jwcarlson

There's a lot going on here and I'm not sure I'm fully following. My personal opinion is that you should use your straight water that has not been through your softener (if you're talking about the units that use salt). They're actually ion exchange units, not actually "softening" the water as you'd typically use the term in an aquarium sense. Take a sample of straight tap water and get a quart of it or so, get your pH reading. Put and airstone in and aerate the water overnight and test the pH again. My tap water starts at 7.0 and ages to 8.2. By nature of the dissolved carbon dioxide in our tap water. That's step one, in my opinion. Your water could easily swing 1 or more pH just by nature of it sitting. So that variable needs to be understood before you start worrying about substrate and what-not. Additionally... the pH test can be pretty difficult to read, unfortunately.

Mine lived with large common plecos (it was a long time ago). At one point there was a school of silver dollars with my biggest oscar, I don't remember him being too tough on them and he never did anything to the pleco. But anything big enough for him to move... moved. I didn't have real plants at the time and he disjointed all the plastic ones. I would put them back together and put them back in the sand and then it was game on for him. 😄 I think your scape would look just fine without plants. But it does look nicer with them, I think. I do wonder if they would be more likely to co-exist if they were raised from little guys in a tank with lots of plants. I'm coming into a glut of good sized tanks this weekend (125, 90, 55, and 40 bowfront). It will be tough for me to not end up with an oscar eventually. I absolutely adored mine 20 years ago.

Interesting that they haven't shredded the anubias. When I had oscars they wouldn't leave anything alone. It looks very nice, much much nicer than any of my oscar tanks ever did!

I have only ordered fish from them once, but it was a good experience. Put your email in to be told when the fish are back in stock, in my experience they seem to be 2 or 3 days out and then back in stock at least the ones I was interested in.

Here's the crew during refill from tonight's water change. I measured three of them and the two bigger ones are 5.5" and one that was WAY WAY behind is right at 5" now. The (darker) blue one is coming out of a worm issue and has started eating. Hoping that he takes off the way the other runt did now that he's eating pretty well. In a few days it will be ten months since I received them at 2.5". Tidal 110 has replaced one sponge filter and eventually at least one more will go, possibly two more. I'm holding off as my wife recently gave me the go ahead to buy used tanks that an old friend from high school wants to sell. He's selling me a 125, 90, 55, and 40 bow - all with stands and filters for $350. Trickster knows how to get me to bite. Not sure what the future of the discus is, but they may end up in the 125 with significantly more dither fish. Anyway, they were being pretty photogenic tonight.

I have three double stacked large AC sponge filters, I don't think I can stack them anymore! 😄 And one stuck to the back that's a finer filter. It's too much with wood. This way I should be able to add some more wood and the planter back in with some other plants.

Absolutely, I think most fish handle all of that stuff pretty well. The discus are certainly more sensitive. But yeah, someone rips the roof of my house and shoves a 10 foot wide vacuum in sucking everything up and then just walks away, I'm going to be a little confused and moody for a bit. 😆

They have come to grips with the wood. Tidal 110 comes today and I begin transitioning the tank to something more "display tank worthy" eliminating the sponge filters over time and freeing up some space in the tank.

But emptying that full bucket every sixteen seconds would get pretty old. 😄 My biggest issue with eliminating it has been that during water changes and just regular tank maintenance/activities the duckweed has been sucked up into coarse sponges, into the HOB, or stuck in java moss, etc. I would think being underwater for weeks and weeks would kill the scourge, but that's not the case. It just grows bigger or does its dividing routine and spits out small ones that float up. It's been months since I got rid of the vast majority of it. And I am still finding some every once-in-awhile and frequently finding dead ones (so maybe it does die after being submerged for like three months). It's not too big of a deal at this point because I can manage it like this and eventually it will be gone. But man-o-man does it get its teeth into you! 😄 My dwarf water lettuce has been the say way, but because of its size it has been significantly easier to deal with and maintain a desired population.

Both tubes were brand new in this case.

Is that christmas moss in the front right corner?

So is this poor little fella going to hate his life if he lives it out with CPDs? He seems pretty happy and bold, not like he's scared or anything. He sometimes schools with the CPDs. The reading I've done seems to indicate he's OK at the 74 degrees I'm keeping the CPDs at. Otherwise I could get a few more of his type, but not sure if I want more than 6 CPDs + this guy in a 10 gallon, do I? Also shrimp in the tank.

If nothing else, I am glad it's not just me that has had some struggles. I do think this thread has helped me come up with a better plan. I'm actually not horrified by how this particular attempt turned out. Not a ton of white stuff and what's there will be pretty well hidden by growth (as long as they grow pretty well) over time. Anubias does well in my community tanks, so I'm hoping it also performs well in this discus tank, though there is not much for nitrates to speak of. I could be convinced to remove the pothos as I'm sure that sucker inhales a lot of what nitrates are there.

The blue diamond had quit eating about the time of my last post. After three rounds of levamisole, he is back to lightly eating and getting a bit more aggressive in appetite each day. Not sure if it was just "bad luck" or if the tetras I added over the summer brought worms in. In any event, he seems to be recovering. As the fish are farther into maturity the water changes will probably eventually lessen, but I am still committed to nightly 90% water changes and February will be a year of that (just missing a handful for vacation or weekends away). That said, the tank has been setup as a growout from the beginning. Bare bottom, very limited decoration. The plants I tried before were absolutely thrashed by the discus and perhaps didn't have enough to eat from the water. The guy I got the plants from has beautiful stands of them in his discus tank and he doesn't use root tabs or anything. I have some of them growing in a different tank and am considering bringing another cluster up to see if it survives. If I could get a good stand of them growing, I could hide some of these filters. Also thinking more about rearranging and maybe eliminating one of the tall sponge filters. At the least, I think they're all going to get shuffled all the way to the right to limit the ugly areas. Overall wishing I had a bigger tank with a sump where I could hide the heaters and eliminate the filters taking up space. Maybe someday. 🙂 Added some driftwood and anubias last night. The discus are quite alarmed, but none of them died of fright overnight and they had ventured about 4" farther left of where they were in this picture as of this morning.

Interesting. Our water is just thin chalk, so that shouldn't be an issue. But I made sure everything was really dry before gluing. I baked the wood weeks ago and it's been sitting out while I wormed the tank. Now I wish I had more plants to glue so I could try it wet and see what happens.

That straight up does not work for me. I had some "stuck" for probably 30 minutes, I picked the wood up and two of them fell off before I could get them to the tank. Misting did seem to help it set, I think I've been doing it too dry *shrug*. It's in the tank now. The discus are frightened. Need to rearrange all of the filters, I think I'm going to put all the big sponges all the way on the right. Trying to class up the tank while also keeping it manageable for the nightly water changes. 🙂 This pic was last night, the discus had ventured about 4" farther left as of this AM.

Good grief, I have been doing this all wrong.

I think the youngest ones can get through the coarse sponge. Any coarse sponge in my tanks end up packed with shrimplets. They're like hotels for them.

Interesting, I didn't know that. It ia pretty dry here at the moment. How long before you can usually put it in the tank? Usually I just give up and put it in. 🤣 Thank you, @Guppysnail, by the way... So the wood should be wet? I did it with it wet once and it seemed similarly bad, but it might not have been gel.

I have glued plants to driftwood a handful of times and it is, without question, an unmitigated disaster. I have to keep adding more, it never seems to start to set up. I have been gluing for probably 30 minutes and it just won't harden. What am I doing wrong? The house is 62 degrees, is that part of the problem? Currently misting plants wondering when I will be able to put them in. At least now that I wet everything down the glue is turning white so I can see how absolutely terrible it is going to look. 🤣

I watched one of my cardinal tetras eat a pretty big cherry shrimp this weekend. And the kerri tetras were helping too. Personally, I like to see that as I have too many cherry shrimp anyway. 😄 The tank they're in has a nice sized rock pile and some coarse filter material (AC sponge filter and intake guard) and those are basically shrimplet hotels. It wouldn't surprise me if there's 100 shrimplets living in each of those two items in the community tank. Edit to add: When I had guppies I also had oscars (many years ago) and I would occasionally thin them out by scooping and giving them to the oscar. I know that doesn't necessarily help if you don't have more than one tank. But why not get a 75 and grow out an oscar to help get rid of some of your guppies? That sounds like a perfectly reasonable thing to do as far as this hobby goes! 🤣

Imagine coming back to that soup after a 2-week vacation. 🤮

I finished the 4th and final book in The Books of Babel (The Fall of Babel) and it was quite a good series indeed. Started the next Vinland Saga, not sure what book to read after that.

Here's today. Cleared out 90% of the water lettuce. Nitrate was at 10 PPM before water change. It's really cloudy from refilling and two weeks ago I pulled the polishing floss and it's just had lots of solids floating since. Anyway, clearly a lot more light now.

Current status. Due for floater clean out, though they are always dense. It's important to note that the stem plant dwindling happened before I added floaters for the most part. And I forgot there was pothos in there! Looking at it objectively it might be a miracle anything but the water lettuce is alive. 🤣