Ken

I little background please? How long has the aquarium been set up? Are there fish in it? Are there plants in it?

4-6 weeks is minutes in aquarium plant time. Let them do their thing from another month or two. Get them the basic nutrients and wait it out. The more stuff you dump in the less you'll know about what worked and what didn't

Plant some of everything you are considering. With any luck, one or more will take off in your aquarium. Then you'll know the best carpeting plant for you... in your tank.

Put the fish in. Then just wait it out.

I had the nano HOB from Aquarium CoOp on my 10 gal. It is a Penn Plax. It's a nice little filter and pretty quiet. I went shrimp and snails only in that tank and now run the small CoOp sponge only. The sponge is much quieter of course. But as always with just a sponge there's not much mechanical filtration. But I don't want mechanical filtration in the shrimp tank.

It's perfect!

The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources also sent out an alert through some local aquarium groups on Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/UtahDWR/posts/5624094357601530 Around here you have to take a course on Zebra Mussels before you can register your boat.

I had an outbreak recently and used the Maracyn I had from the Med Trio I had on hand and it took care of it. I would advise getting on it fast, it went from wondering what it was to all over the plants and wood in a few days. I followed these instructions: https://www.aquariumcoop.com/blogs/aquarium/blue-green-algae

All the sudden I have nerite snail eggs all over. The snails have been in there nearly a year without laying eggs that I have noticed. If I move the female to another tank will she continue to lay eggs without the male in the same tank? I'd like to determine who is who.

I have a couple Cardinals that look like that! I assume they are either females (that get more round) or they're like me and enjoy a little extra food. I fast the tank every couple Sundays and really don't worry about chubby fish.

I would second that with one caveat, start a little slow on the fertilizers to let everything balance out and adapt. Once the plants get off and running you can bump the amounts and not grow a bunch of algae or put your nitrates through the roof. A couple months of ramp up in my experience.

I don't want to scroll through ads to get to content on any site. The ads at the bottom felt like the videos... e.g. "by the way, we sell stuff that would be good for that". I thought that was a good idea.

7.6 is just fine for anything you want to put in the tank. My pH is 8.0-8.2 out of the tap depending on the day. I tested a lot when I got back into the hobby then decided that there are more important things to worry about. All my plants (well... not Val) and all the fish and shrimp do very well and breed. My advise is to concentrate on working towards balance, don't mess with anything that isn't causing real problems.

They would, the lighting and background would really make them pop. I have Glowlight Rasboras (Rasbora Hengeli) in a tank a couple feet away from this one . They are quite similar to the glowlight tetras and really pretty little guys. Here's a not so good picture I just took.

That really is stunning. I wonder if you could keep a small group in a 20 long. I know nothing about gouramis. Aren't they quarrelsome?

I wondered the same thing. They are pretty, the post says they have 6 in one tank so guessing not Bettas.

I've been just letting my new 20 long just sit while I decided what kind of fish I want in it. To start the cycle I squeezed out the sponge from my 40B into it. Somebody made the trip in the filter. They had to have been eggs at the time. Baby Panda Corys! Two of them! Here's a picture of one tiny little feller.

I use 3/8" vinyl tubing, it floats better. https://forum.aquariumcoop.com/topic/3936-floating-plant-corral-a-different-version/?tab=comments#comment-28961

Years ago, when I was in the hobby last time, I had the same dream. I had the land, a tractor with a bucket on it to make the pond and the money to pull it off. But other things ended up taking priority. Mine was going to be built into an embankment with a glass front so you could look at it from above or below the water like the penguin enclosure at the zoo.

Thank you for all the suggestions, this forum is great. I'm busy googling all of them. There are so many that I either hadn't considered or didn't know existed. Analysis paralysis is killing me. 😉

My 20 long is finally ready for fish. Ammonia-0 Nitrite-0 Nitrate-30ish pH-8.1 KH-240 maxed out the strip GH-18 maxed out the strip A Marineland Pro 125 and a medium CoOp sponge for filtration. I have a few characteristics in mind but would like help finding the fish fulfills them. Something that tops out in the 3 inch range, I only plan to have 6-8 in the tank. Not aggressive, but active. Pretty but not flashy. I kind of don’t want to deal with livebearers and lots of babies. Probably the only tankmates will be Hillstream Loaches, and whether I want them or not, snails. I'd like to hear your personal experiences. What am I looking for?

I'm sure the Cardinals and the Lemon Tetras and the Hengel's Rasboras that are joining the community next week will all get a baby shrimp when they can. I still take about 50 a month to the LFS.

I'm low tech with medium lighting. The tank is 18" front to back so I have two lights to get full coverage to the bottom. A Finnex Stingray and a Aquaneat Full Spectrum. They come on at 10am, off at 1:45pm, back on at 7pm and back off at midnight. That fits my strange semi-retired schedule. I do a 20-25% water change Saturday or Sunday. I give it 4 squirts of EZ Green on water change day and 2 squirts about half way through the week. Root tabs happen when it looks like the plants want some, I doubt you can over do them unless to tried to. Here's the tank. Look at the lower left, a baby Panda made an appearance for the photo.

I agree that some algae is a good thing, My shrimp were breeding like crazy all while I was trying to make the tank "look" better. I'm hoping a little algae grows back for them.

That sounds a lot like my 40B. I'll tell you what I did and you can decide if you want to try it. At first I tried the less light less ferts way, even more algae and some new kinds. I decided that wasn't the answer in this case. Next I used some Flourish Excel following the package instructions. And as soon as the algae started dying I upped the light time by 1-1/2 hours, from 7-1/2 to 9 hours and upped the Easy Green and Easy Root Tabs by 1/2. The plants took off and the algae has (so far) not returned. The whole process took 3-4 weeks. It's been running that way for about 6 weeks. Even the Val is starting to grow like everyone says it will.