Daniel

@matt Culturing Daphnia is tricky. No matter how many times you have done it, it can still be frustrating. Culturing Daphnia should be called culturing green water because if you don't have a lot green water it becomes even trickier to feed the Daphnia. Personally I wouldn't run a filter in a Daphnia tank as the Daphnia would not appreciate the water movement and neither the mechanical or biological filtration provided by the sponge filter is helping the Daphnia. What are you feeding your Daphnia. A good Daphnia tank should be greener than this. Post a photo of your setup as that might be very helpful in solving the problem.

No issue at all. I kept scores of bettas in 1 gallon jars, with every other day water changes back when I was heavily into bettas and those bettas thrived and were lusty and vigorous! A one tiny guppy will not produce anywhere near the volume of waste products that a much larger betta does. Be prepared though once the belly starts to sink in and the swimming become difficult the unhappy end is nearly inevitable.

Not saying that at all. I have used metal halide lighting on this aquarium and that is relatively cheap, it is just noisy and hot. Plain old dirt cheap florescent bulbs work really, really well for growing aquarium plants. And personally I use inexpensive Finnex Stringrays LEDs for all of my smaller aquariums. They are super durable (I can't tell how many times I have dropped them in water or on a concrete floor and never once has one failed), and you can't beat the price. But if you want LED floodlights, that is pendant lighting that produces a serious amount of light and is geared towards horticulture use, then you have left the realm of cheap. The lighting for my biggest aquarium which is 3 feet deep came in at roughly $500 per light, and I am using 3 of those lights on the big aquarium. It is one of those areas in life where you get what you pay for.

You are on the right path. Seneye makes a monitor that uses light to track water chemistry readings. I was working with Seneye the other day to calibrate one of their monitors and I sent Seneye a photograph of the color changing slides they use to monitor water chemistry. So it can be done. And just from the color, size and distribution of the color changing crystals in a photograph no less they were able to report back to me water parameters that I knew independently to be accurate, even though all they had to go on was this photograph. And I do get reading on my phone, and computer from the Seneye device. And I get texts and email when the reading go beyond set boundaries. And it just got better! Apparently I can hook my Seneye monitor up to a Raspberry Pi and capture the data stream that my Seneye device is producing and write the data to my own database. Here is the info on the Seneye website about connecting to a Raspberry Pi. If you can DIY this, I would love to be a beta tester for whatever you come up with.

Given that your fishroom is in your livingroom, have you considered a single linear piston pump? A blower is relatively noisy compared to a single linear piston pump and might be more expensive also. Update. Your are asking about linear piston air pump. I misunderstood. Several forum members have one.

I keep angelfish and guppies together. When I am typing on this forum and I hear 'popping' sounds at the water's surface in nearby aquariums it can only mean one thing. There is a gravid female guppy dropping fry and the angelfish have figured out where the fry are.

I have seen betta and guppy judging in person and yes, it is pretty much 'Best in Show'. 🙂 Here are the betta judging standards (warning these can make your eyes bleed).

No particular time. I have done it in the dark, but that always leaves me a bit queasy about what may or may not have gone down the python.

Bay leaves are from the bay laurel (Laurus nobilis) plant. They grow here in North Carolina natively. I have collected freshwater ghost shrimp from shallow pools of water that were littered with the fallen leaves of bay laurels and the shrimp seemed perfectly healthy. And I find shrimp in pools of water with maple leaves, oak leaves, hickory leaves, beech leaves, etc., and even long leaf pine, pine needles. I am not recommending that you put pine needles in your shrimp aquarium but I found more shrimp in this little pool full of pine needles than any other place that I collected that day.

Here is the summary first, Hardware store LED floodlights are inexpensive but weak in the light needed for plant growth Horticultural LED floodlights are expensive but strong in the light needed for plant growth After reading your post above, I measured the output of a LED floodlight I have in kitchen. I have a light meter that measures intensity across the spectrum of light. This is the LED floodlight in my kitchen. This produces nice warm visible light that I prefer, but it is lacking in those parts of the spectrum that plants need for growth. I also measured sunlight with the meter which also measured the photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) which is just a fancy word for measuring the spectrum of the light that plants can use to make food and grow. This is what sunlight looked like this morning. The big blue hump on the left and the big red hump on the right are the part of the spectrum that plants can actually see. What that chart also shows it that we (humans) like which is the middle greenish yellow part of the spectrum. We humans perceive that middle part where red and blue and green equally combine as 'white' light, or sunlight. Plants don't care about that part, they are interested in only the blue part and the red parts. So when you buy an LED floodlight, what you get is a lot light that doesn't grow plants but looks good to you. To get a LED floodlight that grow plants, you need to buy a specially designed horticultural LED light that is rich in the blue and reds plants need. Here is the spectrum of a Kessil a360x LED floodlight tuned to grow plants. To our eyes, this would be blue plus red, so we would perceive this as purple. Not very pleasing. So Kessil makes a version of the a360x tuned to grow freshwater plants, but still be pleasing to our eyes. This is the Tuna Sun spectrum. And yes, I use Kessil three a360x's to light my deepest aquarium (the other thing in the photo is my automatic feeder), and I like them and would buy them again, but I paid through the nose to get these. So in summary, Hardware store LED floodlights are inexpensive but weak in the light needed for plant growth Horticultural LED floodlights are expensive but strong in the light needed for plant growth

When my rimless aquarium looked like this all choked with 1" of dense plants at the top, all of the shrimp stayed in the aquarium. But the other day, I moved the plants, and this is what happened. Actually, there were several jumpers (I think my cats ate a few). None of the shrimp climbed, but their jumping abilities are positively Olympian! So you can easily keep shrimp in a rimless (and presumably topless, although I do have glass tops for my rimless tanks, I don't use them) tank. Just make sure you have a dense cover of floating plants.

Thank you @Paul! There isn't much more to say on this topic. For further discussion of acclimating fish purchased online please visit this topic.

It is a genetic trait and many people find it desirable.

What are your lights and what is their schedule?

I have had this tank set up since early November and have had fish in it since the beginning. I measured the ammonia, nitrite and nitrate everyday. Here is a graph of what that looked like. Nitrates were high initially likely from fertilizer the plants brought in with them, but this faded. After a few days the ammonia and nitrites began to increase. And then the ammonia and nitrate held steady for a few days. Then the ammonia peaked on the 14th followed by a peak in nitrites the next day. Nitrates began to rise after that. And now everything is falling back down again.

@Aubrey shh! Don't tell anyone about the files part of the forum, people might start uploading photos there (which we don't want them to do that). We want to keep the files area a place where you can upload books and papers and such just like you did. Thanks again for uploading that!

Exactly, set your heater a degree or two higher than your desired temperature and then plug your heater into the controller and then the controller (which has external thermostat in your aquarium) determines when your heater goes on and off. That way if the inexpensive bimetal thermostat in heater fuses in the on position, you are protected. I think the Inkbird runs around $35.

I haven't been using it for long so my opinion could change, but Eco-Complete from Caribsea seems to be getting the job done just as well as the non-inert substrates in the other 2 Dirted tank project aquariums. Time will tell.

@ange Did you ever see @Bill Smith fabulous Pex Pillar invention? For under $10, your root tab problems are a thing of the past! 🙂

I am with @MickS77. When I started keeping aquariums in the late 1960s, the only thing I was told was to use dechlorinator and let the water sit a day or two before you used it. So I did and it worked. Currently I start a new aquarium with water and plants from a previous aquarium and a few fish.

There are few 'diseases' that aquarium salt and high quality water cannot fix (including fin rot). Here is a good Co-Op blog post that you will find helpful. 5 Quick and Easy Steps for Treating Fin Rot WWW.AQUARIUMCOOP.COM What do you do if your fish’s fins and tail are looking ragged or discolored? It may be a...

UV lights have their place, but I haven't used one for at least 11 years. My guess is that most of members of this forum do not use a UV light. And it not the expense of the UV lights that keeps me from using one, it is that most of the uses of UV, like assisting with clearly cloudy water, can also be achieved inexpensively and easily without UV.

Keeping fish for fun, catching fish for money! Total fish vertical integration.🙂

None of the very inexpensive UV solutions is effective for use in aquariums. Sunlight won't hurt your sick guppy but it is only one part of a good quality environment.

UV lights that are used in aquariums to reduce populations of algae and bacteria are fairly powerful, hot, and completely shielded so as not to harm you or your fish. Which is a long way of saying, no, a normal UV light will not work for your guppies' fin rot unfortunately.