RockMongler

I have a 20L with some hillstream loaches (not reticulated, but the ones Aquahuna sells as the "Chinese Butterfly Pleco"), and they do pretty good. I'm honestly not sure how much algae they actually eat. Most surface algae is well controlled in my tank, I get a slight green tinge on my stream cobbles that sit there long enough, but those surfaces don't get completely covered in crazy amounts of algae. So, I am pretty sure they graze on some surface algaes and biofilm. I primarily feed xtreme nanopellet, and the two loaches I still have come out in force when they smell the pellets. The pellets land on their smooth rocks they like to hide among, and they will scoot around eating the micropellets up off the rock. They are also very much into Repashy Soilent Green. I have seen some territorality between them, and some of the initial 4 I had might have been bullied away from food enough that they didn't make it, or they died of old age (I am pretty sure they were wild caught). I had another hillstream loach, of another species, that had an impolite nickname because he was a super territorial jerk. The other hillstream loaches got chased out of where I could easily ever see them, and I think was not great for their eating habits. That loach got their own tank where they lived out the rest of their days. The ones from Aquahuna, once they got some amount of social hierarchy going, I would see all of them in various spots around the tank, grazing or chilling without instantly chasing each other away. I don't have any experience with panda garras, but they are definitely on my list of fish to have someday.

The formal way I started a siphon in the lab involved filling the siphon tube up with distilled deionized water from a small squirt bottle. The same thing could be done in a fish tank. Having a dedicated tank cup could allow you can pre-fill the siphon with (with water from the tank or even from the tap) can get you the same effect as filling it up in the tank, if you want to be as cheap as possible, while still using that style of long siphon. As long as you have a mostly full U shaped bit of tube that you can flip and keep the water in and not let air in, you can start the siphon.

Remember, you can get a siphon started by filling up the tube with water, holding the whole thing like a U shape, then you flip it over, and as long as you have water over the top of the rim, the siphon will start, no muss no fuss. I learned how to do this in grad school in a chemistry lab, because starting a siphon with your mouth is a no go in a lab, and the contamination you might get from a bulb is also a no-go. It's super easy, and you have zero chance of sucking in poopy fish water. You can also do it with just a piece of plastic tubing, even like your airline tubing.

I have a 10 gallon (female) betta tank, and I just recently added 1 kuhli loach (who ive seen wiggling about in all the Sußwassertang jungle) and 4 harlequin rasboras. I might add more rasboras later once they get settled in and I make sure my water chemistry is stable. The betta seemed slightly annoyed at first, but quickly got over it, and having the rasboras to act as a dither fish seems to help her feel even more comfortable. My cat and the betta like to get into staring matches, and the bettas behaviour has become even less spooked at the cat than before.

Thirding that. Only issue might be crossbreeding, but in a social group they should work out just fine with one another. I've seen them kept together at LFSs, both the gold and regular WCMM in the same tanks for sales, and from what I've seen in that situation, they appear to readily shoal with one another.

Seconding the other Texans' answer of "Fill it up in a bucket the day before, let it get down to room temperature overnight". I primarily keep cool-water species, and that main tank is whatever the room temp is plus however much heat is added by the light/filter/powerhead. My betta tank is kept a bit warmer, but I don't worry too much during water changes because the difference is usually not too bad in the summer. In the winter, I try to somewhat control the water temp for the betta tank by filling up directly with warmish water, but I keep to the "overnight get to room temperature" method for my main tank.

It's a neat setup, but after having it set up for so long, the streamflow doesn't quite do as much as I'd like. The streamflow manifold I have built mostly just functions as extra biofiltration with a fairly small. Things that have happened life-wise in the tank: All of my pond snails/bladder snails appear to have died off in the tank. The MTS population is incredibly healthy, pushing inot "Too many". I think that some of the planaria I have in my tank have some relation to this particular set of events, either predating on just the bladder snails, or chowing down on the bladder snail eggs. I do have a planaria trap I use occasionally when I see the population get too large, but overall the planaria aren't seeming to be having a particularly large negative effect on the tank. They appear to be more than willing to just eat regular fish food, so I don't think they are the shrimp-parasitic kind of planaria. My red cherry shrimp colony appears to be very healthy, with lots of shrimp of various sizes visible in the tank at any given time. I don't see many shirmplets, but they are probably hiding in... My subwassertang has grown gangbusters, and the java moss in my tank has almost entirely died off. I think some of the pieces of wood in my tank have a very negative effect on the java moss, because many pieces I had in contact with it slowly just turned brown and died off, and other bits just aren't growing that great. I had a really great bush of it grow on top of my powerhead spreader bar I eventually moved onto one of my pieces of wood, and it just all died within a week or two. I have java ferns in one corner that are doing fine. Not gangbusters, but slowly growing. My one anubias is also growing fairly well. My hygrophilla has been a bit of an odd one. I think the species I have is a bit big for my tank, but with some movement of stuff, much of it has stabilized. There is also duckweed I haven't yet managed to entirely get rid of, but I do like it as a nitrogen sink that is easy to remove from the tank. At some point, I may try to get another floater thats easier/less messy eventually. In the vertebrates, my WCMM are doing just fine. I think I've only really had one casualty in the last year, but the remains were likely just digested by the tank before I could really notice. I'm down to a single pair of hillstream loaches, and they appear to be a male-female pair, as they don't appear to be territorial with one another. My otocinclus passed away. It might have just gotten to its maximum age. he sheer amount of subwassertang I have is kind of absurd.

Did you (or perhaps a nearby neighbor) do any chemical treatments in your yard in the last few days? Say, grass fertilizer, or a pest treatment for ants/termites/grubs? I would suspect, given the volume of plants you have in the tub and the relatively low number of fish, that it might not have been the ammonia/nitrite/nitrate, but some other contaminant that got into the tub. But, that might be harder to properly test for. That is what I would suspect outside of extreme temperatures.

Sadly, measuring more than the basics is often chemically complicated. Most quantitative (ie, actual number) identification processes for things like separating sodium vs potassium in solution are multi-step lab processes, because Na+ and K+ both behave very similarly in most chemical reactions, as they are both alkali metals. That's why we tend to measure things like GH (measuring ions with a +2 charge, like Ca+2 and Mg+2) and KH (measuring CO3-2 and HCO3-1) as an aggregate, rather than looking at individual elemental/polyatomic ion species. I don't know if you could simplify a process like that down to something you have soaked in a cotton pad on a piece of paper with useful coloration tying into a certain concentration. Having much more than pH be even remotely accurately measurable from a strip is pretty impressive to me, to be perfectly honest. Equipment that can do quick, easy identification of elements in a sample tend to exist in commercial and university research labs, and have a price tag to match their rarity (and a lot of those might not play nice with solutions). And having spent some time playing with analytical instrumentation like that myself a bit in grad school, they are also often super finicky. That we can get "Just the basics", (seemingly) idiot proof, quantitative data from an automated machine like API is selling for ~$1200, on its own is also pretty great. Hopefully the cost of units like that will come down in price to the point that almost anyone would be able to keep them in their homes.

They are a native north american species, so they get ignored by a vast majority of fish keepers (in the US, atleast) because "Oh, that's just a regular back yard fish" ignoring that any species we keep is from someone's back yard. From what I've seen looking at them previously, they are probably going to want cooler water than a lot of tropical species, as their native range extends from northern Mexico to southern Canada. They also get moderately large (6 inch body length, with record wild caught getting up close to 9.5 inches), so you'd want a larger aquarium to accommodate them. Best bet would probably be a species tank, unless you want to get into experimenting with possible roommates yourself. Feeding, you'd probably need to do lots of frozen/freeze dried/live food at first, and see if you could push them over towards prepared food in the long run. Overall, I'd wager they probably take care similar to any larger cichlid species but with slightly cooler water. Sadly, for most north american native species, they aren't super well kept in the hobby, so there simply isn't a lot of wisdom out there on how to care for them. You might also run into state/local rules that limit your ability to keep native species in your care. Which is a shame, because there are a lot of cool native north american fishes that would be awesome to keep in tanks. But, native species tend to be expensive and difficult to keep because it is so niche, so people stay out of it.

With a lot of plants, you could probably push up to 75 total tetras easily (as long as you don't introduce them all at once!) and probably beyond. (I would lean more on the advice of forum members with more experience with larger tanks, however). You might want to investigate tetra compatibility a bit more; I mostly just listed off all the smaller-ish tetras that popped into my mind right away. I know some can be a bit more nippy than others, but most small tetras are super chill. You could also get a reasonable number of corys, otos, and some (smaller) plecos as well.

Perhaps think about a small (body size, not body count) tetra community tank in the 75 gallon. A heavily planted tank with things mentioned in other posts, populated with hordes of tetras! A large tank with a horde of neon, cardinal, rummy nose, lemon, neon green (and any other ones in that size range that are community safe)! Most of the smaller tetras tend to be very sociable, and will school with their own species, and shoal with other species. I'd also get a bottom dwelling crew of otocinclus and corydoras. Many fish stores I have visited have a large neon/cardinal tetra planted tank, and despite being common fish you see everywhere, seeing them in large numbers in a planted environment is always a sight to behold. I personally think a large number of smaller fish is far more interesting to watch and enjoy than a few larger fish. With larger numbers, you can start to see some of the fish's social behavior really start to take shape. As for filtration... I'd consider doing some sponge filters, ideally hidden behind the larger piles of plants, perhaps with a hang on back for some water movement/water polishing.

One thing to remember about any indicator (which is the chemical that changes color depending on pH) is that they tend to be very chemically reactive. There are tons of them out there, and some you can even make at home (For example, red cabbage can be used to make an indicator that is blue at ~7 pH, green at basic pHs, and red at acidic pHs). It could very well be that the chemicals API uses in their liquid pH tests and the chemicals in the co-op indicators are different, and may have differing reactions to other chemical species floating around in the water being tested, besides just looking at H+/OH- concentrations. Most indicators used for aquariums tend to have fairly narrow ranges where they change colors, and I can imagine it not taking much else in the water to throw them out of whack. It could be as simple as the indicator used by one gets thrown off by iron content in water, vs the other one is completely unaffected by iron in the water (or any other thing that could be dissolved in your tank water).

I use the water from my fish tanks to water my patio plants. It's definitely a great idea.

Rinsing new stuff in tap water should be fine, as long as you have treated water in your tank. The amount of water left after rinsing something compared to the volume of water in your overall tank system will be just fine, and shouldn't hurt your tank. I've never used Purigen myself, but the whitish haze in your tank might just be because of a bacterial bloom. How new is this tank? Is it cycled?

Sounds like a case of live and learn (or, learn and carryon)! Some species are more apt to jump out of tanks, making lids necessary. I haven't kept panda garras myself yet, but I do have hillstream loaches. And from what I've read and seen videos of online, is hillstream loaches do more than just jump out of the water; they will climb up the glass. It's an adaptation they have so that during times of less flow in their natural environment, they can climb from isolated pool to isolated pool looking for the perfect place to hang out (with some species doing it a lot more than others). A quick look at panda garras online tells me they have a similar skillset, and are known to climb up glass, and out of a tank. Its one reason to be careful of rimless tanks with no lid. They definitely are aesthetic, but if you have climbers or jumpers, they are a liability. I know it feels awful to lose an animal in your care, but don't let it get you down too much. Keeping fish is not always easy, and good advice can be tricky to come by for many species.

Yeah, I've been playing around with it a little bit, making a different spreader bar, etc. With the current spreader bar I have on the power head, alongside making sure the power head intake isn't clogged with snails/algae, I am getting something that resembles what I want. Your setup is much more ideal because everything can be so much more diffuse on both the intake and output side, but after kind of messing with it for 6 months or so, I've settled down and am happy enough with the flow (especially considering the time and money investment not being terribly high on the streamflow manifold). What really ends up being tricky for any setup like what we are doing is the aspect ratio of the tank. It's hard for the water to get that smooth side to side flow in such a short length. The more I've sat down and watched during feeding time how food particles get moved around the tank, though, the more I realize the setup I have with the rather turbulent water on the right side (with both a hang on back filter and the powerhead), does get a fairly nice, smooth laminar flow through the hygrophila towards the large sponge intakes on the left. The small pieces food I drop in on the very turbulent right side will get pulled into the water column by all the mixing, then get smoothly slid across towards the more gentle flow by the sponge intakes. I think given how relatively small my tank is for a hillstream setup, I couldn't get much better (especially not without tearing up everything and really disturbing all the livestock). At some point, I might build yet another spreader bar (I would need to get more joints/caps, because I still have available straight tubing, but there has been a shortage recently because the great freeze Texas had a few months back ruined a lot of plumbing) that would spray the output directly back towards the glass on the right side as you propose. Also, within the intakes on the left side, I have drilled many holes through the PVC pipe that is covered by the intake sponges, so water is being taken into the stream flow manifold from many levels within the tank. Attached is what I think I kind of have going on within my tank, only really highlighting the plumbing within the tank. Because I have the current spreader bar spreading water flow perpendicular to the length of the tank, I get a super turbulent area, but then I get relatively clean laminar flow towards the sponge intakes past the highly turbulent area. I think for my livestock it works out well, because the WCMM will spend sometimes playing around in the turbulent area, but spend a lot of time shoaling in the more smooth, slow flow in the rest of the tank. The hillstream loaches seem to really like the high flow turbulent area (especially because of the small pile of cobbles). The invertebrates just kind of hang out everywhere in the eternal search for snacks.

Just updated today, too.

May Update! My hygro is really growing in! I cut back the java moss because I kind of had a death bloom in it; the java moss started dying from the inside out, getting to the point where I could suddenly see the piece of wood underneath. I got rid of quite a bit of the java moss, and started new supergluing some to the wood. I also finally got around to permanently mounting the subwassertang to the one stick on the right side of the tank. That spot is very popular with the shrimp, and my anubias right below it is about to put out yet another leaf. My java ferns are... existing. Not particularly thriving, but not really dying back either. I'm quite happy how everything is growing in. However, I definitely need to get a DSLR for taking pictures. I just can't quite get my phone camera to play nice. My WCMM are doing quite well, but still not seeing any fry. I might take the two females, and a few of the males into my other tank that is currently experiencing green water to see if that would get me any fry. The hillstream loaches are getting really settled in. They aren't super skittish anymore, and they seem to have maybe broken off into two pairs (or, at least I can hope that's the case). Only real addition I want to make right now would be getting ahold of an anubias nana petite to put in the one rock on the left side. It has a really nice little spot I could just drop it in.

Nice looking build. For those of us who aren't super familiar with the metric system, I did some number crunching, and the visible portion of the tank is ~34 gallons, with the total being a little over 42 gallons. What do you plan on keeping in it as far as livestock goes? I've done my attempt at a stream flow tank with a stream flow manifold in a 20 gallon wide (~76x30x30 cm), and while I think my livestock is very happy, I've still not quite gotten the side to side flow I want. I have hillstream loaches, white cloud mountain minnows, and red cherry shrimp (and a lonely otocinclus), and my setup gives me some super high flow areas, along with some lower flow areas that they can chill out in, so everyone can have what they want if they move around the tank.

I third the staghorn algae ID. I got rid of it by reducing light, and increasing flow in my tank.

Yeah, bottle #2 of the API ammonia test kit is sodium hydroxide (a good, strong base that will push your pH sky high, and is also used as drain cleaner) and Sodium Hypochlorite (aka, the active ingredient in bleach, that will also push your pH sky high). It will 100% force all ammonium/ammonia into being ammonia only. Remember, ammonium needs to be in higher concentrations to be harmful to fish compared to ammonia, in the same way that nitrite has a much much lower lethal dose than nitrate, enough that many of us with planted tanks will specifically pump in extra nitrates as plant food. You can have quite a bit of ammonium in the water and not have any particular adverse effect on fish, but if your pH gets high enough, it will become ammonia, which is very bad. I know I've read horror stories of an acidic tank getting a fairly large water change with basic water pushing the pH so high, that all the not-super-deadly ammonium moved to deadly ammonia. So, the API test kit will probably give you a worse reading than something that doesn't force all the ammonium/ammonia into just ammonia, but I think it's still probably a good metric to know. https://apifishcare.com/pdfs/products-us/freshwater-master-test-kit/api-ammonia-solution-2-safety-data-sheet.pdf https://apifishcare.com/pdfs/products-us/freshwater-master-test-kit/api-ammonia-safety-data-sheet.pdf if you want to look at chemicals yourself. I live in East Texas, and I'd rather have something that chellates the metals out of solution as well (I know some of the rocks that come into contact with the aquifers/lakes my water is supplied from have plenty of heavy metals, especially arsenic), and I'm a bit lazy, so I just go with a well regarded, pre-mixed solution, rather than making my own sodium thiosulfate/EDTA solution (I have Tetra Aquasafe and API Stress Coat that I alternate using between changes).

I suspect the reason a lot of companies are very tight lipped about exactly what is in their fancier conditioners (AKA, not just a concentrated solution of a chlorine reducing salt) is because A) they have something that works, and don't want to share it with their competitors or B) they are using a competitors patented chemical cocktail within their own, and don't want anyone to know about it. I'd be a much happier person if I knew exactly what was in it, so I could better know the chemistry going on. But I use API Stress Coat as my regular dechlorinator, and it has the same mystery box of what they use for dechlorination, but now with Aloe Vera.

@DShelton Do you have a list of all the ingredients in Seachem Prime? I'd love to see a list of them. Of course, you don't (or if you do, you are legally unable to tell us because it has a bunch of proprietary stuff even on the MSDS). There are more chemicals in a dechlorinator like Prime, than simply something that oxidizes chlorine/chloramine like your common sodium thiosulfate. I suspect they have buffering agents in there, which can help keep the pH in a place where ammonia stays ammonium, and therefore, less harmful to fish. That alone would, at least to a layman, "detoxify" the ammonia long enough for our BB to do its job. Most also probably have an acid like ETDA that helps with unwanted metals in the water column. One thing I was looking at when figuring out exactly what is in Seachem Prime was this blog post: http://goldlenny.blogspot.com/2010/09/discussiong-about-seachem-prime-and.html It certainly does something (and quantifying that is hard), but it is not just a dechlorinator.

That is not true. Many products people use for dechlorinators aren't just dechlorinators. You only really need a little bit of sodium thiosulfate to detoxify chlorine, and you can get tiny bottles of sodium thiosulfate solutions that can treat huge amounts of water. Many also have EDTA, an acid that does a good job of grabbing heavy metals out of solution, which is useful even in non-chlorinated well water, as it binds metals like copper, lead, and cobalt. Things like API Stresscoat and Seachem Prime are dechlorinators, mixed in with others stuff to do more than just remove chlorine compounds (Chlorine gas and Chloramine). Both companies also sell just plain ol' pure dechlorinators, at a lower price point, and in a much more concentrated form. Most of the time, the extra stuff is probably unnecessary (ie: stress coat has aloe vera to help with keeping fish slime coats at their best), but they do have more chemicals in them than just something to detoxify chlorine. There are plenty of people online willing to speak in support of Prime helping with nitrogenous waste, even if the help is a little bit of regular sodium chloride salt* reducing its toxicity on fish while BB do their job. You could probably recreate the effects on your own by mixing up your own raw sodium thiosulfate with other various additives, but most people want a ready to go, easy fix solution to dump into their water during water changes. Prime is probably overkill, but it's extra ingredients can be useful to keep things chemically safe until BB can take over detoxifying nitrogenous waste. The only big problem I would see with excess use of dechlorinators is an increased use of oxygen in the tank** as the chemicals do their thing. So, as Cory always says, put an airstone in your tank! Airstones are like magic, and their possible downsides are far outweighed by their massive upsides. So, no. Unless you are just using a pure sodium thiosulfate solution to treat your water, the stuff you mix in does more than just remove chlorine/chloramine, and the fancy proprietary cocktails sold by API/Seachem do have more in them than just chlorine treatments. However, I would also only dose according to the label, and Seachem Prime does have instructions for doing so under certain conditions. *Remember, chlorine in your tap water is Cl2, chlorine gas dissolved in water. It does a good job of murdering living things, like bacteria we don't want in our drinking water. Chloramine is trickier because its a bigger compound made by adding ammonia to the chlorinated water, so you get a something like NH2Cl that is also excellent at murdering living things (it's what you get when you mix bleach and ammonia). The chlorine going into your tank with Sodium Chloride is Cl-, Chloride, the chlorine ion, which is far less hazardous to living things. In fact, we eat it on a daily basis, and it's a critical part of our body chemistry. **This also goes for when you medicate your tank. Many chemical reactions in our aquaria suck up oxygen (ex: NH3 -> NO2 and NO2 -> NO3). Use airstones!