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My favorite tip, is to use 2.5ml for most of the API liquid tests when the drops are divisible by 2 and use half the drops (eg 3 drops instead of 6). The color is the same as long as you look through the side (which is what the instructions say) 😮 This seems like a bit of a hot take, but I agree in general you usually don't /need/ all or any of it as long as you have water and food for your fish. Since we're talking about saving money can you expand on that. what are your recommendations for adjusting pH GH KH?

I guess I have a lot to say here so I'm bunching all my replies into one, especially because some are veering off topic. On topic: Generally I think the advantage is you get clear water, less algae, and possibly less pathogens if they're there (I wouldn't pick a UV sterilizer to remove pathogens though). Algae has to go through a planktonic phase so it'll spread slower with a sterilizer. I've noticed less glass cleaning when I use mine. The disadvantage is you kill all your microbes and critters that get swept up in it. Most are though beneficial, at least on this forum. But even if they're beneficial, you may not like them and if you don't like them and don't have to live with them then why not nuke them. At the end of the day aquariums are for you so do what you like (as long as you're not a psychopath). To add to this power cycling every 5 min is for sure a good way to wear out your ballast. cycling once a day isn't much of a problem unless you're going for a world record in longevity or something. I think this depends on technology. true for LED, less true for tungsten and i'm not quite sure about fluorescent(if you exclude ballast failures). For tungsten the heat cycling of the filament is a contributing factor as well. I guess it depends on how you define death, but exposure to UV-C very much does kill, or result in the death of, microbes by damaging DNA making them unable to produce the proteins necessary to continue to live. UV can also break and denature protiens. As a side not sterilize has two meanings: to make free from microbes, and to make infertile. If it doesn't kill a microbe, there will still be residual effects in the form of damage to DNA and protein. If given enough time they may recover but be left with permanent and most likely deleterious DNA mutations. Given that the recommendation (not saying its right) is to have 4+ volumes per hour of water flow through filtration that's an average of 4 trips through the sterilizer per hour. plankton doesn't die on it's first trip it will eventually.

heh, unlikely. 😉 the strips always show chlorine in the pond but my tap water has less chlorine. yes, but lab ph probes, a cheap ph probe and the api kit always show considerably higher ph than test strips.

i bought them from another hobbyist as "pearl medaka"

seems to me you're most likely to have success with high purity analytes. If I've learned anything its that chemistry is weird and that for any given assay you'll run into conditions where it just doesn't work right. It's always nice to know what those conditions are though.

Oh I was talking about my tub. The three remaining rice fish will hang out on the surface but the wcmm won't come up and only dart up to snag food.

Wow my adults stay at the bottom. Will the next generation be less scared and more surface dwelling?

I think people over think this. As long as it's not a green led or laser it'll probably grow plants. Imo you should pick the light you like the color of and the plants will be fine.

I think the comments above 100% nailed it on the aesthetic drawbacks you might have with this. But I think this is 100% doable too. You'll need to make sure you feed right but the nice thing with this combo is i don't think anyone will out compete for food, especially if you spread wafers or gel around the tank. There are 2 facets to stocking. 1 is bioload. plants, algae, and water changes are effectively negative bioload. The other is a question of how much room they have to do their thing. If you're considering tetras or something middle/top dwelling i'd do them first then add the otos during the the new-tank diatom explosion after the glass has gotten nice and brown to give the often starving otos a nice boost when they move in. I don't have cories so I'm not as sure what they eat, but i hear they're easier to feed. Also I've tried every food with a picture of an oto on it ( 😅 ) and have had good success with hikari micro wafers (YMMV though).

My pond has ricefish and white clouds. I recently found a bunch of fry, but don't really know which fish they're from though I suspect its the white clouds since the ricefish have had a rough start in the tub pond. The fry are all the size of mature mosquito larvae right now but some of them are surface dwelling and whiter and some are swimming lower and darker, though the dark ones do come to the surface sometimes. Do youall think this is an age difference thing or do I have both species of fry? I didn't manage to photograph any of the darker fry since they're deeper and dark on a dark background.

I lost a medaka today out of my tub pond. and one is unaccounted for. I added them in maybe 4-6 weeks ago, and they started out unhappy. a water change later they same fine but didn't want to eat flake from the surface. now two of them are eating one is missing, one is a runt but still fine, and this one is dead. Two weeks ago I added white cloud MMs into my tub as well. two days ago i found a ton of fry. Does anyone have any theories about why this guy died? below are some photos of my parameters. I don't believe the pH because the co-op strips already read between 6.4 and 6.8 for me even when other methods all say high 7s. I'm also really skeptical there's chlorine in there because I haven't added water in weeks, and when I did I used prime.

I think the rate it dissolves at depends a lot on, ph, temperature and flow, maybe hardness too (especially calcium I'd think). So you won't get a solid answer anywhere. You can sort-of upper bound that time by your water change frequency (and quantity) since anything that changes "slower" than that is unlikely to have a big effect on parameters

Another alternative is the cheap polyester quilt batting. Its got a little more structure but is the same thing otherwise. The other end of the spectrum is the co-op filter floss (or any brand i think). I'm 99% sure its the same material but it holds it's shape better and I like it a lot more. But, i have 6$ worth of quilt batting, which is a lifetime supply, so while I'll eventually go back to the co-op floss it'll be a while. I'm also skeptical that the "fire retardant" kind has anything in it other than words on the bag that they can use to charge more. Polyester is inherently fire resistant. But that maybe a moot point because the cheapest ones don't say fire retardant any way and why spend more?

Just to update this. I just kept feeding every day regardless and eventually one and then two of them tried and rejected the food. And now two of them are taking flake now and seem bigger and happy(they're really cautious about it still, attacking it and hiding again). The runt is still being a runt and not dying but not growing, still probably half length or less of the others. That leaves one unaccounted for and presumed dead too. I also noticed two days ago a TON of fry. I'm not sure if they're rice fish or the white clouds I added two weeks ago so we shall see. I'm going to post a bit more about the fry later in the breeding section later after I get some new pics. Since there's fry and dead fish, I'm assuming that some of them just somehow never learned to eat in the new environment. Not sure what else to conclude 🤔

My inclination would be to choose a top edge maybe under the HOB, just in case it weakens it more than I expect. I noticed you made a few of these posts. And we all appreciate the thanks 🙂 ! There's a forum feature to save you a post. Its the heart to the bottom right of each post you can hover over it and react in a few ways including "like", and "thanks". (note: It's hard to read intent on forums and I'm just trying to show a feature, not scold. People on this forum are super nice and you don't have to worry about that unless you have blatantly hostile behavior, but then a mod is likely to take care of it before you even see it 🙂 )

Granted I've not tried it, but, Plasti dip has a lot of organic solvents in it[1] including >16% hexane, >13% toluene, and MEK. Any one of those will damage acrylic. I bet after it dried it would be fine but it may loose strength and it may not come off or it may haze the acrylic at least. [1]: https://www.usplastic.com/catalog/files/msdss/38048 8814.pdf

Yeah I love my ottos but I never see them. One hides behind the HOB and never leaves when I'm around, 1 comes out sometimes, and the other 4 are usually... somewhere? I think I've seen 4 at once recently when feeding in the evening so I have between 4 and 6.

Here's a tip: if you take the motor out you can cram sponge behind the skimmer. You can also fill the skimmer slots with silicone if you don't want them. I heard that on the 55 if the flow adjuster isn't working it's probably because the adjuster got knocked out of place in shipping (or they have bad qc). You can open it up and bend the plastic piece back and it'll start working. Also, their support email wasn't responding for months but they got a new support system and they're now very responsive and they happily replaced my bad impeller motor recently so it's nice to see they're trying to improve.

I've got medaka and white clouds in my pond. I went to feed today and I saw a weird new bug in there. Upon closer look, I discovered they were fry! I scooped one up and took a few photos below, but I'm wondering should I feed them or are they okay with random pond microbes? I'm still feeding the pond flake every day.

my understanding is that bloodworms are fly larvae. those look pretty long and depending on how long they've been in there you might be able to eliminate larvae vs worm at least.

Seems like which reaction you chose for the post could be some kinda personality test

In my experience with the api kit, two brands of test strips (including the co-op strips), and a lab ph meter, and a cheap ph meter, there are certain water conditions that make the test strips read considerably lower. I'd believe the API kit since it always agrees with the lab ph meter. I have a hypothesis about why that is now but I haven't been able to test it yet. 😞 I think the problem with testing against buffered solutions is that all tests have been validated to work with those solutions because that's the easiest way to test them. I think to understand where the strips, meters, and solutions differ you have to look at whats different from test solution water and tank water. EDIT: to put this another way. i bet you'll find all methods work great with buffers even if they disagree with tank water.

Yeah, I'm in the same boat and have done nothing about it yet. I suspect it may have contributed to the high initial mortality rate of my cardinal tetras, but now they seem to have adapted. If your water is that soft chances are it doesn't have a lot of buffering capacity so you can try what i've been considering. I've considered adding crushed coral or some other carbonate source and then slowly adding acid until whatever is raising my ph is depleted and the carbonate buffers the ph instead. But at that point I'd be messing around so much I might as well switch to RO +minerals. If you do make any changes keep us posted. I'd like to know how it goes.

This is why we can't have nice things. Thanks internet.😡

I got two hitchhikers in my bag from the fish store today. One I think is rams horn the other IDK. I'm anti snail but these fish were for my tub pond and in pond context I think I'm somewhere between ambivalent and pro-snail. So I have two questions 1) What are these 2) Will they survive my tub. If I'm sentencing them to death i'd rather just give them away, assuming either is desirable to someone The first one is tiny. like rice grain sized. the second one is bigger, maybe plain M&M sized.