CT_

I've been waiting for this post. I'm surprised no one posted sooner. I'm in the same boat(east side 108). I have a computer fan blowing over the top of mine. That's good for 3-4 f in my tank. I'm also topping off with refrigerated RO water. If you don't have an air stone and can add one then you should def do that. My understanding is they'll suffocate before overheating. I'm at the point of floating frozen water bottles now too. I also have some wcmm in a 5g upstairs at almost 90f with my cull shrimp. They're low priority for me but seem to be the same as always.

yes you're right my table also says "Un-ionized"

which fish? for how long in the water? My table says only about 2% of that is unionized.... so no. no would also mean you don't have to specify the above.

I've found nitrate to be pretty good. my nitrite is always 0 so either it's always zero or the test is broken, I've never tried to validate that one. and I should, but i don't check for ammonia 😳.

Indeed. I suspect a good portion of human opinion about it is cultural though.

If you're worried and this is a standard A19/A21 bulb then look for a bulb that says it's "damp rated" and for "fully enclosed luminaries". These are actually pretty common features these days since you need that for outdoor bulbs, many ceiling luminaries and bathrooms. Personaly I'd buy a 5000k+ "daylight" bulb for a fish tank because I think it looks better than a 2700k bulb in a fishtank.

I hope you're in the right age range to appreciate this, but this is where my mind immediately went.

I've lost cardinals and maybe 2 otos in my tank. never once found a body even after moving everything. I either have cannibals or a space-time vortex in my tank.

this seems surprising to me. mine demolished diatoms when I first got them, but they were probably hungry too.

A lot depends on how they're being used and /stored/. It seems like black magic to me but there's something about how the glass is doped and prolonged exposure to pure water or certain ions can deplete or exchange ions in the glass and damage your probe. Generally it's recommended to store the glass electrodes in 2-4M KCl when not in use. I've seen manufacturers recommend replacing every 1-2 years but I think it also comes down to the accuracy you need. I think that's the recommendation to ensure they're in spec (sometimes as good as 0.001ph). In practice I think you just replace them whenever they don't work as well as you'd like or don't hold calibration. for fish +/- 0.2 is fine and within 0.1 would be outstanding, so there's a lot of wiggle room. The same goes for calibration period. I've read daily or more and up to monthly or less depending on conditions and what you need.

woah good eye! I watched the video and indeed it is! This is why we need an 8k stream.

Mine tends to peak just below the daytime high. I'm going to shade it for the 80+ days I think. I'll be following this closely.

Cory mowing his neighbor's lawn needs to be a member's video for the YT channel.

ah okay so all you know is > 10ppm or whatever. if its at 30 and you do a 50% change then you're at 15 and it would still read off the chart. I'd dilute 1 part tank water 3 parts tap water into a cup, measure that, and multiply the results by 4. if its still maxed out I'd dilute that mixture 1 part to 3 parts and try again, but hopfully its not that bad :O.

This seems odd. I'd check your tap water for nitrite. And try and check your test too. Is it reading the maximum? What if you check tank water in a cup and then do a 50% change with the cup and test again?

Don't hamstring yourself. Steal all the ideas you can ;)

So, if the fish eat half their food the majority still comes from the fish?

I was having a little trouble with nitrate and hardness at first too. from what I can tell its really important to set a timer and read at exactly 1 min. nitrate especially gets darker as you leave it around. You can also see in your photos and mine and many others that if you're not careful you can get a multicolored kh pad. I'm pretty sure thats interference from the GH reagent. I've learned to look at the strip and make sure there are no water bridges between the pads after I take it out. That usually results in gh/kh readings that agree with my titration tests. The chlorine works okay for me inside (1.5 in my tap, 0 in my tank) but doesn't work for me outside. I have no idea why. some people have guessed hose water gets less air and has more choline, or that its the plastic in tubs, maybe its UV from the sun somehow. idk.

@Cory I got some time to test my hypothesis and I think I figured it out. I've spent a LOT of time in the last month thinking about this and trying to figure it out. Acidic soft water can be bad for pipes so some water districts add sodium hydroxide, a strong base to up the PH. If its the ph indicator I think it is in the strip then its also an acid. Since almost all of the NaOH dissociates when dissolved into water it doesn't have much buffering capacity. This means a relatively weak acid like the ph indicator can bring ph down. Liquid tests, use much more water (100x) and probably less indicator (and also different indicator) so they don't change the pH as much. To test this I mixed distilled water with two tiny granules of sodium hydroxide and measured the ph with both my meter(>11) and the strips (<7). Since 11 is out of range I thought maybe the test results could be invalid (though my understanding of the chemistry is that it should max out the red color if the sample ph remained at 11 on the strip). So I diluted it down until the ph was stable around 8 (I hit something like 7.8 which is close enough), and tried again, same result strips show <7. Here's some photos of my experiment: just distilled water freshly opened. says 6.7 but there's nothing in it right now. Just to illustrate sane results with just water on my probe. two granules of lye + lots of stirring and waiting for measurement to settle down: I moved 1-2 teaspoons of the ph 11 water into fresh distilled water until i got a stable reading close to 8.

Are we talking about ammonia specifically? or nitrogen in general (ammonia/nitrite/nitrate)?

I'm a bit confused. What's the current dogma? What's harmful about that dogma (if anything)? What's correct, or currently though to be correct by experts? And what should we be doing different?

Agreed. I think you'd have to define "source" better and tank conditions better to make it a properly answerable question. My guess would have been the food you put in the tank, assuming I wasn't interpreting it as a "gotcha" kind of question.

What are good options for tub pond fertilizing? All my water lettuce is turning yellow. I know easy green works but I'd need a lot and I'm not made of easy green. I'm guessing the problem with most ferts is ammonia.

I quarantine mine in a tub of alum until their all dead. 😅

I said heat cycling not heat. the mechanical stress of expansion and contraction causes wear. I'm not sure what you mean by "innocuoate" here. If I take a bucket of water with microbes, take half of the water, sterilize it and put it back, I've changed the the make up of the bucket of water. Assuming its well mixed (granted not all aquariums have good flow) repeating that indefinitely will reduce the number of microbes asymptotically to 0.