jwcarlson

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)

That's a cichlid thing, friend. 🙂

No pictures of fry rack, but there are still about 60 CPDs and recently the sterbai have been spawning frequently and there's maybe close to 50 fry going. The first batch of sterbai now in a ten gallon I was wondering if they'd grown much since I moved them. This is yesterday, I have been trying to get them to eat freeze dried tubifex like the parents. They're doing well and have certainly grown a bunch. Sad to see them lose all that orange from full BBS diet, but tough to do that much BBS forever! I am really considering moving them and the parents into my 125 together. I'm rotating through a variety of foods with them. FDTW, Extreme Nano, some discus pellets that my discus won't eat, rarely some frozen Hikari blood worms, they still get some BBS twice a day, earthworm sticks, and blackworm sticks. They're basically a garbage pail and seem like they'll eat anything. The parents are fairly picky.

50% water changes twice a day in a 10 gallon tank is easy to do. Tough to let anything build up to the point of causing an issue when you're doing that. That's what I would suggest.

I just add them on separate sides of the bowl, usually. I think there's a lot of extra steps on this particular video... things that I don't necessarily do anymore or only occasionally (autolyze and stretching for instance). I think the biggest thing is figuring out something that works and that at least gives you a baseline. I'm sure there's some sourdough purist that thinks this video is garbage, but it's worked fine for me. 😄

After losing my mind over a year ago trying to figure out how to get plants attached, I made this thread. And I learned a ton. I think it's worth a read. I now put glue on the plant and glue it underwater. It's 100x faster and so much easier.

This is a rough approximation of what I normally do for an overnight loaf.

I hope Pod bounces back for you, @PluckyD!

I've never punched my sourdough down, sometimes do "no knead" same day bake and sometimes a sequence of folding the dough before putting it in a basket for a fridge rise overnight, but I'm not sure punching it down after proving overnight is a good idea. But I'm a big dummy, so who knows. 😄

Ok, @Guppysnail, how do you go about counting 196 little GBR fry?