Remi de Groot

Why looking for a algae eater to go with your shrimps? Shrimps love to graze on all the algae. I even have my lights on longer in my shrimp tanks to get some algae going. Only cleaning the front glass of the aquarium.

Got this on my to do list for weeks now. Not one of my favorite jobs 🤫. My Eheim hoses are just enough see trough that I see the buildup if I shine a light on it.

One of the reasons 'tanks like this' do so much water changing is because they put way to much fertilizer in them or the substrate is leaking nutritions in the water that should go to the plants. All of this to make sure the plants never run out of fert (the Estimative Index for example). And to have your aquarium look like this, just changing water is far from enough. You have to remove the plants very often, cut them and replant them. Especially the first picture you show with the Dutch Style. Aquariums 'like this' are build for the plants and the fish are just a little extra. Most people on this forum keep aquariums for the fish...

Never did it, but i guess you can use bleach to disinfect. You can use dechlorinator later to remove some of the chlorine left in the sponge. But before doing it, please research it before just following the blind here ;).

As far as I can see on the picture you don't really have any fast growing plants in the aquarium. This could help as well against algae. Have some competition going in there. Maybe some floating plants to block some of the light and use some nutritions. Shrimps love them as well to hide and feed between the roots. I've got Salvinia in all my shrimp tanks. Shrimps are hanging on them like batman most of the time.

First bbq of the year next to my pond. Great to see how my new Comets slowly are starting to join the pack of older Golden Orfe. Took the small guys a few weeks to get used to them, but they are justing swimming up and down the pond along with the rest.

Although people always seem to advice javamos I've been struggling with it as well. Always goes brown and takes months to start growing. Somehow I never had this problem with flame moss, so I decided to keep using that instead. Started with 1 cup and keep replanting cuttings in new tanks. With some patience you never have to buy new again. Grows really well even without fertilizer, co2 or anything else.

I always start my new thanks with 6 hours of light and work my way up by 30 minutes every 2 weeks. That way it's easier to find a good balance between light and algae.

I remember the answer on the livestream. Great to see the result of it and love your shrimps! Here in the Netherlands the caridina shrimps are indeed kept in way lower water parameters. But makes sense to use the numbers the shrimps are used to and not a number the internet says.

I found the video from @Irene very useful on this topic.

Funny thing is that I never knew otto's can be hard to keep until I started watching the vids from Co op. Never had any problems keeping them alive. Guess I've been lucky all these time. My first aquarium ended up in a big disaster when I went on to holiday. May home owner gave the fish the same amount of food in a week as I would have done in a year. So everything was death when I came back. When I came back I emptied the tank, turned of the lights and filter and just left some wet gravel in it to start over again a week or so later. Guess who started swimming around the tank again when I refilled the tank a week later... So that always made me think otto's are a easy fish, impossible to kill...

You have to find the right balance between light, co2 and fert. A disbalance gives algue. The highest factor now is light. So start there and don't change anything yet on the co2 and fert as from what you are doing now. 10 hours can easily be reduced. Try going to 8 hours first (or even lower), before spending money on a New light. See if that makes a different. Keep an eye on your plants how they are doing.

Also, remember that if you make a change it can take some time before you see a result. So don't change to much at once and don't expect a result the same day. Balancing the tank takes time and a lot of patience 😉

In the livestream from june 6th they have been talking about the speakers on the YouTube channel. It will be every 3th saturday of the month, starting in July if i remember correctly.

Problem i had last month when removing the co2 injection was that the ph changed to fast and to much. With some dead fish as a result. At least, i think that was the reason for the death fish. Didn't change anything else in the aquarium. So maybe better to turn it down day by day. For the algae: You need the perfect combination between co2, light and fertilizer. If you lower 1 of them, you should lower the other 2 as wel. With nitrate 0 you already are a bit low on the fertilizer. So the only thing would be indeed lowering the light. Just a matter of trying what works for your aquarium. 8 hours is still a nice long time for your plants, so good one to start with in my opinion.

Same here. As soon as the aquariumlight goes off the oto's come out. They come out a bit more if the group is bigger, although 2 dozen sounds like a nice group 😉

I've had great succes with the floating Salvinia Natans to get rid of nitrates. Plus side over stam plants for me is that it's easy to remove if it's growing fast. Just grab some out of the aquarium instead of trimming and cutting.