ChefConfit

Your crypts and microsword will definitely benefit from the root tabs(my crypts eat more root tabs than my sword does). Many people find they can grow Val and tiger lotus just fine only dosing the water with ferts, but in my personal experience they do benefit from root tabs or a nutrient rich substrate. Don't worry about putting tabs under the stems use them for your other plants.

Stocking ideas for non rectangular tanks of various sizes. For example there are fish that you could do in a standard 29 that aren't a good idea in my 29Hex and I'm sure there are fish or combinations of fish I can do that wouldn't work well in a standard 29

I believe it's been said above, but most stem plants are considered water column feeders meaning they are capable absorbing all the nutrients they need to thrive thru their stems and leaves from the water. That's not to say they don't take in nutrients thru their roots or that they won't benefit from root tabs, but you would probably be better of spending that money on a liquid fert like Easy Green. If you have any heavy root feeders like crypts or swords I would save the root tabs for them. As for how long they last the best indicator is when plant growth begins to slow down then its almost depleted. That's when you want to add more. If you wait until you notice deficiencies then the root tabs were probably depleted weeks before.

The 2 products should be fine to use together if you have a need for both. Equilibrium isn't exactly a fertilizer. It's a Gh and Kh booster. It's made for remineralizing RO water or adding minerals to very soft water. While the minerals it adds are used by plants it doesn't add any of the other nutrients plants need. On the other hand iirc in order to make Easy Green work for as many people as possible they assumed moderate mineral levels in the water already. Therefore there isn't a ton of them in Easy Green.

I wouldn't do anything special. As said by @Daniel, @James Black and @Levi_Aquatics they should be fine in the bags. Fish usually go several days in bags with little to no negative effects. If it will put you at ease though you can fill a 5g bucket a 1/4 to a 1/3 full then add an air stone with your USB air pump and a lid or covering to prevent splash.

Well both nerite and amanos need brackish water to reproduce. That combined with the temps not being very conducive to their survival should give them a very low chance of ever becoming a problem. You could also look at species that have reputations for being hard to keep/breed. If they need very specific parameters to survive and or breed they are unlikely to become an issue if released.

I'd start by getting rid of anything your fish don't love or you don't like feeding. No point in keeping foods you probably won't end up using. If you don't want to throw them out you can find a local fishkeeping group and post them for free. There are plenty of ways to extend the shelf life of the rest. If you don't have freezer space you can put them in the fridge. Vacuum sealing is also an option. Creating a feeding schedule could also help. It won't make the food last longer, but it will help make sure you have using them all regularly.

Don't bleach your tank. It sounds like a fungal infection followed by ick just wore the fish down. Treat it with salt then when you restock quarantine them in the tank with the med trio. If you bleach it down not only do you guarantee you kill all the BB and have to restart your cycle but you run the risk of harming the next inhabitants if any isn't rinsed away.

@James Black I'm having the same issue. I've also noticed that if you screw up typing someone's name while tagging them in a post you now have to delete the entire tag including the @ instead of just fixing the spelling error for the suggestions to come back up. The other thing I've noticed is that on mobile the top menu buttons are no longer on the right they're a little left of center and it just looks odd. The only thing really bothering me is the notifications not coming up though.

If it were me I'd switch the current tank over to the new filters a week or so before switching tanks so that they are fully seeded, but you should be fine just transferring over the sponge filter and bio media from the aquaclear. If you haven't purchased the new filters yet if recommend saving money by sticking with the ac50 and getting a medium sponge filter instead of the large. The medium is a much more convenient size to maintain. Even @Cory has said he uses the medium over the large for that reason. Honestly though just the ac50 and small sponge should be more filtration than you need in a planted 40. If what you're looking for is more flow then a wavemaker would be a more effective and possibly cheaper option.

As many others have said there's not really a need for a standing QT tank if you don't have a ton a stuff going in and out of your tanks. My recommendation is getting a small sponge filter and usb air pump to run in your main tank so that when you need a QT tank you have a cycled filter ready to go. This has the added benefit of being a backup filter in case of power outages since it can run of a portable charging pack. If you don't want to do that then you can keep a small extra bag of bio media or an extra sponge in the filter on your main tank to use in the QT tank filter when you need it. I've done both options and they both work fine. If you still want a QT tank set up full time a nice option is using it to grow out plant trimmings/ extra plants from propagation either to sell/give away or to turn the extra tank into a water garden that can be used as a QT tank when needed.

@Koinot sure which plant you were talking about needing a way to hold it on to the tank, but if it's the pothos you can use the suction cups meant for airline tubing. That's how I have my marbled queen in my hex, just have it hold the stem like you would an airline.

It's all about the market in your area and how long the store owner thinks it will take to sell them. For example most stores go thru a ton of guppies every week so the store may be willing to pay a higher percentage of their retail price because the of keeping that fish until it sells are likely to be lower. Meanwhile if there isn't a big cichlid market in your area or the store you're selling g to specializes in community fish those cichlids you bring in might only get you 5-10% of retail because the store is going to take on the cost of keeping them happy and healthy until they sell which may be a long time if at all. Also don't forget you are competing with a wholesaler when you sell to the LFS. Hobbyist bred doesn't automatically mean better. You need to beat the wholesaler either quality, price or reliability. Maybe even 2 or 3 of those. For example if you're LFS has trouble getting in blue dream shrimp from their wholesaler and you bring some in don't expect too dollar the first couple times but once they see yours look better and have a better survival rate and you have them for them every month so you're a reliable source they might be willing to pay more than they would from a wholesaler. There's no harm in asking for as much as 50% retail but know that 20-30% seems to be what a lot of stores pay and even less if they might have trouble selling it fast.

Is that a thing? I need one. Probably can't ship though cause of the size/shape.😢

There's a youtuber that is a big advocate of dirted tank and also natural light. I can't post a link because he also sells plants. He has some videos on using natural light for you aquarium. Basically it comes down to keeping it balanced which is harder with natural light since you can't control the sun.

Yesterday I did a 50% water change on my 29hex adjusted my lighting schedule and am doing a new fert regimen to try and combat BBA and get better plant growth. I haven't had good growth since I rescaped 2 months ago and my corys stopped spawning around the same time. I'm thinking about getting a co2 setup for the tank as well. Today I sold my last 10 juvenile corys from my most recent spawn to my LFS then impulse bought this guy. He's in quarantine with meds for a week then will go in the hex. My shrimp I got last week are also doing well. No deaths and everyone seems to be active.

@Colu I think you meant to post in the dream products thread

After reading the original question I think we should look at this more as using an outdoor mini pond as a horse trough rather than just keeping fish in a horse trough because the OP is asking about actually adding plants to the trough. So I have a few questions. Do you have a float to maintain water levels or do you manually fill? Are you considering a substrate to plant in or only floating plants? Would you consider adding an air stone, pump, wave maker of some sort? While not a necessity added water circulation would help keep the ecosystem healthy. As for stocking I'd suggest white clouds because they are smaller and cold tolerant. You could also go with a small native species depending on your local laws. Maybe some variety of shiner?

I've searched for the fish in the news thread a few times and it's never shown up for me. I've almost given up and started a new one multiple times. It also happened with the what did you get done today thread the other day. Had to got through another members activity feed that I knew posted there recently to find it. Also adding the ability to enable push notifications thru a phones browser. Several retail websites I use can give me push notifications thru Chrome about sales and restock so I'd imagine it's possible for the forum. I'll admit I have no idea the kind of work that feature would require though so just a suggestion.

As @MattyIce said there is a small pocket of air in the root tabs. You can poke a hole in them to let the air out, or just burry them deeper.

I'd suggest easy strips for water testing (the easier testing is the more he'll do it), a gravel vac, fritz complete from the coop (so you get the pump top and 1 pump treats his whole tank), the med trio, aquarium salt, new sponges for in his HOB and a prefilter sponge or a sponge filter to replace it, an air stone/pump/tubing/checkvalve and a variety of fish foods. That's pretty much the shopping list I'd give anyone who just set up their first tank minus any stuff for plants. You also mentioned his heater broke. If he has fish that need one you can get him a small preset one.

That's the one people use. I haven't used it yet, but I think I might on my next tank. If there's a tractor supply near you you can get it there, or you can try tool stores but I'm not sure who carries it.

If you put it in a pot of cold water and bring it to a boil anything that could make you or I sick (and I'd assume fish) would be dead before it even reaches boiling. The tannin rich water from boiling it would also be sterile, and could be cooled down then used to dose the tank with tannins.

Added Blue Dream Shrimp to my "accidental" tank today! There are 16 in total. This is my 4th and if it fails final time trying to keep shrimp in the new house. I've previously tried blue dreams twice and amanos once. I was going to try red cherry shrimp but I found these from a Hobbyist for half the price my LFS charges. My first attempt was with 10 blue dreams. About half died within a week, and the rest died while molting. Because of the deaths while molting I thought it was due to my soft water, so I added crushed coral to my HOB and a wondershell to the tank then waited a month. Second attempt was 6 blue dreams. Once again half died in the first week. The other three survived about a month and a half then disappeared one at a time. The final one lasted to about 2 and a half months. Wasn't sure what the problem was, maybe lack of minerals for the early deaths and harassment by my fish for the later ones. I redid the tank with a significant amount of crushed coral in the substrate and tried amanos next. The shop only had 3 left when I went in so I took them. They all died within 2 weeks. They were tiny and I think the fish were harassing them. This time I'm doing things different. It's a 10 gallon tank with just them, bladder and ramshorn snails. The tank was originally set up in August as a bare bottom tank to propagate floating plants then had substrate added in October (about 1/2 sand 1/2 crushed coral because that's what I had around) to propagate some stem plants. Hardscape was added in November when I added some Cory eggs I harvested. More plants have slowly been added and a second batch of Cory fry raised in the tank. The HOB was swapped for a sponge filter almost 2 weeks ago and the second batch of corys removed over the weekend. I'm hoping having so much crushed coral in the water will help with the minerals this time and since the only other livestock is snails predation/harassment shouldn't be a problem. I also started with more shrimp this time and some are fully grown. Hopefully I have success this time and soon have a thriving shrimp colony. If it works out I'm planning attempt to introduce them to my community tank again. Probably in larger numbers so they can establish themselves before their numbers dwindle, then I might do them in my deck pond in addition to whatever fish I decide on.

Added blue dream shrimp to my “accidental“ tank! Making a separate post about my troubles keeping shrimp since I moved and what I'm doing differently this time.