.