Rube_Goldfish

I have had no luck with Littorella uniflora (though I haven't given up, and it's only MOSTLY dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive.) but it's got a nice grassy look, too. Edited to add: Oh, and Lilaeopsis brasiliensis and/or Lilaeopsis novae-zelandiae

For what it's worth, my first planting of stems (Bacopa caroliniana) I was convinced I was terrible, but I was planting into coarse, rough gravel. Finer substrate is so much easier, so you were kind of planting with one hand tied behind your back, there.

I liked the "Mini Encyclopedia of Aquarium Plants" by Peter Hiscock when I was first getting started, though it's been a while since I've read it.

If that's the case, then one of those DIY solutions you linked look like they should work pretty well, or a Python (or its equivalent). A Python could add new water back in at the end, too. Or, you could get a bucket, put a pump in the bucket with a hose leading to your sink (or wherever you dump your old water), then siphon from the tank into the bucket. To replace the water, put the bucket-with-pump in the sink under the running tap, temperature match, and pump into the tank. This thread might be helpful.

So is your main goal water conservation? Because if it's okay to use the outgoing water to vacuum and then just dump it, then replace it with new water, you could do that with electric pumps or a Python, which are physical but not as much as buckets. I wonder if you had a small, gentle submersible pump (I use this one) with the output directed through a sieve, or a small colander lined with sponge/filter floss, or something like that,* and that whole contraption was in the tank the whole time, would that work? It would be hard to "aim" the pump's intake, I guess. *Maybe a quart-sized deli/soup cup with holes punched in the bottom, or maybe even the whole bottom removed if you had enough and fine enough floss in it?

I've never thought about this, and I'm not sure how to do a search for an off-the-shelf commercial product. Would it be good enough to siphon/vacuum into a bucket through a net or basket packed with sponge, to sieve the solids out, then pour the water back into the tank?

Well, I had a few similarly bad hatches, including another with clumping, but they had confounding variables*, so I didn't really count or report them. But I finally tried again, and this time I had some leftover water in my water change bucket that I hadn't used. It was remineralized to about 6 dGH, whereas my previous hatches were at or very close to zero. This batch was a resounding success! (And I did use three drops of chlorine bleach, for the record.) I'll be hatching another batch this week to try to replicate my results, but I really think my hatching water was too deficient in calcium, causing the brine shrimp to hatch but then die. * For example, one batch I harvested about two hours too late, which I don't think should have mattered too much at 81°F but I was trying to be careful/scientific about it. Another batch clumped up, but I think I figured that out: I decant from the Ziss hatcher into a brine shrimp sieve, then rinse with tap water and then use tank water to wash the nauplii off the of the sieve and into my cup. I thought I could use RO water for both purposes, since it was a convenient source of dechlorinated water, but it seems to have disagreed with the BBS.

So I bought six Amano shrimp for a different tank, drip acclimated them, and added them in. Less than twelve hours later, they were all dead. The TDS in that tank is about 500 ppm. So now I'm re-thinking my "recipe" for water changes. I have all soft water fishes, or least fishes that don't mind soft water, and I think this creeping TDS has been a part of my Apistogramma not spawning (it's been a few months now). Here's the math I'm thinking of: instead of 1:1 tap:RO, use 1:4 tap:RO, though still with 1.5 tablespoons of Equilibrium per five gallons. If I did my math right, that should give me 6 dGH, 2-3 dKH, a starting pH of right around 7, and a TDS of about 120 ppm. It'll mean that I'll go through RO filters faster, but c'est la vie, I guess. So then to make this change, I'll do frequent, small water changes of about 10% so that the plants and animals get a gradual change. I wrote all that above earlier in the week but did not end up posting it. About an hour ago I did mix up about 4:1 RO:tap in a 5 gallon bucket: My reading of that is 0 about 5 dGH, about 3 dKH, and a pH of maybe 6.8 (also some chlorine; I'd forgotten the dechlorinator, though none of it has been added to any tanks yet). But my TDS meter registered about 320 ppm TDS! I know my water softener is leaving a little residual sodium, but I thought that this math would work: 1 part tap at about 300 ppm (running tally: 300 ppm) PLUS 4 parts RO at about 10 ppm (running tally: 340 ppm / 5 = 68 ppm) PLUS 1.5 tablespoons Equilibrium (for 6 dGH) at about 107 ppm (6 × 17.8) (running tally: 175 [68 +107]) PLUS Some small amount for dechlorinator, maybe call it 200 ppm total. So why would it register at 320 on the TDS meter? I guess I could use straight RO, remineralized with Equilibrium (for the GH) and potassium carbonate (for a little KH), but I was rather hoping to use some tap, not least for the temperature matching. Any ideas? Did I do my math wrong? At the moment, the bucket is sitting with a small submerged pump acting as a makeshift powerhead; I want to see how it tests out after 24 hours off-gassing. I guess I'll report back after tomorrow's testing.

Ha, me too! I didn't know that either, but your question made me realize I'd never thought about it, so I looked it up!

According to Reader's Digest: "Seltzer is simply water with carbon dioxide, that gas that gives it that satisfying fizz. Club soda starts the same way, but it also contains minerals like potassium bicarbonate and/or potassium sulfate." https://www.rd.com/article/club-soda-seltzer-tonic/

Slightly higher GH, okay. I guess I'm just fretting because, in terms of shrimp, I've only ever had Amano, and I want to get this right from the beginning. Plus my LFS is really hung up on TDS, and while the "TDS can be misleading" idea makes a lot of sense to me, 500 seemed high for shrimp and soft water fish, so I wanted to float the idea here first to draw on the forum's collective expertise.

I am part way through setting up a ten gallon planted tank with dragon stone, driftwood, and a pool filter sand substrate, with the ultimate intention of housing a colony of Neocaridina shrimp and then, once their numbers have built up, adding a school of chili rasboras, though at the mowm the only animals in the tank are hitchhiking bladder snails. I have a water softener, and my tap water, after 24 hours off-gassing, read (measured with a Sera test strip and a cheap Amazon TDS meter): 287 ppm TDS dGH: ❤️ dKH: 15 - 20 pH: 7.2-7.6 I have an RO filter, and so for my other tanks, I normally mix tap and RO at equal parts (1:1) with 1.5 tablespoons of Seachem Equilibrium per 5-gallon bucket to get to 6 dGH (which works out to about 500 ppm TDS or so, I guess because of the potassium and other non-calcium/non-magnesium ingredients in Equilibrium). My new water, then, is about 500 ppm TDS, 6 dGH, 8-9 dKH, and close to 7 pH, and my tanks settle between 6.4 and 6.6 pH (there's a fair amount of driftwood and other organics). So, that's all preamble to say: can I keep mixing my water the way I have been for this new tank with chilis and neos? The alternative would be remineralization of straight RO with something shrimp-specific, probably Salty Shrimp GH+/KH+. I think that would probably still be fine for the chilis, but if I can have the convenience of one "recipe" for all of tanks, I'd prefer to do that. Thanks in advance! My tap water dGH is less than 3, but when I tried to write that as " < 3" it changed it to a heart emoji and I couldn't change it back.

This seems great! I saw that the authors' water is 125 ppm general hardness, whereas mine is closer to 0, but I guess they don't need the calcium if Epsom salt can do the trick. Bleach, huh? Okay, I'll try it and let you know!

Actually, I have a water softener because our municipal water supply is hard. It has a bypass valve but it's aa hassle to use, but I think the outside hose is not softened. I'd have to test it, I guess, and bring it up to room temperature, but that ought to work.

Nope. Even worse than before. I had about the same "good hatch rate / bad survival rate" problem, but this time the dead nauplii were weirdly clumped up. If low general hardness is my problem, I guess it's not magnesium that's the issue. I guess I'll look for a cheap source of water soluble calcium, or maybe do a cost comparison of Equilibrium and Tums. Or maybe just suck it up and buy the ACO brine shrimp salt.

Well, I'm back, unfortunately. My survival rate had a brief boost with my improved cleaning protocol, but it didn't last long, and within a couple weeks was back to the familiar problem I'd described above: great hatch rate, but most of the newly-hatched nauplii dying sometime between hatch and harvest. So I wanted to go back to the basics, and ended up, naturally, on the ACO blog how-to, where I noticed this paragraph: "If you don’t have marine salt and you have soft water, you can add to ¼ to ½ teaspoon of baking soda to raise the pH or add 1 teaspoon of Epsom salt to raise the GH (for 2 liters of water)." I have a water softener, so my tap has a GH of close to zero. So I added a teaspoon of Epsom salt to the batch I set up today, and will report back my results tomorrow. Wish me luck!

In that case, they may still just need some time. Your water parameters will be different than what they're used to, the lighting will be different, nutrients will be different, flow will be different, and on and on. Root tabs are a good idea, Easy Green dosing is good, too, but at this point I'd say consistency, patience, and close observation are probably the most important things. Good luck!

From what I understand, dechlorinator uses up some amount of dissolved oxygen, but not enough to worry about it unless you're already on the edge of not enough oxygen and even then you'd probably have to overdose the dechlorinator. So under normal circumstances, yeah, it's probably harmless.

YouTube aquascaper MD Fish Tanks did a pearlweed carpet tank not long ago: And another Youtuber, Fish Shop Matt, had a "how to prepare and plant plants" tutorial that you might find helpful:

How long has it been planted? Maybe it's just still adjusting to your tank?

Ah, that's a bummer! I'm lucky enough to have a great club close by. Sounds like the other options might be your best bets then; you could try starting a club or convincing your local club to meet more regularly, but that's probably too much just to offload excess guppies!

The foam stuff has a few names but the most common is rock wool. You could put the whole pot, rock wool and all, in the tank and let it grow like that; the ACO Easy Planter is designed to be used that way. Normally, I wouldn't recommend that for stems, but depending on the coarseness and sharpness of your gravel substrate, it might be the better option. My original substrate was a rough, coarse gravel that cut up my stem plant stems; for a long time I thought I was just bad at planting plants, then used much finer gravel and sand and realized how much easier it could be. So you've got options. There's a YouTube channel, Fish Shop Matt, who just put out a "how to prepare and plant plants". Rock wool removal starts at about the 4:30 mark, but the whole thing is worth a watch:

@RichNJ, YouTube aquascaper MD Fish Tanks did a pearlweed carpet. I've never tried it, and so have no personal experience, but it looks like it will work but with a lot of maintenance:

You can try to match up the not-healthy looking leaves to ACO's nutrient deficiency chart and guide, but for now, I think @Tanked has the right idea.

Clubs are a great idea, and ACO has a club finder on their site: https://www.aquariumcoop.com/apps/store-locator