ererer

It's an uber sustainable protein source, what's not to like? Green smoothie anyone?

Maybe Igor should be Igorina, a la Terry Pratchett?

Sorry to hear about your struggles, I don't have any suggestions unfortunately. I just wanted to say that your shiners look incredible!

Nice pictures, love me some darters!

Seems like an awful lot of filtration. If it was me, I'd do either a single sponge filter or an appropriately sized hob.

I've used the non-wifi inkbird controllers successfully. I'd suggest trying their wifi models as @Mmiller2001 recommended.

UGFs seem to used to be really common but have fallen out of fashion. Can't say I have ever tried one or really even know a lot about them. Most surfaces in your tank, especially plant surfaces, help with biological filtration. Sponge filters, HOBs, and canisters can provide varying amounts of mechanical filtration. All three work fine for me.

"Yes, I thought you had to" is a rather biased answer for a survey.

@tolstoy21 I have the smart buddie booster pump, which incorporates an auto shutoff and a backflush setup with the booster. I'm impressed with it. The instructions show to put the pump after sediment and carbon and before the RO membrane. https://brsinstructions.s3.amazonaws.com/brsAquaticLife/Smart_Buddie_Manual_061318.pdf I don't think the sediment or carbon filters need the extra pressure, but I don't know if having the extra pressure shortens the useful life of those filters, or if putting those filters before the booster pump potentially extends the life of the pump?

Interesting, I have my booster pump setup after the micron filter and carbon block but before the RO. I saw this suggested somewhere but don't remember where right now.

Neat, I haven't seen that graph before with a trend line for total N. Interesting relationship!

With white worms, I can keep mine in my basement, so temperature isn't an issue. Though I keep my fish upstairs in my bedroom, so going downstairs and coming back up was also impractical. I was keeping mine in a damp soil mixture, and found that they weren't reproducing very fast so that I couldn't feed much or often, and it was time consuming and messy to pick them out of the soil one by one. Also, I had to watch and try to feed individual fish since I didn't have many worms to make sure that everyone was eating, with the picky ones that only eat live foods, like pygmy sunfish. It was just impractical for me. I gave up on them when the culture became infested with tiny red mites (they may have come in on the soil, that was my fault). I've heard about people using scouring pads instead of soil as a culture media. I had grindal worms shipped to me this way but they didn't ship well the one or two times I tried so I didn't end up getting to try it. @Dkshadowwolf and @Daniel, do you have suggestions on easier ways to keep white worms or grindals? With microworms, I just make a new culture every two months, sprinkle yeast on the culture every so often, and use my finger to wipe some worms off the top or side of the container. Very easy. If white worms or grindals could be this easy, I would definitely add them to the mix. I'd do blackworms, but I'm not interested in setting up another aquarium just to culture them. Unless there's also an easier way with them?

I feed quality crushed flake to all my tanks, sinking shrimp pellets to my tank with corys and sometimes the shrimp tank, blanched frozen veggies to the shrimp and snail tank, microworms for my natives tank for the pygmy sunfish and to my paracyprichromis tank, bbs to my paracyprichromis tank, and the vibra bites fake bloodworms for my apistos, cardinal tetras, and julidochromis. I'd like to feed more live foods, but find it to take too much of a setup or too time consuming. I tried white worms but that didn't work well for me. I just started bbs and will probably use that for more tanks now that the paracyprichromis are eating crushed flake as well. I also need more microworm cultures going at once. They're easy I just need to start them.

Have you tried feeding them crushed flake or sinking pellets and they won't eat it? I've found corydoras not to be picky eaters, mine seem to scavenge any food that makes it to the bottom. They aren't the fastest eaters though, so you need to make sure that food gets past any fish in the upper water levels.

Well I'll be damned. Thanks for sharing. I do notice that my corys like to dig through sand in search of food, so maybe keep a small part of the tank with sand where you feed them? Seems like they'll do okay though with the gravel, so choose what you think looks good!