James Croney

Rarely I have come across a fish tank that gives a little tingly-electric feeling when I put my hands in. its especially noticeable on small cuts in the skin. Usually I just replace the heater, and it goes away. This lead me to believe that sometimes the heaters "go bad" and start to leak current into the water. Well, the current can find an easier route to ground thru my fingers than anything else in the glass tank. One has really been throwing me for a loop though. I had changed the heaters multiple times chasing the issue. No heaters, no finger tingling. Put brand new heaters in, I get finger tingles. I check the ground plugs, i check everything I can think to check. Turns out, the people who installed my electrical box put the grounding rod directly thru the sewer drain on the property! Like, they bullseyed it, so that the electrical ground was in current with the sewer water from the house. I imagine the ground rod passed current to the sewer water that then passed current onto the metal pipes that then came back into the tank. Again the 'best ground' to get to was my finger, since the house ground was 'shorted'. I do not know enough about electrical things to understand why that is the case, but its some data I wanted to share with the forum. As a last resort, check your electrical box grounding rods and if they come into contact with anything that comes into contact with the water! Now that its repaired, no current comes to my fingers, even when I have a few cuts on them. For context this is a aquaponics setup outside.

I see the air-powered fish tank decorations all over the internet. And I have tried to google my idea here, but .... the terms overlap so badly i get an ocean of half-related stuff. Could anyone suggest some search terms for me, or mention a product they may have heard of before? I would like to find an air-line powered submersible propeller with a fish-safe cage. In my head, the air line that would normally be hooked up to an air stone feeds a small bubble-driven or slight-pressure-driven mechanism that turns a propeller shaft. The purpose would not be to get air into the water so much as increase flow. As a note, i already have air bubbles with a small gravel filter. So really just want some low-rpm version of a normal tank propeller. Thanks for any thoughts! Also, any other air-powered thing to suggest. I have an extra line in my airline due to some bad planning and need to fill it. LOL

I'm not sure its near consumer technology yet, but I can't help but day dream about a fish tank that doesn't get algae buildup. Article below, but the high level is that they left a glass window underwater for a year and it had no significant buildup or 'gunk' on it. Pretty amazing considering we all know what glass+water+light equals 😄 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.8b02982 Speaking of, are there any other methods people have come up with besides the handy-dandy magfloat with scraper? Are there like "aquarium oils" that I could treat the glass with to reduce buildup? I haven't seen any that I could trust LOL

https://www.ebay.com/itm/185181577315 So i was looking for some substrate for a small tank, and came across these things. They are twice as expensive as normal gravel substrate... and take forever to ship, but I think I am going to get some and do the vinegar test and stuff on them to see if they are safe for the fish. Maybe i can get some really sparkly ones for a few bucks more... Do does anyone have any suggestions as to what to try to prove their safety in the water long term? This obviously isn't practical for larger tanks, but a small 5-10 gallon tank might be neat.

So it turns out months later that I have a fish tank placed next to my computer monitor. I often leave the monitor on overnight, as at the point I scrape myself away from the keyboard all I do is shuffle into bed. But, this brings me to this thread again... I have a Fluval Plant 3.0 LED Light on a daylight cycle for a 55 gallon with guppies. I began to notice one or two of the fish hover-swimming in the water vertically at night! It only happened when i left the computer monitor on at night, the Fluval light was off/low at night, and took many months before i noticed they were 'confused'. Being curious i messed with it a bit. When i turn off the computer monitor, they snap out of it and correct themselves to swim like normal fish. I didn't think much of it, but then one of the two that was doing it died. ... So i put on a dark screen saver. A few weeks later the other one died. No other guppies of the 20 others in the tank seemed to have felt this way about the weird lighting, just those two. They were part of a trio I got online, but the male never showed this. All the others are younger, born in the tank if that would make a difference. Ive been calling it 'moon confusion' in my head, but there is probably a real name out there somewhere. So it turns out that you can re-orient a fish's 'balance' by messing with the light sources. Seems like a learned behavior of fish who have never seen a light source be anything but "up". So... maybe don't do that to your fish.

Tilapia can really kick that tail around when they get scared. Was looking at ways of moving/sexing/inspecting them with less stress. ... But sometimes I don't always end up where I expect on the internet, which brings me to this video. I ... it was one of those things I couldn't not share here.

Ahh that's cool for a floating plant! Duckweed is my floating plant of choice. I suppose I could tie it to a coconut bridge or something. ... Can you convert a venus fly trap to fully submersed? I wonder...

I'm looking into my first carpet plant... and I think this one might be the one for me! I heard it was a dense carpet plant, and was sold on the idea when i heard it eats the little Infusoria in the water as a carnivorous plant. I always thought venus fly traps were cool, but they don't grow under water. Ill get a few cultures and see how it goes. My water is also pretty hard (guppies and guppy grass with snails) so Ill see if they have what it takes to survive. 🙂

I don't feed my daphnia anything, but they are 'in cycle' -- which means (at least to me) that there is tiny little bits of green algae being produced at about the rate the daphnia are eating it. Due to how they grow i get explosions and drops, but it overall follows the amount of food they can get. Right now its cold for me, so only a few scattered daphnia here and there can be seen. They do like to hide though. In times where my culture is thinner than I would like, I get a 5 gallon bucket and fill it most of the way with water. Add grass from your yard or any dead grassy-like matter. Ive used dried guppy grass to great success. Stir it up and crunch it up, just a handful of grassy stuff. Put it outside in the sun. Add as many daphnia as you want, ive grown them out from as little as 10 or so. They dont take more than a few weeks to have 1000s of babies. -- When you start to notice that there are more daphnia, pour some back into your culture tank, keeping some in the bucket. Top off the bucket with water from your main culture. Seems like a bunch of exta effort, but its free food. so... kinda balances out As far as gut loading, when i catch daphnia I often see little green stripes of what I assume is somewhere between daphnia food and daphnia poop. I think that gives some extra 'free nutrients' to the fish when hey eat them.