SheWhoConquers

Do you think adding a second finnex will be enough to get the intensity needed? Or just replace current light w/ Fluval 3.0?

No. I am certain I have very few if any stems from my original set. Almost all have been propogated from new growth in that tank.

I have a 36g bowfront aquarium equipped w/ CO2 and and a 30in Finnex Planted+ ALC light. I just need some advice on whether my problems are related to lighting. I'm getting fast growth but my plants are not growing bushy but rather spindly. I am hesitant to put more plants in because I am not sure what I am doing wrong. As you can see the long spindly plant behind the Ludwigia is supposed to be Elodea and it barely has leaves. Even the Ludwigia is sparse just a bit. Cabomba is growing long and spindly too. I even have monte carlo and dwarf hair grass, unpictured, that is growing, but slower than I feel it should. Basically in everyone's best estimate, do you think its a lighting issue? I understand this is a tall tank and strong lighting is necessary. Also if you agree its lighting do you think the Fluval plant 3.0 would give me the par needed in this tall tank?

So weird you bought the same spray bar I just was looking at on Etsy today 😄 I love that center sculpture, so unique. I almost wish it was covered in the same moss as the little hut on the right. The flow on the spray bar was gentle? I don't know why I had visions of excess surface agitation.

I have my own biases regarding Amazon's business, so I can understand some of those reviews although I did not buy my flex from Amazon. However, based on the build quality of my tank, I am hard pressed to believe that this tank is prone to chipping or cracking more than any other tank. If you saw the Flex up close I think you'd agree, the tank was built pretty solid. And as far as having to do mods on an expensive tank...yeah it does suck, but that's going to be the case with ANY tank you get because it's impossible to get a one size fits all tank. Even in this one thread everybody modified their tank differently and I believe we all ended up at the same place. A nice tank with happy healthy fish. Honestly I feel like the Flex is a luxury item. It's not necessary or required, but for me I needed something that was clean (free of all unsightly equipment), quiet and not cheap looking in my bedroom. And this tank works for me.

I have the fluval flex 9. I never used stock filter, upgraded that to a sicce silent, just had to cut tubing to make it fit. I did have to buy small marina intake sponges to baffle the outputs since there is a betta in there. All I did was cut a slot in the side and slide it on. I have read that plenty of people thought the feeding hole was too big, but I haven't had a jumper in the year I have the tank and mine has never been blocked. I run a nano sponge filter in the third chamber for emergency use. I did have to use my warranty to replace the lights shortly after I got the tank, but my new lights are fine and are sufficient for anubis and jungle val.

I would keep it. Looks good to me. Your tank is progressing nicely too.

Strange that you say this after I had my first fish related "nightmare". I woke up in a panic calling out to my dog who somehow I had worked in my head was the result of rushing water under my bed. I thought he had something to do with breaking an aquarium. I had to apologize repeatedly and tell him to go back to sleep because I was crazy and that had nothing to do with him.

I just got three gold neon gobies today and I already love them. I am praying they all get through QT intact, because they may have just beat my orange venezuelan cories as my new favorites.

I swear I thought I watched and read enough species profiles on shrimp, where I thought I knew enough about them. But I feel like I must have missed the behavior section, because somehow I got the impression that shrimp were delicate and fragile 😄 I never kept shrimp before and just bought three Amano shrimp to help with the algae in my tank--they are doing an awesome job by the way--but these guys have personalities that I just didn't equate with shrimp! I thought my neon tetras were buttholes, since they spend half their waking hours annoying each other, but these Amanos are no joke. I have only had them for a bit, over a month, and I went from thinking they were dead to seeing them enough to determine these guys are not gonna be ornamental like my snails. My amanos are quite a bit aggressive! I was initially amazed at how they marched right into a feeding frenzy to get food and sometimes would perch on top preventing access. They always seem to be the first to the food too, and not at all skittish about my presence. I even watched one pick up a wafer that you could not have told me he had the ability to lift, and run away with it leaving everyone else foodless 😂 They also do some swim battling between each other which is quite entertaining and are awesome little acrobats that love swinging from my jungle val. These are some bold little guys, and if I would have known this beforehand, I would have gotten them awhile back.

No aggression that I can see towards this one particular neon, I mean that isn't warranted. There is a scuffle when #8 attempts a clearing of the area. Also in general all my tetras seem to randomly "swim-fight", for lack of a better term, with each other. I also tested to make sure they all come out to eat, because that I wasn't sure about, and all 8 are present for feeding.

I am certain it's not a cardinal. I tried to upload the best I could get. But with a QT tank directly in front couldn't get the glare off.

Currently I have 8 neon tetra in a tank and I have this obsessive habit of counting my fish. I don't have tons of tanks so it's easy to do 😂 But in this tetra tank I repeatedly kept counting 7 schooling every single time. Eventually enough days counting 7 I would eventually inspect the tank to ensure I still had 8 fish. Well, after far too many times doing this, I eventually decided that I needed to find out why? Maybe #8 is sickly or being bullied. Although sickly would be odd because months is a long time to be sick. I discovered after many tank stalking sessions #8 is not bullied and sits quietly in the dark under the rocks and doesn't venture out much and when they do, it is to chase the other fish away. It seems the little bugger has made a home and he like solitary living 😆 I didn't know schooling fish could be territorial in the same way something like an Apisto, Cichlid, or Betta could! I also find his behavior strange, because if #8 is alpha he rearranged the pecking order because he was a late addition to the tank. And I know you're wondering how I can tell the neons apart 😂 They all look the same. But in this case, I can, based on slight coloration differences between the old and new additions. My older fish are much more brightly colored. Has anyone experienced similar behavior in schooling fish?

I'm currently quarantining 7 cories in about an 8 gallon storage with a sponge filter, guppy grass, gravel and pvc which some bags have bags of media stuffed inside. This is my first time not going bare bottom, but I really felt like bare bottom washes out my fish in QT. And I honestly wouldn't care if they immediately color up within a week of being added to their permanent tank. But this has not been the case for me, the process is much longer than I would like. Have I quarantined every single thing before adding to a tank? No, but because I am currently setting up a tank with fish in it I don't want to end up replacing. I am taking my time and doing it right 😌

Hah! Yeah I know...it's a risk. At this point I'm wondering if I should just go "create" my own water as much work as it feels that I must do to keep the fish and plants I want with tap water.

I will definitely look into potassium carbonate, not too familiar with its use in the hobby. But I'm curious now 😁 I think I will have to supplement the KH because I'm looking to stock a 36 gallon and I don't want to further my limit choices.

I wasn't blaming the KH for the floating plants, just explaining how I even got to looking at the KH. And as far as aquasoils. I do use aquasoils. However, I removed this as a factor when I tested from my tap and received identical results. And regarding alkalinity out of the tap, water reports for where I live are a bit convoluted because at any time I can receive a mix of water from three different intakes, two are similar, and one is noticeably different and I haven't been able to determine how and when I am receiving more of one than the other. But essentially, the minimum alkalinity reported than can come out of my tap ranges 25 to 50ppm, max anywhere from 50 to 100ppm, and average is supposed to be 40ppm to 75ppm. The ranges are unfortunate, but this is what I am left with when I can't just call the water company and say, hey is my water composition 50٪ Baxter intake 40٪ Belmont intake and 10٪ Queens Lane today? So understanding what's coming through my tap where I live, according to my water department is not an perfect science unless I move about 10 miles north. I do plan on getting the KH liquid test though for a more accurate reading and no I don't use water softeners.

I am new to hobby so I never paid much attention to KH, but in my search to discover why I can no longer effectively keep floating plants, I have been testing and analyzing my water a thoroughly and discovered my KH is basically non-existent. I haven't bought the liquid test kit for KH yet, but on both the Tetra and the Coop test strips I test consistently with a brightly colored zero indication. I was surprised because with my limited knowledge of GH and KH I assumed having hard water meant I would have in the least some registerable amounts of KH. I mean I don't even have just hard water, I have SUPER hard water. Coop test strips give me a royal purple every time 😂 I am pretty sure my water is basically a brick out of the tap. So adding crushed coral or wonder shells sound counterintuitive to me when all I want is registerable KH. And just to remove any tank factors out of the equation, the KH is non-existent out of the tap. So weekly water changes seem to do nothing but add zero to zero. Now on to PH concerns...currently I am running peat moss in my tank and the lovely thing about KH being on hiatus, I can lower my PH pretty easily. PH is around 6.8, down from my normal average of 7.4. It actually only took me, maybe two weeks to get there approximately. And my concern is that maybe I shouldn't be playing with PH if I have no KH. It feels like I got in a car to drive in a city with no traffic lights? So while on one hand I can go as I please, the danger of something going horribly wrong is possible as well, unfortunately. So basically I guess my questions are whether I should just keep doing what I am doing regardless of KH absence? Can you just supplement KH without adding more brick to my brick water? And should I even be adding peat if I don't have KH on the premises to police?

That's weird that you just brought up low KH with a basically stable ph in a nano. I just recently found that I too had pretty low KH in a 10 gallon tank that's about a year old. The fish in my tank seem fine too, so I'm airing on the side of letting it go unless I see some weird PH changes. Just out of curiosity, what kind of substrate are you using? My tank has ecocomplete and being located in PA, I have pretty hard water, so I knew GH wasn't going to be a problem, but KH never crossed my mind to pay attention to.

My PH used to read just like that, I hated being between 7.4 and 7.6 because it forces you periodically to run both tests to ensure you aren't sliding too far one way or the other 😌 I threw some peat in my tank though a while back and I am comfortable where I am.

Yeah. I think I'm just gonna hold my breath and see how it goes with these new floaters. Maybe I did release something initially that was harmful. I have since did a few water changes. So hopefully whatever it was is gone... I just can't imagine that my aquarium can keep a red tiger lotus but not floating plants.

Hi. So I had gotten some dwarf water lettuce a while back that came with some duckweed unintentionally, but I was cool with it. And it really grew in thick, nice and green in my ten gallon tank, it was just beautiful. I was taking out clumps of this stuff every week. Well one day I elected to remove some tiger wood I had in the tank that was covered in moss and waaay too much algae. After a lot of trial and error and trying a bunch of different stuff I had come to the conclusion that the tiger wood and the attached moss was just too close to the water surface and therefore the light source which was encouraging the algae. So upon removing the wood about a week or so later I noticed my dwarf water lettuce was dying and so was the duckweed. I tested my parameters to make sure it wasn't a larger issue and nothing was different. Then I came to the conclusion that maybe without the tigerwood it was a flow issue, possibly because my air stone was too strong since the tigerwood and its moss was absent from the surface? Either way, no Bueno. Reducing the surface agitation did nothing. All of my dwarf water lettuce and duckweed continued to die off. I have maybe a few specks of duckweed here and there. I am now putting in the tank regular sized water lettuce and am quite afraid the same may happen again since I never really figured out what the problem was. And that would be a bummer because I really want some floaters back in the tank for my betta. So I was doing some googling and got to wondering whether the tigerwood and moss maybe provided some other benefit to the aquarium that just wouldn't show up on normal aquarium test kits? And on a side note there are other plants in the tank doing just fine that have taken off since the removal of the tigerwood, probably since they have access to more light. I have three different kinds anubias, val, willow moss, and a red tiger lotus.