DShelton

Perfect, thanks @Cory

I bought my microworm culture from Taylor (aka SimplyBetta). They were pheap (5$) from her, and great culture. I kept them going for ~18 months. I no longer needed them and gave them to a fellow hobbyist.

Apologies for the thread necro, but it seems like the most logical place for the question, versus a new thread. I have seen several posts with dimensions of the body of the heaters, and a statement to the effect that the cord is 11.8" long. Does anyone using these heaters know the length of the cable is between the heater body and the temperature controller, and the length from temperature controller to the plug?

Yeah mine has a wonky behaving SATA controller. I think I am going to send it to Louis Rossmann and see what it will take to repair it.

I have mine still sitting on the desk and am considering still considering going back to it. I 'upgraded' to a 2017 12" Macbook, and regret it every time I touch this garbage keyboard.

@Odd Duck 817 here, Arlington/Mansfield.

That is a pretty tough question to give an exact answer to. It depends on a huge number of factors. The pH of the source water, % water change, frequency of water changes, KH, GH, plant load, and total water volume, just to name a few. The approach that @Colu listed above is sound. If you are starting with a slightly acidic solution start with a small amount of crushed coral/aragonite and give it a few days to adjust. As an example, I have a 30cm pea puffer tank with Fluval Stratum as the substrate and filtered with a matten 30ppi matten filter. When I cycled the tank with just plants and substrate, the pH of the tank was ~6.4 (source tap water is 8.2). Before i put fish in it, I added about 300grams of crushed coral in a filter bag behind my matten filter. Within 48 hours, the pH of the tank was ~7.2, and it has remained that for the last 6 months or so.

What is the pH, and temperature of the water? If the pH is ~7, then, as @tonyjulianohas said, most of the 'ammonia' is actually ammonium. Only the free ammonia, 'actual NH3' is toxic to fish (I mean ammonium is too, but not at aquarium concentrations.). The chemistry that the API test kit utilizes for the ammonia test, is detects combined ammonia/ammonium concentration so we have to rely on the pH and temperature to approximate the actual free NH3 concentration. The following web page built by a faculty member at Iowa State will do the math for you. http://home.eng.iastate.edu/~jea/w3-research/free-ammonia/nh3.html If you want to do the math yourself, this paper will walk you through it: https://floridadep.gov/sites/default/files/5-Unionized-Ammonia-SOP_1.pdf If you want to utilize his calculator, you can make the assumption that ppm == mg/liter. That assumption is slighlty flawed, but only ever so slightly. 0.998859 is the approximate density/specific gravity of water at ~20 - 25 C) and the the actual conversion is: mg/liter = ppm * 0.998859 I assumed your water temp was ~25C and running your .25ppm ammonia/ammonium through the calculator with an assumption of pH 8.2 to get an approximate free ammonia concentration of 0.0207 mg/liter (ppm). Cheers,

Ammonia/Ammonium

Absolutely yeast/sucrose (classic fermentation) was one of the first DIY CO2 systems and is by far the cheapest of them since the reactants are cheap and available at the grocery store. This was the DIY system that poor college kids could afford way back int the day. Honestly it works great, but you have to be really careful to not gas your tank with CO2 or explode the plastic bottle and spew yeast/sugar everywhere. Other than that, it has a couple of problems that make it less desirable than the citric acid/bicarbonate reactors: One of the byproducts of the reaction from the yeast is ethanol, which becomes toxic to the yeast at certain concentrations, so the reaction kills itself over time, usually before all of the sucrose is consumed. There is no real easy way to control the reaction, i.e. turn it off and on with the light cycle. Once the yeast/sugar are mixed in water, the only way the reaction stops is the alcohol kills the yeast, or the yeast run out of food and stop producing CO2.

It depends on your plants. Hornwort is particularly good at sucking up nitrates, so are many of the other stem plants, like wisteria and water sprite. Some other plants Cryptocoryne sp. for example do not effectively utilize nitrate as a nitrogen source. The plant will uptake the nitrogen and store it, but not utilize it for new plant growth, eventually it gets to a toxic amount in the plant, and the plant will die back. The advice above about water changes is solid. As long as your source water does not have any nitrate in it, each 50% water change will cut the nitrate concentration in half. A couple of those kinds of water changes will soon have the nitrate concentration under control.,

There are some great DIY systems that do just this. The reactants are usually citric acid and sodium bicarbonate. They work by siphon and sucking one reactant (citric acid) into a vessel containing the bicarbonate, producing CO2. With systems like this, since they work off of the siphon, you can control the reaction by shutting off the CO2 flow to the tank (i.e. manually with a valve, or automatically with a solenoid). There are a couple of DIY ways to do this, one using a manifold and solenoid: https://www.dudegrows.com/my-diy-co2-setup/ Another way is to use some 2 port bottle caps for 2l soda bottles, a pressure gauge. a valve and some Tygon® tubing. Wikihow has a great article, and the kits are cheap on amazon or fleabay. https://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-CO2-Reactor-for-an-Aquarium There is also a commercial stainless steel bottle that you can buy, mix the acid/water/bicarbonate in the bottle, and the reaction pressures the stainless bottle, it is then controlled with a regulator and a solenoid like a traditional CO2 bottle. I think both Dennerle and JBL make one, but there is an FZone one on amazon that is cheaper than the big brands. https://www.amazon.com/FZONE-Aquarium-Generator-Regulator-Diffuser/dp/B08ZLVQ5L5 These systems are cheaper than commercial CO2 systems, and refilling them is pretty cheap too. Both the citric acid and the bicarbonate are really cheap in bulk. I used a system like the one shown on the wikihow site for a few years on a 60cm tank and had to change the reactants every three weeks or so.

It is heat fused coal slag, so it is chemically inert, just like the pool sand that you have been using. The only issue that I have ever seen with it, last bag i bought had lots of residual organics in it. I soaked my bag in buckets for 2 or 3 weeks changing water daily before the organic 'oil slick' was gone from the surface of of the water.

If your source water is acidic, or only slightly basic. It will also raise the pH. The amount depends on your starting point.

Yes, the laterite in the plenum config (i also use it in Walstad tanks) is an iron source. Brightwell aquatics still sells it. Last I bought came from them via Amazon.