Bullsnark
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Posts posted by Bullsnark
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On 7/20/2021 at 8:44 PM, GameCzar said:
Kind of off-topic, but searching the Co-Op store, I dont see med trio offered. I found the components after finding a blog article about it, but it seems they are all sold separately and in different quantities.
Was this something that used to be on the store in one package?Ich-x, para cleanse, and maracyn2 are the trio. There are videos on quarantine and medication procedures that give the step by step. You could use salt as well, but that’s not as safe with certain fish/invertebrates/plants
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On 9/4/2021 at 2:29 PM, Patrick_G said:
I’m also in agreement with @lefty o . It should look good to you. That’s the number one most important thing.
Now if it were me and I had those prime looking rocks I think I’d try a inverted U shaped scape with more height to the rocks.
I like this scape from another forum, you can see that the rocks come about 2/3 up on each side.
On 9/2/2021 at 12:28 AM, Bullsnark said: -
On 9/1/2021 at 10:44 PM, lefty o said:
my theory when decorating a tank is to make it pleasing to your eye, and not worry about what others think. you will be the one viewing the aquarium, it needs to be pleasing to your eye.
I moved a couple things around and put sand under it. Added water and salt so it can sit overnight. Tomorrow I am going to drain it all, add plants, and refill. Hopefully in a few weeks I can put some fish in there.
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On 8/29/2021 at 10:46 AM, Nik_n said:
I was considering going out in the forest behind my house and collecting some driftwood. I was told that as long as the wood is not rotten, drying it in the sun is enough. Have never tried it before but I'm considering it more and more now. The area I would collect from is a forest behind some farm land. I would go deeper into the forest and not the areas close to the farm land. If I find a piece or two I will probably, scrub it, let it dry in the sun, leave it in a salt bath for about a week, wash it with a garden hose and put it into a freshwater bath until it sinks.
I heard that you could also do a bleach bath. Never tried it before, but I was told that the wood might absorb the bleach and leek it into the tank.
Salt is a lot safer. A strong salt solution will kill any non-saltwater organism and won’t kill your fish if you have traces of it left afterwards.
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OK, so I’m setting up at 55, and I have the most gorgeous rocks I’ve ever seen. They called him sponge boulders, but they are extremely hard rock that is partially lava rock, partially some other rock, and a lot of crystals. The crystals don’t appear to be water-soluble at all, so I am going to set up the placement of the rocks before they go into a salt bath so I can work on the base+ substrates while they soak. Pictures will be left to right from above, then the front.
I tried to make the big rock on the left-hand side where you can see it from three directions because it has great features on all three sides and the top, and the rock on the right side has stuff on the front and side. A couple of the other rocks could be flipped or turned, but I’m not an artist, so I am open to suggestions-
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My fiancé got a beta at random after a new pet store came to her hometown. After watching a few videos and seeing people’s tanks and fish I was hooked (pun intended).
I was a plumber for years and I wanted to do aqua escaping for peoples homes, but I ended up getting injured before I could start my own company. I wanted to install water features on a larger scale, but this is probably the next best thing. We started with 13 gallon tank, now we have a 20, two 10s, a 40, and a 55.-
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On 8/28/2021 at 4:00 PM, BlueLineAquaticsSC said:
These are just thrown together in a pile and weighed down by rocks, but they are the root system of some old bushes I dug up. I soaked them for a few months in water and then used a wire brush attached to a power drill to take off any soft wood and bark, then hosed it off and stick it in the tank. In the past with smaller pieces I have boiled the wood and it did help it to give off less tannins if you care about that.
Yeah I am going out in the morning with a saw. These are both root systems, so that should help, and I can put a few holes through some of it for hiding spots to help reduce buoyancy as well. I hope to get decent pictures. I found some stellar rock today at a landscaping supply that I need to power wash and soak.
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On 8/27/2021 at 6:42 PM, Guppysnail said:
If you are really concerned I have in the past when concerned used my bathtub and filled it with pot after pot after pot of boiling water and left it sit until cool.
I will use hot water on the rocks and scrub them, but hot water won’t penetrate wood in any reasonable length of time. That’s why they use it for cooking utensils.
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Actually let me rephrase: I’m not going to be able to sterilize it, but I’m going to clean it to the best of my ability. I am trying to get the most dangerous things off that will endanger the tank and fish. If this were a native tank, I would just toss it in and not worry since they live in the water anyway.
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On 8/27/2021 at 6:34 PM, Streetwise said:
It looks deciduous and not coniferous, so that is good. If it is heavy enough to sink, you might not have to wait. I would not be worried about trying to sterilize.
No I’m definitely sterilizing anything in this area. Everything around here is dirty, and there’s fertilizer runoff as well as any amount of sewage runoff around here. At least minimal precautions have to be taken
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On 8/27/2021 at 6:34 PM, Patrick_G said:
I gather beach wood in my local area. For sun bleached wood above the waterline I just wash it and put it in the tank. I’ve had good luck, but that type of wood is super buoyant so it needs to be heavily weighted. Other folks have vastly different protocols, so I might be doing this totally wrong!
I’ve also collected some Madrona and I’m letting it season outside for a year before trying it in tank.This is out of a local dirty river, so you have to be really careful. I had a cousin that lost everything in his 75 because he used a piece of wood full of parasites and it infected everything.
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Has anyone ever harvested wood from the wild for their aquariums? I found a fantastic piece that I plan on going back for later once I have my saw with me. I’m not 100% sure how I’m going to prep this monstrosity. I know I’m going to take it to a car wash and pressure wash it, then it’s probably going to sit in a 55 gallon trashcan full of salt water with the lid attached for two months so that it stays underwater. After that, I will pressure wash it and soak it in freshwater water. The first picture is the entire root mass, but the second picture is closer to how I plan on trimming it. The third picture is a second tree that I plan on going back for later tonight.
Does this sound reasonable, or does anyone else have recommendations?
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On 8/19/2021 at 11:42 AM, B1gJ4k3 said:
Well, let's see how this works...
Of all the "iums" to keep track of, I think this mostly closely resembles a refugium, which is apparently fairly common in the saltwater world, but mostly used for culturing worms and such in freshwater and avoid them getting eaten right away.
I've broken down my 20 gallon quarantine/grow out and and put it next to Casper's 125. For the overflow, I watched a lot of YouTube videos on an overflow system and the one I ended up building out of PVC isn't exactly like any of them, but it probably most closely resembles the one from Blake's Aquatics. I didn't want to limit the flow too much, so I used 1 1/4" PVC and 5/8" ID vinyl tubing across the top. I ended up putting a 90 degree elbow on the inlet to keep the water level up a little higher and above the frame.
The idea of using a spare powerhead to move water out of the small tank and into the big one didn't really work, since that's really not what they're designed to do, so I end up getting a (what turned out to be very small) submersible pump from Amazon. It's much smaller than I thought it would be, but so far seems to be doing the job. It's connected with 3/8" ID vinyl tubing that runs to the opposite side of the big tank, up into an old canister filter outlet tube. The pump is only about 95 GPH, so it's definitely not blasting water out of there, but it's enough.
I've tried to set it up so that if either the pump fails or my overflow loses the siphon, things won't get flooded. Unless Casper somehow hulks the elbow off of the overflow (unlikely), there shouldn't be enough water to flood the 20 gallon and I've placed the pump pretty much as high as I can in the 20 gallon, so that if the overflow loses siphon, it would only pump and= additional gallon or two into the big tank, which shouldn't be enough to make it over the lip. I guess that's the advantage to such a small pump. I am a little worried about the lack of water movement in the 20 gallon, since the flow is so low though, so maybe I'll add a spare sponge filter or air stone or the original power head in there just to get some water movement.
For plants, I was able to find some hornwort and Amazon frog bit locally (Shout out to World of Wet Pets in Beaverton--I just wish they were closer to me). I figured I'd start out small considering how quickly they are both said to propagate. I've covered the top with that plastic light diffuser grid from Home Depot (how versatile is that stuff in fishkeeping, btw???) and then put some pothos clippings from a friend of mine through that so the roots are in the water. @Guppysnail recommended that I try sprouting a sweet potato in the water as well, so I plan to give that a shot.
I've mounted a Fluval Plant Nano above the pothos and I have a spare 18" Current USA LED that I can either put on top of the grid or slip down between the two tanks if the frog bit goes crazy to make sure the hornwort gets some light. Both are on timers for about 8 hours a day.
It's too soon to tell whether or not this will help cut down my water change schedule, but It seems promising so far. I've been pretty impressed with how well the overflow works, too. For an initial test, I set it up in my 75 gallon grow out tank that's across from this one. I threaded a garden hose onto the outlet and used it as an overflow to do probably about a 40-50% water change. It was able to handle the flow that comes out of my faucet, so I'm confident it will handle the tiny pump that's in there now. It was a little nerve-wracking watching my baby platies "investigate" the open overflow, but as far as I could tell, nobody actually got sucked out. So if this experiment fails miserably for some reason, at least I've built a pretty nifty way to handle a simple water change on larger tanks...
I'll keep updating here as time goes on. Normally, it takes about 3-4 days for nitrates to reach 30-40ppm, so I'm hoping that once this gets established, it will be able to stretch it out so that it fits a little better into my existing weekly water change schedule.
No filter over the overflow?
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On 8/2/2021 at 3:43 PM, B1gJ4k3 said:
So...I have an idea...
I recently adopted/inherited a very large Central American cichlid. You can read more about him here if you would like. Long story short, he'll pretty much destroy anything you put in the tank with him, be it flora or fauna. He also eats a lot and produces a lot of waste. Consequently, the nitrate levels in his tank stay pretty high. His previous owner was doing 75% water changes every three days to combat nitrates. If I need to do that, I will, but honestly, I would like to avoid it. I think there's a smarter way to handle it.
Obviously, I can't put plants in his tank because they'll get eaten or uprooted. So, my thought was to build a kind of sump system with a spare 20 gallon, put it next to it and just stuff that 20 gallon with plants. I've found promising-looking plans for an overflow that doesn't involve drilling and I figure I can just add a spare powerhead to pump water out of the sump back into the tank, so the engineering of it is not the problem. I'm wondering how I get the most "bang for my buck" plant-wise.
I've got some pothos I can root in there and various stem plants (water wisteria, ludwigia, rotalla, bacopa), but they don't seem great at really sucking up nitrates. I've heard Amazon frog bit is really good, but as near as I can tell, Oregon classifies it as a noxious weed (for good reason), and no one who knows what they're doing will ship it here. I've heard hornwort is also good, but my normal plant sources don't have it in stock. Bamboo could also be an option, apparently. I'd like to avoid duckweed for obvious reasons, but if it's amazing at sucking up nitrates, I guess I could give it a go. What plants would anyone recommend?
And what of lighting? I have no shortage of various aquarium lights, including a few Fluval Nanos. Do I just blast that sump tank with light all day? If algae takes over in that tank, is there a risk of it spreading to the main tank? I don't mind the small tank having algae, but I'd like to keep it out of the main tank if possible.
What are peoples' thoughts here? How can I work smarter not harder?
I think I would go a bit larger than a 20 gallon tank myself and get a couple of big totes to run the plants in. If you use the same concept, but split the flow between two tanks/totes, it would give more time for uptake as well. This is the same basic idea that aquaponics systems use, and some of them can house large numbers of large talapia. With one small pump and float driving the draw from the supply tank, the rest of the system typically runs off of a siphon and gravity to take care of the rest. Media beds that flood can house rooted plants of your choice as well as floating plants in your holding tank from the pump. Check out aquaponic systems on YouTube for additional ideas.
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On 8/25/2021 at 4:34 PM, KentFishFanUK said:
That's good that it's working for your guys, some Bettas are mean! Haha. I think it's normally the Bettas who nip the guppies rather than the other way round? Guppies are usually peaceful. Either way sounds like you got a nice chilled out pair. Nice looking Betta too!
And here is Gretchen
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On 8/25/2021 at 5:04 PM, Guppysnail said:
You may want to add an extra airstone. The heterotrophic bacteria does consume oxygen. It will dissipate as excess nutrients (ammonia nitrite unused by filter bacteria) in the column are used and filter bacteria establish. Plants now vs later will help use up that excess. Good luck 😁
I turned the big one off for the picture so you could see the details better without agitation. There is a 14” air stone running down the center
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Sometimes in the middle of nowhere, it’s either read the fine print of every tube with a magnifying glass, or hit up Amazon.. There are several that ARE aquarium safe that state “not for aquarium use” because of liability reasons however.
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I called SASHCO’s customer support team to get confirmation, but I wasn’t sure until today. Lexel is an excellent high quality sealant that has excellent adhesion even on wet surfaces, but according to their staff, it hasn’t been tested below the water line for more than 30 days, but more importantly, it isn’t actually silicone at all, it is rubber. It does in fact release chemicals over time and would kill aquatic life.
they claimed that this was on the packaging, but I could not find it anywhere on the packaging, the website, or anywhere else available. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to read a tube of clear caulking, but it’s not exactly easy. Especially when the tube itself is clear and the writing is black and you can see the writing on the opposite side at the same time.-
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On 8/25/2021 at 4:38 PM, quikv6 said:
Do you have a test kit? It looks like you may be at the beginning of the cycle, with the bloom. The cycle takes time, and throughout, there will be toxins such as ammonia, and later nitrite, that can and will harm/kill your fish.
Here is what will help:
1) Test kit - Levels will change daily in a new set up.
2) Water Changes, based on the test results. Ultimately with fish, I would be leery letting ammonia rise above 1ppm, at the most. Even there I am leery...but see #3.
3) Seachem Prime, which can help detoxify the ammonia (see post 2) for about 24-48 horns. It will also remove chlorine and chloramine.
It was treated with prime to start with, but no test kit.
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Once I get back home I’ll take a picture of the other one. Gretchen is sexy too. I plan on breeding them together later and we wanted to make sure they wouldn’t be hostile, so we put them in together and watched. There’s plenty of cover and sight line breaks now, and more to come
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It’s a 20 gallon tank and the two beta are happy together. The guppies haven’t been nipping at the beta at all. The male is Gilbert “Gill” and is a Dumbo Half—Moon, the female is Gretchen, a dragonscale
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I was referring to whether adding more plants during the bloom would cause any adverse effects. From some further looking, it appears that this bacteria is simply in the water column and hasn’t made its way into the media and onto surfaces in a permanent biofilm yet, so it’s just visually displeasing more than anything. The bacteria will do their job, and hopefully take up residence outside the water column soon. The plants were going to happen regardless, I just didn’t want to disrupt the cycling of the tank adversely if it needed to happen the way it was going; as in if it needed to clear first before adding the plants
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I have another sponge filter and dual outlet air pump coming on Friday, so hopefully that will help. I am also getting more plants this weekend, so that can’t hurt anything can it?
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I can’t upload the video from iPhone because it is the wrong file type, but it swirls around in the water and is leaving a slick film on the inside of the glass. It looks like bacteria or something from what the rocks look like, and this tank is a new tank with the gravel, filter, fish, live and plastic plants all from a smaller tank that was about three weeks old. There are nine guppies, one gold mystery snail, one albino pleco, and two betta in this tank. The filter has three sponges, and the bottom is filled with bio rings and gravel.
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Does this sound reasonable, or does anyone else have recommendations?
I called SASHCO’s customer support team to get confirmation, but I wasn’t sure until today. Lexel is an excellent high quality sealant that has excellent adhesion even on wet surfaces, but according to their staff, it hasn’t been tested below the water line for more than 30 days, but more importantly, it isn’t actually silicone at all, it is rubber. It does in fact release chemicals over time and would kill aquatic life. 
Plecos dying
in Diseases
Posted
pH 8.0
hardness 300ppm
total alkalinity 720 pom
nitrate 0 ppm
nitrite 0 ppm
temps 73 and 79
OK so I have two different tanks that my plecos died in the last 24 hours. Last Sunday, I found tiny white spots on the fins of one of my female beta, so I hit all 4 tanks with the med trio to put a stop to everything. The fish had all been in two tanks previously, so I knew the chance of contamination was high. This Sunday, I changed about 50% of the water in both my 20 and 10 gallon tank, and found the first of the dead pleco while gravel vaccing. He had not been doing great from the beginning, so it wasn’t a surprise. What was a surprise is that 4 more pleco died in those 2 tanks within 24 hours of the water change. The water was treated with prime, and sat for 45 minutes before being added back to the tank(s). All of the other beta and guppies are doing fine, but what would be causing this plecocide?
I didn’t include pictures, but that’s because the fish are in a plastic bag frozen right now.