Rube_Goldfish

The thing I've always wondered about the MD style substrate-in-bags approach is with root tabs. I know plant roots can penetrate the bags but I can't get root tabs in there, and while aquasoils don't need nutrients for a while, they will eventually. Or are the bags just set up knowing that the whole tank won't run beyond, say, two years anyway? I know MD seems to think anything past a year or so is ready for a teardown, but I also know he has a YouTube content beast that he has to keep fed.

Okay, fair enough. I'm hoping to set up a Neocaridina tank myself in the new year, a first for me, so I'm trying to learn from everyone's experiences. @smm333 Good luck!

Do you know what went wrong, or rather why it went wrong?

@jwcarlson You beat me to it! @Irene 's video is a great primer.

Yeah, if it's 6.0 or less in the tank, and higher than that immediately out of the tap, it's not really the cause of the problem, but we might as well get the most accurate picture we can. The other option, if you can dedicate the time and feel comfortable trying, is to do a fish-in cycle with these goldfish. Lightly feed, test every day (maybe twice a day, as goldfish are famously messy) and be prepared to do lots of water changes according to what those tests show, but they'd eventually get that tank cycled for you.

Leave your tap water out for 24 hours or so and then test it. Because of CO2 off-gassing, most tap water has a tendency to rise in pH over time. (Ideally you'd aerate the tap water during those 24 hours but even just waiting is better than nothing.) Also, what substrate do you have? Many aquasoils and some other substrates will pull down pH and/or KH (which in turn would allow the pH to fall). Do you happen to have a KH test kit? Unfortunately, it's not included in the API master test kit. Edited to add: oh, and some aquasoils give off ammonia in the beginning, in some cases a considerable amount.

Should I still do drip acclimation if I'm moving shrimp from one tank to the other (Amano shrimp in my case)? I put test strips in both tanks and the results look identical, and both tanks are heated to the same temperature.

It's funny that you mention B. caroliniana as smelling minty, because while I don't smell mint, according to Wikipedia it's commonly known, among other names, as "lemon bacopa" because "the leaves... smell of lemon if crushed" and I don't smell that, either. Then again, I don't really have a great sense of smell, so maybe you're both right! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacopa_caroliniana

Ant-Man and the Wasp: the X-Con office has a tank in it. Some kind of barb, maybe? Or maybe just a whole mess of young comet goldfish?

Malaysian trumpet snails and corydoras, among other animals, will stir up sand and bury poop. Cories and other digging fish might not work in a cherry shrimp tank, though. You can also just sort of stir it up yourself with chopsticks, aquascaping tools, or just your fingers. Lastly, you can give gently "puffs" of water with a turkey baster to kick up mulm (but hopefully not sand) into the water column to give the filter a chance to grab it.

Haha, when I've bought shrimp from my LFS, they've put a sprig of rotala or a bit of dwarf sagittaria in the big for the shrimp to hold on to, and after getting the shrimp in the tank, my frugality and distaste for waste compelled me to plant those pieces, and they've done really well for me! So it turned into a buy-shrimp-get-plant-free kind of deal!

Maybe put an airstone and a bit of plant trimming in the bin and hope for the best, at least overnight. It sounds like that water agrees with them more anyway, and there's really nothing else you can do tonight. Then talk to the store you got them from tomorrow. I'm sorry you're dealing with this; good luck.

I've used Seachem Stability. I had success but also put seeded sponges and bio-rings in the tank with a bunch of plants, so I can't really say if it helped or not. But my LFS recommended it, at any rate.

My understanding is that water softeners remove magnesium and calcium and replace it with either sodium or potassium, depending on whether you add sodium chloride or potassium chloride to your softener (NaCl is much cheaper). I don't use my softener's bypass valve, instead opting to remineralize with Seachem Equilibrium. The bypass would be free but I'm not using that much Equilibrium and it easier to use (I never know how much water I have to run with the bypass open before I'm not getting softened water anymore). My experience is that snails like alkaline water anyway, so I wouldn't worry too much about the nerite.

If you like the long dangling root look but frogbit doesn't like your tank, might I suggest dwarf water lettuce? It has similarly long roots and propagates itself pretty well in my tanks.

Is there some technique I don't know for netting shrimp? Specially Amano shrimp, in my case? It's a moderately planted ten gallon tank, and I want to transfer them all to the 55 gallon upgrade tank, but they didn't get the memo. Maybe I'm just being too cautious of their long, fine antennae and legs and need to just go for it, but I don't want to hurt them or the plants. I'll drain the tank and take out the plants and hardscape if I have to, but the tank is going really well at the moment, so if I don't have to I'd rally rather not. Pictured: Amano shrimp eating spinach and taunting me

It might not be the easiest or most affordable, but the safest and most effective "chemical" to add might be reverse osmosis water. I use a 1:1 ratio of RO to tap because I've got the same water: high pH, high KH, low GH. Also worth noting that I remineralize with Seachem Equilibirum to bring the GH up to about 6 degrees. Most of the other ways of bringing pH down are going to struggle against a high KH, which would have to be depleted first. Maybe someone else has some insight.

I don't know, truth be told. I just know that they're expensive and seem to grow plants real well (and have a lot of fans on the marine side of the hobby, though those are different). Sorry!

I don't have any first hand experience with expensive lights - I was in full "treat yo self" mode to get the Finnex 24/7 Planted Plus models I got, and they're probably a step down from the Planted 3.0 - but names of high end lights for you to investigate include Chihiros, Twin Star, and Kessil. Edit: this video is a little Euro-centric but might still be useful:

What substrate do you have? A lot of aquasoils can be acidifying, and Safe-t-sorb, in particular, can really soak up your KH. The fact that these tanks have been running for a while makes me doubt that it's the substrate's fault, but it can't hurt to know.

I use polycarbonate sheeting intended for greenhouses, cut to size with a box cutter. Probably doesn't look as nice as glass, but supposedly transmits more light than glass does. Here's Cory demonstrating:

That's what my LFS does. They've got plants in pots and all, but they've recently started selling epiphytes already glued to driftwood. Sounds like a good plan.

Bacopa caroliniana has been my most successful stem plant in low tech set-ups. I would definitely heed the warnings above about duckweed. I second @Patrick_Gs suggestion about water lettuce and would also suggest Salvinia minima, if it's available where you live, if you prefer smaller leaves and shorter roots. Either way, floating plants are great for new tanks because they can really soak up excess nutrients, having unlimited access to atmospheric CO2, and can also shade a tank, if that's what you want. And if it's not, just grab a bunch and toss or compost them. I will caution that floaters can tolerate surface flow to varying degrees, but there are ways around that, too. If your dwarf sagittaria ends up anything like mine, it'll sit there, seemingly doing nothing at all for months, then one day just decide to take off like a shot and send out runner after runner, so don't get discouraged if it seems like it's stagnant for a while. Lastly, the greater the plant biomass you can get, the better off you'll be in terms of water quality and algae. Other than your wallet, you basically can't have too many plants.

I've had good luck so far with Oase, Eheim, and most recently the ACO heater, but I've been in the hobby only about a year and a half so I have no first-hand idea about longevity. But while they've all work pretty accurately, the ACO heater has been the easiest to use because of the outside-of-the-tank temperature control.

Short version: how much does it stress fish to be netted and moved from one tank to another? Long version: I have a planted 55 gallon community tank, a planted 10 gallon tank with only Amano shrimp, and a 10 gallon quarantine tank with an Apistogramma cacatuoides trio just coming out of quarantine. Ultimately, I want the Amanos and apistos to all end up in the 55 gallon tank, but I want to give the shrimp a week's head start to learn the hiding places, get comfortable, and get any initial molting out of the way before the apistos join them. So that will leave the apistos in a somewhat empty quarantine tank (with no plants) and a nicely planted tank with no fish.* Would the apistos be better off staying where they are, or being netted out to a "better" tank, only to be netted out again a week or two later? Full disclosure: the two 10 gallon tanks are arranged vertically, and the qaurantine tank, on the bottom, is a lot harder to work in. Also, the planted one is much more nicely lit. So I might just want the apistos in the planted tank for my benefit and not theirs, and therefore I'm rationalizing to myself... *This tank will ultimately house a Neocaridina davidii colony, but they might have to wait until after the holidays.