Daniel

From Forum Guidelines:

@Streetwise and @MickS77 and others have been very successful with blackwater tanks.

Yes! Sometimes Cricket gets on (or even in) the aquarium. 🙂

Coolest thing I have seen on the forum today!

The lowest maintenance but attractive fun fish tank I have had recently was a school of angels in a hardscape only tank.

In my experience almost all plants grow well in the 60s.

I did most of the plumbing, but my plumber did the tricky stuff. Everything came from different places. If you look at the photo of the RO system you can see where I bought that from. It has been set up since 2007 and I cannot remember where the storage tank came from. Float valves and RO units are big in the saltwater hobby so that where I would look.

For me healthy juveniles are the best because they grow up in my water eating my food. Up until now they have been through a period of rapid growth and I am more than happy to take the baton and bring them up to adults. I trust my methods more than having them in some grow out tank somewhere. But then again, I tend to have an optimistic outlook. I look forward to seeing your updates!

The reservoir has what is called a float switch at the top which come on and starts filling the reservoir when the reservoir dips below completely full. When the reservoir get full to the top again, it shuts off water coming in through the fill tube. It is all automatic.

Exactly!

I don't think any of my bettas that had dropsy survived. But there is always hope.

Yes, I have a 100 gallon one: This is the reservoir that the automated water change system uses when it needs to make a water change.

This is what I use for my water prior to entering the automated water change system. The first filter is sediment and then the next 2 are carbon. The last 3 remove ions. The pH of the water is neutral as it enter the storage container.

I put quick connects and valves on mine so I can turn it on and off at the tank. I can also make it any length I want. And I can put different attachment on it for different sized aquariums.

You can integrate a Raspberry Pi device with the Seneye sensors, here is how, and then you can read it off your phone as it web based.

On the smaller side CaribSea has Peace River And on the larger size Rio Grande

I do have an automated water change system. It is not hooked up to Apex, but it could be. 🙂

My Neptune Apex does temperature, pH, Conductivity, Oxygen plus controls my heaters and lights and gives graphs of data over time and is completely programmable. I have even used it to track photosynthesis using pH as a proxy.

Remember that what fish eat everyday in the wild isn't always pure and clean. Here is one of my favorite fishing spots for the tiny blue spotted sunfish: The Elassoma I fish for come from can come from some swampy, stinky waters full of all kinds crawly stuff. Not everything is a trout stream. 🙂

I have fed baby brine shrimp right away, but my water in my breeding tanks always has lot of rotifers and paramecium and such in it anyway. I wonder what @Brandy or @Fish Folk does?

Yes, and I have done so in the past. The fish loved them.

It reminds of snakebites and automobiles. People are often much more afraid of snakes than cars, even though 1 or 2 people die from snakebites each year in the US, but 30,000 - 40,000 die in automobile accidents. Poor water quality and/or a poor or inappropriate diet will kill your fry for sure, but almost certainly not hydra. I often get hydra in my fry tanks when I feed (overfeed) baby brine shrimp. Although I am sure it has happened, over the last 50 years of raising baby fish, I have never seen a hydra eat a baby fish. Hydra love baby brine shrimp and baby brine shrimp are representative of the size of food hydra eat. The main drawback to hydra is that they can be unsightly if their populations are large. I think pictures like this are what make people unnecessarily worry about hydra (but this isn't the way hydra feed in real life): Take this video I shot earlier of hydra feeding, this is how hydra feed, and it is 99.99% tiny stuff:

There aquarium stays a room temperature (no heater), maybe a little above room temperature because the aquarium is set before a south facing window so somewhere between 70°F and 74°F. I wouldn't put discus in there, but angelfish and everything else seems to do fine.

Wouldn't bother me either.

By way of @Streetwise according to the community page there will be no livestream today.