jwcarlson

Yep! The constraint becomes how fast the water drains. And if you either pump the water out or if you're draining down to a utility sink 12 feet lower than the tank... it drains pretty quick. I can change 63 gallons of water in my 75 gallon discus tank - 15 minutes drain, 17 minutes refill, 21 minutes to refill the barrel. Active time for me is less than 10 minutes, though I should time it sometime. A quick vacuum of the bottom of the tank takes a couple minutes. Then I set timers and do dishes, laundry, feed fish/cats/dogs, etc. It takes so little "hand time" if it's set up well. They also make through-wall hose bibs. I didn't go that route because I didn't want a joint in the wall. So I ran a garden hose up from a Y valve. One side drains to the tank, one side goes to the pump.

There's no scenario where the bypass to the water heater would be easier. Unless you're buying gallon jugs of water at the store and hauling them in. If I were you, I'd put a barrel down by the basement faucet that's already bypassed. And then buy a pump to pump the water back upstairs. To make it easier, I ran a hose up/out through the wall and it's permanently hooked up. Not everyone's cup of tea, I know, but if you locate the tank right, it's not particularly noticeable or anything. You're not going to want to do the bucket method, so you're probably going to need a pump anyway. The pumps aren't too bad, I think mine was about $60.

Honestly, once you get into the routine of large water changes using it, there isn't that much of a difference compared to just turning a faucet on. And, the way I do most of my water changes... I almost don't have enough water to overflow anything or at least not much. So even if I forget to set the timer for refilling the discus tank... it only has enough water to fill the tank because of how "fine tuned" I have the system down. Compared to walking away with the faucet filling it... that's bad news. I think you'll be MUCH happier setting up a barrel and doing it that way compared to screwing around with this bypass/water heating shenanigans. Some of the trash cans even have dollies that you can buy and roll them around if that's something that would help.

I have been pretty close to doing just that as it would do two things. First, it would eliminate my pre-heating, but I am not 100% convinced that it will help with my current need to age my water. Higher temperature should help it degas more quickly, but I do not know if that's more or less instantaneous. I've been planning on running some experiments with cold water by running it through a quick degasing setup. They sell these things commercially, but there's nothing much to them. It's like three buckets in a vertical line and the water sprays down into the top bucket and drains through the bottom to the other two buckets. The material in the buckets (which look a ton like K2 media) just makes the water aerate and degas the 'traped' CO2. Rocks would probably work just fine. Second, it would eliminate quite a few kilowatts of electric heaters that are almost always on either actively heating water or holding at temp until I need it. Gas is a more efficient way of heating water. So my plan, I think, would be to add a gas fired on-demand water heater piped over above a barrel that would spray down through a showerhead or something and drain down to the bucket and then pump it back out through a hose. My current hang-up is that we are actively trying to move out of this house and eventually, if we hit our goal of moving out to the country, then I'm likely out of the hobby at least temporarily. Other things I want to do when I have the land to do it. But that's pretty elaborate. For one tank it doesn't make much sense.

Your siphon tube. And prevention by means of liquid fertilizer. It will shed like an old Christmas tree if it runs out of nitrate. I keep it in fry tanks because it survives fairly well for me, gives great cover, etc. But I have to fertilize just to keep it alive because I change so much water there's never really any appreciable nitrate level.

Plecos are surprisingly more aggressive/defensive than you might expect. I know I normally view them as extremely peaceful (and they really are). But their caves are not to be messed with. There's a discus keeping friend of mine who was missing an electric blue acara that had slipped into a pleco cave (trying to get eggs probably) and the male pinned the EBA in the cave and killed it. Just try removing a male who is on eggs/fry from his cave. 😄 I haven't been successful yet!

In order to get bypassed hot water you'll have to drain your hot water tank and then let it heat back up while the softener is bypassed. This isn't a reasonable thing to do as you're going to be flushing say 40-50 gallons of hot water down the drain which will take about 15 minutes at normal household pressures and then waiting... an hour? more? For the water to heat up, but could be faster because you don't need full temp hot water for a water change. And that's only if the bypass valve is installed at the softener itself. If it's something plumbed in separately it might not be possible to bypass to the water heater at all. You have to trace out the piping. @Cjbear087 I know you want discus, but I would suggest making sure you've got all this ironed out before you invest a bunch of money on discus without a good plan to care for them. I still say that the easiest and best solution is to get something as simple as a plastic garbage can and age/preheat your water in that as opposed to monkeying around with trying to do what you're proposing. There's no shot that you'll be able to keep up with this type of routine long-term. Make it easier on yourself... set yourself up for success. It's not particularly expensive to set up an aging barrel. The cost of roughly 1 or 2 discus. That's cheap in the long run compared to flushing $500+ down the drain when you inadvertently run out of hot water, for instance, and pump 55 degree water into your discus tank.

You can, as stated above, do 100% water change and put fish in. Not sure what to suggest regarding adding ammonia. I'm not a fishless cycle person. Nitrite to nitrate does take longer than ammonia to nitrite as stated above. Quite significantly longer. And, I believe, you can get nitrite high enough to retard the growth of the bacteria that consumes it.

@Seattle_Aquarist Do you think it could be that the leaves develop pin holes and then the snails start eating on them making these holes? That's the way I have explained it to myself because the holes are pretty obviously snail "damage", but I have figured they started as nutrient deficiency.

In my experience it seems to recover pretty quickly. One of mine went bananas and shot out like 8 or 10 babies over the last year. It melts a bit, but as long as I get root tabs to it when it starts, it's not catastrophic. I should probably pull some of the baby ones out and get them into other aquariums. It might be my favorite plant other than hornwort. I don't have much luck with plants, but the aquarium lilies have done pretty well for me.

Those Hygger lights have a TON of blue only light if you're running it on the normal cycle. That would be my first adjustment. I'm not sure which Hygger light you have, but the ones I have can be manually programmed for time and intensity. Algae can use blue while plants cannot (at least that's my understanding).

This happens to mine when I forget to put root tabs under it for a long time. The whole dang leaf will start wilting and the stem will turn to mush.

No, certain worms are affected by different meds. Salt can help as it messes with the abilities to osmoregulate, I believe. Basically drawing water out of them. I'll confess to not being any sort of expert here. My opinion is that parasites are in every population and typically the fish can deal with them. Stess or other issues cause the fish to fall victim and start exhibiting symptoms. You are trying to force them to pass the adults and you suck them out before they can reanimate. Parasite eggs you cannot kill, so that's why you need multiple treatments. And hopefully also vacuuming out the eggs as much as possible too.

Interesting on the yawning. Levamisole can knock them off food for days, I usually skip feeding for a couple days. It's unlikely that you'll notice anything on the bottom of the aquarium. Most of these things require a microscope and a clean sample to be able to look at.

Hope you've got a huge tank! 🙂

It's been 25 years since I had a common pleco, but it doesn't look anything like the ones I used to have. What kind of predator fish are you planning on him living with? It's takes a pretty big fish to eat a 5-6" bristlenose or similar pleco.

Evaporation will cool them to some extent. But that may mean more topping off and certainly higher humidity. With tight fitting lids I find that evaporation doesn't take much water out. How hot is hot? Some fish might not mind it at all, but some fish might have a really bad time.

I'm not convinced that common plecos should even be in the hobby. IMO the best surprise would be that it's a female bristlenose, rubberlip, or otherwise much, much smaller pleco. Doesn't look like a common to me. Spotted rubber lip, maybe?

I'll say good luck finding anything remotely reasonably priced. The ones I have seen have been of questionable history (who knows what was in it). I recently gave up and just bought a couple more 63 gallon pickle barrels. Keeps me a little more agile too so I can customize the different barrels for different tanks. I can get the barrels for $25/each.

Can you really look at it without glasses if your eyes hurt afterwards?! 😄 I can't even walk from my car into a store without sunglasses on during a rainstorm or I get a headache. No way I'd stare right at the sun even if eclipsed.

We got about 85% of totality. I'm sure 100% is cooler. It's interesting, but a bit overblown. Nice to see people looking at something other than their phones, however. But a bit depressing the number of people who spent like half an hour trying to get pictures of the thing through their glasses. Reminds me of people recording an artist at a concert with their phone. The quality of both the video and the audio make it a complete waste of time. Also a little sad to have co-workers in awe that decreased solar output causes the air to cool and all I could think to say to their exclamations was "This happens every night." 😄 I was close to bringing my telescope to work, but I couldn't remember if I owned a solar filter. And I also thought it wouldn't be great is someone looked through it and received eye damage, so I left it home. 😄 It was decent to look at though the eclipse glasses, though.

You already had it when you made this thread? I'm having trouble following what all is going on and how many tanks you've got and what fish are in what tank. Most of the fish you listed aren't good discus tankmates. The best, and required tankmate in all honesty, are other discus. Of your list, the two acceptable tankmates are the pearl gourami and the cardinals.

What fish? Pounding it with a bunch of meds right away might not be the greatest idea, but I hope it works out for your fish.

Most plecos are not particularly fast growing, but if I had to guess, you're keeping him not just a little cold, but maybe 10+ degrees colder than ideal. Where did you buy the rubberlip that ended up being this guy? Seems like a difficult mistake to make for most fish stores or did you win the online order jackpot? 😄

How warm are your unheated tanks, typically? How warm is the goldfish tank if it's not also unheated? How big is the goldfish tank? That's a pretty pleco! 🙂