MattyIce
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Posts posted by MattyIce
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On 11/26/2023 at 8:37 PM, anewbie said:
I don't remember the details but i can try to find an old thread if you are interested - i found it by random wasn't really looking for it. My 'fish room' are 25x18 (ft) and 25x19 - both have 10 foot ceiling but the 2nd one is partially underground (basement level on a hillside; so the door side is ground level and as you move west in the room you are walking underground as the hill slopes up. Anyway it is what it is - wasn't really describing my solution just mention tidbits from something i read. For me i'm waiting to see my electric bill this winter to make decisions. My 550 and 450 in the 25x18 room both require 2000 watt (2 1000 watt heaters); the 550 is only 78 but the 450 is 81 so quite a bit - the 25x18 and 25x19 are both on the same heater which is sep from the rest of the house but each room has their own thermostat. Right now i'm keeping the 25x19 at 72 and the 25x18 at 68 but might warm it - the rest of the house is 66. On the positive my home heaters are geo-thermo 😉
This is a Great video that Cory put out years ago if you are into South Americans/giant tanks, at around 39:30 Mel starts getting into cold water changes and tank temps during spawning time vs winter time. and mentions 78 during the summer and 70-72 in the winter, and how it helps them recognize the seasons and spawn better, but also stresses them a little to help them spawn better. But that is for that specific kind of fish, if you have different fish, it might be different.
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On 11/26/2023 at 8:37 PM, anewbie said:
I don't remember the details but i can try to find an old thread if you are interested - i found it by random wasn't really looking for it. My 'fish room' are 25x18 (ft) and 25x19 - both have 10 foot ceiling but the 2nd one is partially underground (basement level on a hillside; so the door side is ground level and as you move west in the room you are walking underground as the hill slopes up. Anyway it is what it is - wasn't really describing my solution just mention tidbits from something i read. For me i'm waiting to see my electric bill this winter to make decisions. My 550 and 450 in the 25x18 room both require 2000 watt (2 1000 watt heaters); the 550 is only 78 but the 450 is 81 so quite a bit - the 25x18 and 25x19 are both on the same heater which is sep from the rest of the house but each room has their own thermostat. Right now i'm keeping the 25x19 at 72 and the 25x18 at 68 but might warm it - the rest of the house is 66. On the positive my home heaters are geo-thermo 😉
Sounds like an amazing set up, good luck with that, I am not too familiar with geothermal.
If you could lower the temp from 81/78 you would probably save some money, try seeing what the lower limit of your fish are. At different occasions, you know due to life, my jack Dempseys have been down to 65ish, real skittish, but none of them died or jumped out. if you lower the temps, the water is perfect, and they start getting a little skittish, raise it back up a degree or two, and you've probably saved yourself some money right there.
If not maybe start looking into a 7' drop ceiling, that would save you a couple thousand cubic feet of heating each year.
Also, if your electric company has an app that lets you see usage from a couple days back, start checking that every day and experimenting to see where you can save money. -
On 11/25/2023 at 7:38 PM, anewbie said:
This raises an interesting topic since aquarium heaters are quite in efficient. I follow another forum where they mostly talk about 400 to 1000 gallon aquariums and a lot of discus keepers actually gave up on using aquarium heaters (too expensive) and would run hot water pipes into their sumps with some sort of re-circulation logic to save 100s of dollar on heating their aquarium per year (gas heating is more efficient i guess); also folks with large fish rooms just heat the room. I do keep my room with aquariums warmer than the rest of the house - the house is 66-68 setting while the two rooms with aquariums are 72 (still on the low end since my warmer aquariums are around 82); and i've been debating if i should raise the temp of those rooms - guess i could run some test this year if winter is harsh enough. The heater i use have zones with dedicated zones for the two rooms in question; of course the rooms aren't sealed so heat does leak into the rest of the house which is inefficient. I guess i could keep the door close but ... havent' gone that far yet. Still i was impressed with the amount of $$$ those folks with large aquariums was saving. Unfortunately i just skimmed the details since i wasn't savy enough to implement what they were implementing however it suggest that using a dedicated gas heater for very large aquairum or rooms with many aquariums is cost effective.
When I said I had my tanks spread out in a big room that I was heating to 73, it was a big room.
I was heating a 15' X 20' room with a pitched ceiling at 10' on one end and 12' on the other end. Essentially, I went from heating 3200 cubic feet to heating 450 cubic feet.
I am not sure how inefficient aquarium heaters are, I think it has more to do with their lack of circulation, same with any heater kind of. if you have a 400 gallon pool pond and all you have are sponge filters, it is going to be horrible, but if you have it inline with a 2000 gph pump, you could probably heat that 400 gallons with a 300 watt heater.
though as far as gas/oil, I dont think it is cheaper, instead I think that with a furnace or hot water heater, you are already putting energy into maintaining that water at like 160 degrees 24/7, so syphoning off a few gallons of 160 degree water to mix with colder water is kind of like using something you already have while the in tank heaters are extra electricity. -
I didn't do this today, but figured I'd share. I have been planning this tank Tetris move for nearly a month and finally got it done a little over a week ago.
From right to left it is 2 custom low boys I made out of 29 gallons, sitting over a 150 gallon tub, sitting over a 40 gallon tub, then a 20 gallon long sitting over a 100 gallon tub, next is a shelf with a 40 gallon, a 29 gallon, and 2 10 gallons, sitting over a 75 gallon, with a 40 gallon tub kind of hidden on the floor in the back right corner. Next is a 50 gallon tub and hidden under that in the back left corner I have a 55 gallon drum for aging water that I pump out of my well. Also under the 50 gallon I have a trash can on wheels hooked to a transfer pump for water changes, and then all the way to the left is a 100 gallon tub.
I used to have all my tanks spread out in a big room, I'd heat the room to 73 ish with a 4000 watt electric heater, and use heaters in the tanks closer to the floor that I needed a little warmer, now I have them all in this 8' x 8' x7' tall space under my loft/bunkbed, with a whole bunch of curtains hung up around it to trap the heat.
So for the last week I've been using a good fan for circulation and the hot air from a dehumidifier to heat the space. The coldest my tanks get are 73-74ish and I'm down 20-30 kilowatts a day. This little change could save me 200+ dollars a month on electricity during these winter months.
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On 6/26/2023 at 1:23 AM, Creature From The Tank said:
Hey all,
I just wanted to double-check something. My tank finished cycling this past Thursday. It's a 5-gallon planted tank. I cycled it using ammonia, with plants in...dosing to 2ppm every night. I am waiting for a betta to be delivered hopefully this week. Meanwhile, I was told to keep dosing the ammonia every night up to 2ppm to keep the tank cycling along. Is that correct? I'm worried about my plants. All this ammonia being added after cycling. Having some algae issues and don't want things to get worse. I did finally add some Easy-Green at the end of the 3rd week. My Ammonia is 0, nitrites 0, nitrates 20-40ppm. My lighting is 7 hours, with peak 4 hours in the middle at 35% brightness.
Any advice?
for just one beta, id cut back on the dosing, you are building up a lot of bacteria, when you add the fish, stop the ammonia, and start feeding your fish like 5 hikari pellets a day, you aren't going to be generating anywhere near even 1 ppm of ammonia a day. Alot of the bacteria that you've built up is going to starve and that can cause issues too.
I'd cut back to around 1 ppm, or even stop with the ammonia and just feed the tank appox what you would feed the beta each day so you build an amount of bacteria that is closer to what you need.
Id also probably do a water change a a few days before to take out anything that might have built up over the cycling process while giving a day or 2 for the tank to stabilize from the water change prior to adding the fish.
All in all though, I'm sure you can keep doing what you are dong and you'll be fine. -
In the first pick I think the Tuna sun, ect looks better, You can see the greens better on the sword(I think) and the underside of the crypt is more clear.
Though, I think this is because the sword is blocking a lot of light and the sun's single point intensity directly above the sword is able to get through the leaves better.
In the recent pick you don't have the sword anymore, a lot more light gets through to the carpet, looks good. -
So all the emersed stem plants that I tried to submerse died.
sold off about 100 Val and pot Gayi cheap to the local club
started a third tub using dirt substrate and a crushed coral eco complete substrate mix. Taking a bunch of the Val, I trimmed it down to individual plants or plants with a small runner and divided them between the old tub and this new one
It has been about 3 months since that happened, don’t like the crushed coral eco complete, I still get algae and the algae clings really well so I end up pulling the substrate out when removing the algae, the pea pebbles are heavier and rounder and the algae does not cling as well:
All three tubs have white clouds and cherry shrimp.
the middle tub also had 3 Florida flag fish
and the bottom has an oranda gold fish
after replanting the val it has not grown back as well in the first Val tub and unfortunately the emersed stem plants never took off:
but the dwarf sag is doing pretty well and the pearl weed is doing great, I also also have some nice red bacopa Carolina and there are still a few Taiwan Lily’s alive but that is about it in this tub:the gayi tank is doing great, after harvesting it’s taken right back off, and the jungle Val is also slowly taking over:
The pearl weed I had gotten and was almost entirely melted, has bounced back very nicely:but the Nuri crypts arnt making any real improvement:
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On 6/11/2021 at 4:18 PM, tonyjuliano said:
According to whom? The article cited contains a communication from a "sales guy" without making any expressed proclamation.
There is much more opinion to out there that claims "high CEC", but hey it's the internet.
Here's an article that seems to have solid evidence behind it...
https://www.2hraquarist.com/blogs/beginners-planted-tank-101/substrate-101
So I've looked into this and I just looked into this again and I think I understand it some more now.
There are 2 types of weathering Physical and Chemical,
Physical is people walking on a path, waves crashing and rocks rubbing against each other.
Chemical is organic acids from plants breaking down rocks and forming mineral clays and stuff like that.
Mineral clays like kaolinite have a CEC of about 10 meq/100 g, while illite and smectite have CECs ranging from 25 to 100 meq/100 g.
From what I understand it seems Eco complete is Inert in a closed system, but when going through chemical weathering organic acids break down the silica allowing minerals like iron, calcium, magnesium, potassium, ect to be released while also creating the high CEC mineral clays listed above.
So you are both right. it is an inert low cec substrate that, due to chemical weathering, breaks down over time, slowly releasing basic minerals and generating high CEC Mineral Clays.
Though I may be wrong so please double check.
https://www.tulane.edu/~sanelson/eens211/weathering&clayminerals.htm -
Started on this yesterday, finished up today, but I Found space for a 150 gallon pond in my fish room using a sticks and stones support kinda perpendicular to my 100 gallon pond:
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Friend hooked me up with some 175 gallon totes. Today I got 2 of them ready for summer tubbing.
I put 3 bags of pea pebbles in each, built a connected pvc over flow, and added sponge filters.
Then I took some 27 gallon totes, drilled 1 1/2 inch holes in the corners so I could thread bamboo through them for support, and drilled 100+ Small holes in them using a drill bit so I can use them as pond baskets:
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I had it bad with Jack Dempseys, tried Prozi, salt and epsom salt for a week, it got worse so I switched to feeding metroplex with focus and garlic guard, along with the salts for a week and worse still.
I got some levamisole and the worms stopped moving soon after dosing, after about 4 hours they started falling out of the fish.
I have never tried Nematol, the active ingredient seems to be something for those types of worms so I would think it would work, I would try it.
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I have a 300 gallon Rubbermaid that I had emptied last year but I left it out over winter where it had filled with rain water, leaves, ect
Today I found out that it is packed full of daphnia, and my fish love it:
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consolidated a 3 ft rack of tanks and a 40 breeder into a 4 ft rack
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Pond snails, a hydra, and a water stain
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On 4/6/2021 at 11:27 PM, Anita said:
ORD 💜 This is brilliant! 😃 How about laying the lexan flat and horizontal until the strips absorb some water? Then tip the lexan vertical for easier viewing.
Thank you, the strips are most accurate after a min so I can’t really wait for them to dry and not needing to have it flat saves a lot of space.
Been using it daily for certain tanks, 6-7 strips a day, and have not had any issues with drips messing up readings, instead of putting it directly on after dipping I’ve been waiting 5-10 seconds, seems to work well.
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With 15+ tanks, when taking a bunch of samples, I tend to loose track of which one came from which tank, so I came up with an idea today. Using some multi wall lexan I had left over from making lids, white plastic cover still on it so the colors stand out better, I used a sharpie to write out my tanks, and hung it up. The freshly dipped strips stick nicely:
The only negative I’ve found so far is if they are too wet they can drip onto other strips and change their readings.
a lot of room for improvement, like using a more opaque white so the strip colors stand out even better, but really happy with how well it works.
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With any plant I feel like the growth slows down at the point where it runs out of space to grow. Not sure if it’s true, just what I tend to see in my tanks.
I harvest mine on occasion to give it more room to grow.
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32 minutes ago, Coronal Mass Ejection Carl said:
Other weirdness in the Rubin study:
Their ammonia LC50s are quite high. It's total ammonia but the pH isn't that low. I wouldn't expect ammonia and nitrate LC50s to be that close.
I am not sure I understand what you are saying, perhaps I need additional info from the study, but recently I found that PH greatly impacts Ammonia/Ammonium ratio, where I can have a tank at PH 6.2 and 6 ppm nh3/nh4 with out issues because it is almost all non toxic Ammonium
That might be why the PH is only down to 6.95 in the testing, any lower and it wouldn't be deadly. -
22 minutes ago, Coronal Mass Ejection Carl said:
Needs to be adjusted upwards for life stages older than fry and also because the Rubin 1977 study used potassium nitrate which is more toxic than sodium nitrate. Later papers put an asterisk by the KNO3 studies because they now know KNO3 is more toxic.
With 1977 guppies and no specification on the type of guppies it is hard to make general conclusions on even specifically guppies as a whole. is there anything that explains the strain or source of the guppies?
If it didn't result in the deaths of half the guppies, I'd be interested in a mondern study on different strains of guppies along with Abino guppies, feeder guppies to see if the perceived drop in heartiness in modern guppies is also an actual tolerance drop specific to nitrates.
Id also be interested in how the guppies were sourced and if there was prepwork done prior to testing to ensure the guppies were healthy prior to exposure.
Concerning the use of a chemical, in this study they do a high nitrate test through build up by lessened "water changes" and a test through chemically increasing the nitrates: ( both against controls)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0144860914000041
from my understanding of it, the test where the nitrates built up naturally showed greater impact on the fish growth. where with chemically increasing nitrates but keeping "water changes" the same showed almost no difference in growth.
So while it might appear a hearty adult guppy can handle 100+ ppm nitrates long term, in a situation where nitrates have naturally gotten to 100+ ppm in a tank, there is a better chance the fish are facing other stressors than they are with clean water and the nitrates chemically jacked up. -
Just now, Coronal Mass Ejection Carl said:
3 out of 8 in the 1,000 mg/L nitrate-N group in the Monsees study died. That's 37.5% in ~30 days.
96-hour LC50 where half die after 4 days is probably going to be higher. One way to determine what chronic exposure level would be tolerable is to take 10% of that value.
80 for guppies seems reasonable.
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9 minutes ago, Coronal Mass Ejection Carl said:
The good news is that you basically don't have to test nitrate. And you don't have to worry about 20 vs. 40 or even 80 ppm. They are all equally non-toxic.
You know who Diana Walstad is? Well...
7 out of the 10 are 50% dead in 3 days. Is this supposed to be how much nitrates fish can get before a 50% mortality rate?
Guppy - 836 ppm - 50% dead in 3 days
I wonder if those are fancy inbred 5 times over guppies, feeder guppies, or the cold water tolerant hearty guppies of the 60's and 70's. -
39 minutes ago, Coronal Mass Ejection Carl said:
Ah, yes, the old Isaza article.
That paper states that:
Which is interesting because the Monsees paper doesn't say that at all. Monsees is a pivotal paper in nitrate toxicity research because it finally answers the question of how nitrate gets into fish:
In the early days, scientists thought it could be through the gills since a lot of ions pass or are transported through them. But later studies found that gills were fairly impermeable to nitrate which left them wondering what alternative routes could there be.
Isaza also cites Camargo which is just a review paper that I don't believe performed any experiments. It mentions branchial permeability twice:
Both of those studies are pre-Monsees so it likely never occurred to them to consider incidental ingestion. Regardless, they failed to control for it so they can't legitimately conclude that any nitrate uptake, however minor, was via the gills.
So, basically, Isaza cites Monsees as support for branchial uptake when in fact Monsees concludes it's not branchial uptake. Then it indirectly references two old studies that didn't consider and prevent incidental ingestion.
And in its own experiments, Isaza makes the same mistake. This is on top of the fact that the alleged branchial uptake only occurred when the fish were exposed to extreme pH levels.
There is a lot there, not sure if I am understanding it all correctly.
It seems the low oxygen is still an issue with the conversion of hemoglobin to methoglobin.
Only that their exposure to it is not proportional to the speed of their breathing, and while they may need to breath more to consume more oxygen, it does not make the situation exponentially worse.
Across the studies it seems the main thing that is happening is hemoglobin is being made incapable of carrying oxygen.
Hypothetically, if there are 200 parts of oxygen every time water passes the gills and the fish typically needs 50, going up to needing 150 at 100ppm nitrates wouldn’t make a noticeable difference.
I’d imagine it is more of an issue in nature with run off creating algae blooms and anoxic environments.
I think in truly determining the toxicity of nitrates in a body of water, oxygen levels and labyrinth organs need to be considered.
Also, what you quote notes only trout and some cray fish, I’d imagine that nitrate uptake through both gills and through stomach tissue can vary greatly across all fish and invertebrates, with some being more resistant than trout and some being less.
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Nitrate bonds with Hemoglobin to create Methoglobin which can no longer carry oxygen. This causes low oxygen concentrations in the fishes blood,(Human Blood, Livestock Blood, ect) requiring the fish to inhale more oxygen.
in the study below, it found at around 100 ppm nitrate, oxygen was consumed at 3 times the rate with water at 0 nitrates.https://academic.oup.com/conphys/article/8/1/coz092/5658492
While not completely analogous, it seems like climbing mount Everest, where the higher one goes/ the higher the nitrates go, the less oxygen is able to be used.
Having to take a breath more often than you are used to 24/7/365, the stress of that can't be good.
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So a month plus, decided to check the roots on some of the stem plants. Most of the stem is melting on this hygrophila, not really rooting too well, some of the stem is rotting, so I trimmed that off:
Some of them, the roots seem to be adjusting to the dirted substrate, seeming to adjust from taking nutrients from the water column to taking then from the substrate:
Kinda disappointed, decent light, dirted tub, macro and micro nutrients...So I added some root tabs, I puncture both ends with a razor blade so air can get out of the tab:
I’ll give it 2 weeks and check back on the rooting:
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What did you get done today?
in Photos, Videos & Journals
Posted
I bought some wasabi starts online, got them in the mail, and I've been trying to create some kind of Tatamiishi growing area. I made this, this morning:
I used chicken wire and zip ties to make a gabion, and I used multi wall polycarbonate on either side of the gabion to make a kind of sump design, I am trying to get good flow under and over the substrate to prevent anerobic spots:
Along with the wasabi I planted some dwarf papyrus clones, a little Colocasia, some curly reed, and some other stuff I had
Darn, sorry to hear about that, fish deaths suck. All in all, aside from remodeling, it sounds like you are doing everything you can.