jwcarlson

As a two year discus keeper, I would encourage you to not get discus. Doing them "right" is a lot of work in most cases and IMO they're best kept as a species only tank (or discus + cories or plecos kind of deal). Every time I've done new tankmates with my discus, I have to worm them as one of them drops off and stops eating and starts losing weight. Interested to see the 180 as you get going. I just set up a 125 (used, resealed, etc). I have a 30 gallon sump under it. I'm not sure that I love sumps, but I know I don't like canisters... so that's kind of out as an option.

Ebay is the cheapest place to buy them. Make sure you buy from the actual Inkbird store which is called Inkbird (wild, right?)

Hard to tell, but it also looks like the black spot has the blue spangling mixed in which indicates female, yes?

Book taste is wildly subjective. Just because "everyone else" loved it, doesn't mean you will. I will say that I think you're sleeping on Abercrombie and Lies of Locke Lamora, The First Law series and Gentlemen Bastards are among my favorites. I, too, read amongst plenty of distractions and I've done two things when I really want to focus. Ear buds and listening to classical music or movie soundtracks or just regular old ear plugs. You have to be a certain level of anti-social for this and I don't often use them. But I will break them out when I'm reading the heavier books like you're talking about.

I finished Of Blood and Fire by Ryan Cahill and am excited to read the second book. Finished The Surgeon by Leslie Wolfe last night. It was OK, but I'm not a great fan of twists simply for the sake of twists and then when you think that is the last twist here's two more. Meh. It wasn't terrible, but it also wasn't particularly great. Lots of belief suspended and I'm typically a fantasy reader.

AquaHuna has been pretty good for me for fairly run-of-the-mill fish like you're looking for.

Agree on the leak, but I will say that I think the collars take a little bit more air. It's not a problem for me on a central air pump with plenty of capacity (so far). But I think if someone was at the ragged edge of their pump capacity and then switched everything over to the new collar, it might be an issue.

He does talk a bit about that decision, doesn't he? My personal suggestion for anyone struggling/worrying about heaters is to invest in an Inkbird controller and then it really doesn't matter what heater you plug in. I run all of my tanks and aging barrels with Inkbirds and whatever the cheapest 100-500 watt heaters are made by the alphabet soup Amazon-only companies and it works swimmingly. I'm a bit of an off-standard case, maybe. Because we keep the house quite cool in the winter and I've got some very warm water fish so I'm asking them to raise the temperature 30 degrees above room temp in some cases. I understand the appeal of an all-in-one unit. But I really think the Inkbirds are under utilized and they work with any heater which makes keeping spare heaters cheaper AND you don't need a specific heater. For instance, I could drop a 200W heater in a 10 gallon with an Inkbird and not have to worry about it cooking the fish (though the temp swings will not be well regulated with a bigger heater).

I believe he said they can continue to sell the stock they have or that they (ACO) would refund them.

The discussion about the heater occurs fairly early on here and Cory kind of lays it out. Basically, the 50W heater was having something like 4% defect rate and the 100W was about 7%. Cory goes deeper into it.

Unless it's like five baby oscars, yeah, it's probably fine.

Nitrates are fine for the plants. But you want low ammonia and nitrite before you put fish in. So I would suggest a big water change before you put fish in OR let the plants work at bringing the levels down and then add the fish. And I would still probably do a water change before the fish go in either way.

I use a permanently installed section of garden hose for my water change setup for my discus and I don't think there's been any bad that's come from using it. I think the biggest issue is the flexibility of most garden hoses. I'm sure some exist that aren't stiff, but most all of the ones I have used are not very flexible. Python tubing is great stuff and I don't know if you've priced garden hose recently, but I don't think it's much cheaper.

I don't think there's any risk putting your plants in that. Assuming there are no fish? The plants will likely have a little bacteria on them which will help jumpstart. I don't have any great suggestions, I know a lot of people do fishless cycles, but I find it a little silly as simply changing water is pretty easy. I'd expect once the plants get in there your levels will start going down. I think I'd quit pounding ammonia into the tank, though.

I use Prime dechlorinator and ACO test strips. I have an API kit but it takes so long to test I never use it.

Test some regular tap water, dechlorinate it and test again, see if ammonia shows up. It's possible that your tap water might have some in it.

It's been a battle and it is ongoing with whatever this infection-like thing that's going on. This one just continues to do "whack-a-mole" with spots. The original is healed and clean. Every time I get one closed, another pops up a few days later. This one has actually healed up quite well, the once gaping hole is now completely closed, though still a little concave. Which I understand could easily be a life long scar. It's unfortunate, but hopefully it continues to not be actively rotting. These pics are from tonight. I've been doing 1 TBS/gallon of salt and finished 12 days of erythromycin. No meds or salt as of tonight's water change.

Some dechlorinators can cause false ammonia readings in tests, but I don't know if tetra is one that will.

Me to me whenever I'm looking at fish food... "what are you even doing?" And then I buy it and cringe when I'm throwing it away in a year. @knee Just to be clear, LEGIT fish food is the food that Aquapros makes (or has made, most likely). You can see his bins full of bags in it if you watch some of his videos in his fish shed. Cory has talked about it (LEGIT) a few times. I really like the idea of a softer pellet, but how much better can some of these cooked and extruded foods be than others of the same ilk?

3.0 ammonia is really high. What are you using for dechlorinator when you do a water change?

What test set are you using? Liquids or a test strip? How low is "really low" for nitrates? I consider really low less than 5 and 30 I think is high. How high is the ammonia? The breakdown of waste contributes first to ammonia, which is processed into nitrite, and then from nitrite into nitrates. It sounds like your tank isn't cycled.

Awesome sterbai! I started spawning my six adults about two months ago, I've got ~30 around 1" or a little bigger and another 30-40 small fry coming up. Someone needs to stop me. 😄 They're an absolute blast to raise and watch. I've only ever had a group of 6 cories and boy is the behavior different in bigger groups even as fry. Sorry to hear about your discus, they are pretty tough and sometimes especially so in a tank with lots of nooks and crannies!

That's a pretty big bioload and in some cases it's just not possible to process it all. Not sure if that's the case here, but it's possible in certain circumstances.

What all is in your goldfish tank now, @BIRD0887?

Cichlids are great aren't they? 😄 Additionally, at any moment for seemingly no reason at all, you might wake up to all but one of them dead. (thankfully this is fairly rare, but it's always a possibility)