jwcarlson

I left the algae on for camouflage. 🤥 Took out a couple of caves and rearranged a bit during water change today. She doesn't seem to hate it. I need to borrow my dad's tile saw and cut some of these pots in half. Burying a whole pot in the sand far enough is kind of a pain.

I'd dose for whatever it recommends and dose it for the whole volume of the tank.

Fully agree, I'm doing lots of water changes and wiping everything down. Basically, keeping them like discus, but not *quite* as many water changes. The ones I'm spawning are in mostly RO with a little bit of tap water. Your tap sounds similar to mine. I don't bother cutting it with RO though and it seems habitable. 😄 I think my GH is... 18 degrees which I think is somewhere in that 300 ballpark? I never test it anymore so I forget.

How are you adapting those those long tubes, @dasaltemelosguy? A threaded x barb fitting and a hose clamp?

Without a starter culture might be a little tough. I spawned my sterbai without live food.

I've never owned goldfish and have only had discus shed slimecoat once when I added a bottle of Fitzyme to their tank. I couldn't tell you what caused it, but it ended up killing one of them. The only thing I could think was that it was a pH shift from something in the bottle? It was a near immediate reaction. Bacteria or parasites could cause them to shed it, but I suspect that it's something to do with your water. Have you tested your water today? Maybe you've got something going on that you haven't caught on a test. How much Prime have you been using? When did you last dose it? It might be worth dosing Prime for the volume of the tank if it's been a day or two. I can't comment on stress coat, perhaps someone else can help with that.

I've got rams in my hard tap water. I change a lot of water and keep the tanks very clean and they do just fine. *shrug* Fairly small sample size, but they seem happy as clams as they say. I have been talking to some ram breeders who say they spawn and successfully raise fry in 200 and 400 TDS tap water.

I don't think this is a legitimate concern. Your body can develop or... "undevelop" allergies over the course of time. Allergies aren't as simple as most of us believe. That said, I do think that Cory talked about an employee having an allergic reaction to food when they were packaging their own food some years ago. But I don't know what food that was.

Mine are pretty slow flow as well, @PineSong. I, too, have a 9W and a 24W. The smaller one does seem to have a bit more flow, but neither one of them is blasting anything around the tank.

Doesn't look like ich. Does look like it's shedding slime coat, which can be caused by multiple things. Is your fish breathing heavy? Ich is tiny white spots. Something like this:

My discus lived in a 75 for over a year with nothing but two double stacked, large ACO sponge filters. I eventually added a HOB, but they could have lived indefinitely with sponges so long as the tank is well maintained. I'm not familiar with the tank or filter you're talking about, but just wanted to provide context. A TON of discus are raised from fry to adulthood in tanks with nothing more than air driven sponge filters.

Most corys don't like discus temperatures, but a few do. Sterbai is the most common. Guppies I'm sure would "live" in that temperature, but it's pretty warm for them. And eventually they'll probably be discus food at some point. The shrimp will end up eaten, but they should be OK. I'm not sure about the gourami. Some gourami are OK with discus, I don't think I've heard honey among them, but they are peaceful, so I wouldn't think that would be a problem. In general, though, if it's small enough for them to get a bite of, they're going to eat it. They are cichlids and while they seem less high strung than some others... they have a little violence under the surface like all cichlids do. You're going to need a second tank at some point because inevitably one discus won't eat or will otherwise need special attention that would be cost prohibitive or otherwise difficult to do in your main tank. It's also a really really good idea to start with discus alone in a base bottom tank for a month or so and see how things go, make sure they're all eating, easily observe their poop, worm them for three weeks, etc. Overall, though, if you're looking for more of a community tank-type of vibe... discus are probably a poor choice. They're best done alone for most people as they can also be sensitive to bacteria they're not adapted to. It leads to a phenomenon called amongst discus folks as "cross contamination" which can lead to the death of everything in the tank. In my experience they're also very prone to worms. Any fish going into the tank with them should also be quarantined and at least wormed before introducing them. Even doing that, every single time I have added tankmates with my discus... they end up with a worm issue some time later and I end up needing to worm the whole tank again. It's a good idea to have pure metronidazole and pure levamisole on hand. Common discus tankmates are cardinal tetras, lemon tetras, rummynose tetras, bristlenose plecos, bosemani rainbows, german rams, and sterbai corydoras. You can find some yahoo somewhere who's keeping goldfish, stingrays, and arrowana with them, but that doesn't mean it is the right thing for the fish, which I think is an important distinction.

I was wondering where you went. :D. Glad you're OK!

A mix of tap and RO. I'm only using it for breeding setups and am normally aiming for very low "TDS", so I basically blend trying to hit a TDS. Usually less than 80 TDS. I've been aiming for 15 TDS recently. TDS isn't perfect, but it's a good gauge for what percentage I'm putting in. Because I'm aiming for a TDS instead of a percentage, it's a bit easier to make a smaller batch if I don't need to change water in all the breeding tanks. @Cjbear087 I have absolutely no experience with CO2 injection. "Liquid CO2" is really just an algae inhibitor. In my experience it does jack squat and when dosed higher my fish started to get unhappy. So I quit using it regularly. Though I have a couple jars and sometimes I'll dose a tank. I don't really know why I'm doing it, frankly. 😄

Just once! I do spot check if I have some sort of issue that makes me think I should be concerned. It might be good to test in say August and again in February as water can change seasonally. But once you've done that once there's not a major chance that it changes drastically at any point in the future.

Sounds like a swim bladder. In my experience I haven't noticed anything like a sudden outbreak of fish with swim bladder problems after seeing one have it. But it's certainly something to keep an eye on.

Normal tap water if you can. Otherwise JUST an RO, without the DI (you can get the DI, but it's completely unnecessary for any normal fishkeeping). One other thing that would be good is to know what your water looks like before suggesting that you use it. It's possible that you have ammonia and high nitrates coming out of the tap and if that's the case, everything we're suggesting kind of goes to pot. So do understand we're assuming you have hard, but otherwise safe, tap water. As far as checking pH. Run your tap for a minute or two so you're not getting pipe water that might have been sitting there for a day. Catch a cup or jar of water (any quantity is OK, a quart jar for instance is perfect). Test the pH of that water and write it down. Drop an airstone into it and bubble that water overnight (or 8 hours is fine if you do it in the morning). Then test the pH again and make note. For example, my water comes out of the tap at 7.0. After aging it gets to 8.2 or 8.3. The concern here is that you could shock your fish with a big pH shift (especially with big water changes). If the shift is small say 0.3 or something, it's not a real concern. I think most people suggest that the shift be less than 0.5. If you've ever noticed your fish seeming stressed after a water change, it might be because of this type of inconsistency. The goal being that the water you're for water changes to as exact as the water that remains in the tank as possible most of the time. Again... this applies "always", but at some low level of water changes, it doesn't really matter because you're only adding back a small amount of unmatched water. But big water changes obviously it's a bigger deal. You can certainly compromise, say if your water is 78 instead of 82... that's probably not a problem in most cases. But if the temp is way off AND the pH is way off maybe you cause enough stress with a water change that you do some damage to some fish. Or stress them enough that they can't fight off some pathogen that they otherwise are OK dealing with. Another example of an issue here would be if your water at a low enough pH that ammonia basically isn't toxic, but you do a big water change and pump water in that's got 8.4 pH, you suddenly make that an issue.

For my discus they were always acting totally normal, eating completely fine so I was very confident that wouldn't be any issues stressing them out a bit. I don't know that I would suggest doing it if he's really lethargic or otherwise seems really stressed. But he looks pretty vibrant, so it might be worth a shot. It is a pretty big area, though. So that might be tough. It does certainly look like it's getting worse. Antibiotics might also be beneficial, but I'd see what someone else suggests in the vein... I'm by no means an expert. Is he eating and moving normally?

Yes, but just RO is MORE than sufficient and a little bit cheaper. Other things that might not have been addressed earlier in the thread is that RO takes a long time to make (normal units for this type of application are rated something like 50-100 gallons per day). So that that into consideration. Most of these units also have reject ratios of something like 1:5. Meaning that you get 1 gallon of RO and you reject 5 gallons so for each gallon of water you actually use 6 gallons. For me, water is fairly inexpensive, but do be aware that it could start racking up your bill if you live in an area where water is pricey. And in the long run it's going to be quite a bit more expensive as your RO membrane will eventually need to be replaced and if you're not on a private well, your water is going to cost at least some amount more.

Yes, that should be enough. But you do need to test your water for before and after pH. You can do that anytime. With the dechlorinator I treat for the whole volume and dump it right into the main tank before adding new water. For smaller water changes I won't dose for the whole tank. But if I'm doing say 50% or more, which I almost always am, then I dose for the whole tank.

How high have you been dosing salt? I'm not advocating for this in your case, so don't run off and do it. But my discus had some sort of bacterial infection. It looked similar to HITH, but was not that. I tried tons of stuff and what finally turned the tide was removing the fish from the water and using a cotton swab to dab a little hydrogen peroxide on the wounds. I did this two or three times in total about 4-7 days in between. It was pretty obvious that it helped within a couple of days. Otherwise, lots of clean water if you're not doing that already.

Absolutely. I'd add that you also want to aerate it (just an airstone in the bottom) and dechlorinate it. You can put the decholorinator into the main tank and pump the water in that way. I typically do not put dechlorinator in the barrels because then they tend to get a little slimy. Most of the other discussion above is aimed at making sure it's a sustainable system for you because after your 700th water change on the same fish you're going to be glad that you streamlined the process. 🙂

Your water goes through your softener and into your hot water heater. So you can bypass the cold water, but not the hot water as it is downstream of the softener. You'd need either a separate water heater or an aging setup to bring it up to temperature. Unless you mean that you have a heater in your tank or barrel. Then yes, you can just heat it and pump it into the tank. That said, if you have 50 degree water you want to get to 80 degrees for a water change, you're going to be waiting awhile. It takes about 10 hours for my barrel to go from ~60 degrees to 82. Your tank can certainly handle some cold water without big issues. But I don't know what that limit is. I have no problem dumping a 5 gallon bucket of 50 degree water into an 82 degree 125 gallon tank. But you don't want to do that in a 10 gallon because you're going to do some damage to your fish. This, of course, depends on how big of water changes you're doing. If all you're ever going to do is a 5 or 10% water change, you can probably do just about anything and it would be OK. Personally, if I'm going to do a water change, it's going to be a big one. And for discus it should be.

You only really "need" to age water if you have a big pH shift. Check your pH right out of the tap. Run in for a couple minutes to make sure it's "fresh". Then take that same cup of water and leave it out overnight with an airstone bubbling in it. Check the pH. If the shift is more than 0.5 either up or down (I think half a point is the suggested shift), you should probably age your water. Especially if you're doing large water changes. The only other reason to age is to pre-heat. You can "age" chlorine out, but some municipalities go between chlorine and chloramine so you shouldn't rely on aging to remove chlorine or chloramine.

I realize that I've left out some important information, possibly. And that is that I put methylene blue in with the straight RO water when I pull the eggs. It certainly seems like it is fungus that gets the eggs after a few days. But it happens seemingly "instantly", they'll look absolutely fine with just a couple white infertile ones that are white very early on. And then they'll all be covered seemingly overnight.