nabokovfan87

I was very fun to see Romeo's Journey. Beautiful shell coloration and he definitely had a full and happy life! I hate this as well.... it's so frustrating. I would recommend thinning out the algae over time. You can also cut feeding way back and let the shrimp graze on it more attentively. Ultimately, even with bigger shrimp like amanos, once the algae reaches a certain size they can end up ignoring it for easier spots to graze. The thin, new, "fresh" algae is their favorite, but the thicker, chewy, dense, harder, more robust stuff tends to get left there. Use a Soft toothbrush on the silicone and just be very gentle with it. You can drain the tank and brush on peroxide as well on any trouble spots and it should work wonders. Just let it be exposed to air with the peroxide on the area for 10-15 minutes.

Really unique and beautiful. What an interesting new fish!

Looks great! Congratulations on all the progress and interesting/fun projects.

You likely want to continue with a second round of meds. If you recall, I believe the plan was to get the filtration stable, then repeat the process with the meds.

My condolences. 😞 I'm very sorry for the struggles you've been going through with the rams.

You have a fitment issue with the airline. There should be no air escaping from the inlet side of the air collar. 1. Make sure the way the tube is cut is straight. 2. Make sure the airline isn't hardened into a preformed shape. Especially for the ACO airline tubing which has a different texture than other tubing. 3. Once you have the inlet side of things fixed, then you would only ever need to use a pipe cleaner to clean the inlet. I'll attach a video below. This is common on the marina hang on breeder boxes as well. Here is a video, air diffuser gets clogged at the bend... It's a typical issue but I very much doubt that's what you're experiencing here. I'll reiterate this again.

It's a single piece with a slot cut in for air to escape. No.

I would run the high end PH test and see the color. It also looks like a small amount of ammonia might be there (could be lighting). Based on the higher PH test, you're at the 8.2 range. Nitrates are around 40 it looks like. Just tied to water changes to decrease that if the waste is too high.

@AllFishNoBrakes what do you think? One filter per drop, right?

These plants all do well with low light. Increasing flow may increase an issue with BBA if that's something you're struggling with. Just something to note and keep in mind. The main thing I use is lighting from say 30-45 minutes after the light is on you start your lighting window and run for ~8 hours and then you have the same gap on the other side for your sunset. (Think of your ramp up/down time, use the middle of that slope for your start-end time) If you're having an issue, yes you can omit it. You can also just run only the pure white channels and go from there. The red-green hues on the warm channel are beneficial for overall plant health, just keep that in mind. The way I run mine, PW is a at the ratio for my desired max value and then everything is based on a ratio of that PW value. Something might be 5% less, something might be 15% less, just depends on what I am trying to emphasize. As for the tank, the setup, my low demand 29g tank (taller) is at about 35% max value without a riser. I would LOVE to have the riser to help spread out the light as I did with one of my other tanks. I would expect that with a shorter tank, you're going to end up around 40-55% or so as a max value, but more likely 30% is a good range to shoot for and see how the plants are behaving.

My apologies. Basically, take a sample of water from your tap, not the tank, and then you test it immediately. Aerate it for 24 hours with an air stone and then repeat the test. You can run it for longer to see what the pH stabilizes to.

A lot of hobbyists do and have snails for food usage. Best of luck!

@Chick-In-Of-TheSea 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 So exciting....

The shrimp tank has that "well measured" aqueon lid so the front has a good 3/4" gap and there's not a ton of condensation. I had the light really low. We'll see! I agree though, something is just off.

I do apologize for the struggles you've been having. Hopefully everything improves and it's all just something you've had to work through and use as a learning experience.

"best" for me would be something that comes in the shape of a sphere. It's very arbitrary, but just avoid something that's basically powder or very fine granules. They make them in all sorts of shapes. Seachem penn-plax "pellet" style. marineland fluval / aquaclear It all works. It's all "fine". Get what you can. preference for me for use is just the little sphere type. Put it on the top of the sponge filter, wrapped around the uplift tube or laying on top of the air stone if you don't have a sponge filter.

Interesting... Try with a blue light on or something one night. Maybe you can use something like a pleco cave to capture it and move it to a specimen container.

The engineering team loves to read stuff like this. Imagine a little cover, cut the flow, then pull open the cover, then pull up the prefilter and clean it. Come on fluval.... you can do it. I don't wanna move hoses unless I have to! LOL

Glass cleaned, things tested, and it's just an easy day today while we do all the things I'm supposed to do week to week. Temp felt (to the touch) a tad warm, which might just speak to how cold it's been with the hard floors. In terms of all of the other things, everything looked good. GH was 9 and KH was 3. I added a slight dose of KH buffer to get it up to 4. Nothing too much because of the shrimp. I had done a bigger WC this past weekend, which explains why the KH value crept back to what the tap is at. For comparison, shrimp tank was at a GH of 8, KH of 4.5-5. When it comes to progress, I am trying to get things to grow. Both tanks have had the lights turned up. The floating plants in the shrimp tank are doing very poorly, not thriving. This could be a flow issue. When it comes to the 75G tank something has been eating the aponogeton leaves. It's undetermined what exactly is doing the chomping, but the assumption is that it's the newly added BNP. It happened pretty much the day after adding that fish as well as the barbs and rainbows. I can imagine any of them doing the damage, but it's tough to know without visually seeing it happen. For now, the pleco has been moved out and I'll keep an eye on damage. I would like to see all of the stems start to thrive a bit more. The lighting change is going to be the biggest indication there for me. I also cleaned the lid off today to try to remove that as a factor for the next couple of days. I need to do a better job of keeping that clean. The lights I have on these two tanks are pretty old and I am assuming the LEDs are nearing that ~5-7 year range. At 10-15 I would expect it to no longer function. It looks dim. So I did make that decision to try to ramp things up and risk BBA taking off. The swords are dealing with it and I remove the bad leaves every other week. The heater guard is the new focal for BBA and I am just going to need to keep an eye on where things develop and push to remove it as a factor as best I can. I do see the S.Rep responding well to more light. I just need to see more. I need to see growth as opposed to stagnation and it'll be great once that happens. The Susswassertang on the back wall looks so wonderful. It's really beautiful. I would love to see that fill in as well.

Yeah. Correct. The photos are indicating one thing, the description of the event was another. Thank you for all the help Colu. I am honestly thinking, whatever is going on, it might be best to keep the tank with only plants for ~30-60 days to let any sort of pathogens die off before restocking.

Sounds like Epistylis or a protozoan external issue. The fish shown is very emaciated, very thin, and has gill damage. I would tend to assume this fish isn't going to be able to recover from this point, but I have seen fish make very miraculous recoveries. The gill damage would lead me to think ammonia or nitrite got in there somehow. I would consider testing your water for ammonia or asking your water company if the water has chloramines. All this means is that you would want to do a 2x dose of dechlorinator and make sure you have something like an airstone in there. I believe your filtration and all that is sound and sufficient, but it's just something to mention. What do you think Colu, Salt?

parameters should be good. The best thing to do is an off-gas test now. Your KH is pretty similar to mine, 3-4 vs. 5, which means pH should be pretty low depending on things like oxygenation. It'll be interesting to see what the pH is after 24 hours. Your GH is close to 2x your KH, which is great for plants as well. The Corydoras don't mind GH values being high at all.

This. I ran into a pretty weird issue in my 29G. I have a heater with a heater guard on it so it really does need flow to get through the grate. That being said I thought the easy flow would make it easy! The example being, in this setup I would expect that the heater on the left side of the tank results in the flow being directed at the heater and pushing the flow around the tank. After testing what way the heater was angled, placement, and various other things I would recommend doing a few things. 1. If you can, run one filter on both sides of the tank or add an airstone to the other side of the tank. this is just something I tend to do, but it was one of the way I resolved the minimal flow issue. 2. Heater on the back glass angled away from the flow seemed to work best. When it was angled toward the flow it wasn't able to flow across the heater and remove the flow quickly enough.

The UNS stuff should charge up by absorbing KH. That's been my experience and KH ties into the PH of the aquarium. Honestly, I think one of the best things you could do is to have an off-gas test. I am really unsure why they want the PH that high, but whether it's 24-48 hours of off-gassing or something else going on where you need to stabilize the water from the tap, running the off-gas test will help to determine what the water parameters really are. As a reference, I have a KH of 40-50 ppm and my PH is 6.8 out of the tap. GH has ranged from 100-500+. https://www.aquariumcoop.com/blogs/aquarium/ph-gh-kh For the off-gas test. Take a sample of water from the faucet and test it for everything. Aerate it for 24 hours, repeat those tests. Given your situation I would further that to another 24 hours and retest again. This is why some people have conditioning chambers or recommend something like "aged water" because it's been stabilized. Give the KH value you have, I expect the PH to drop. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry's_law

One of mine that came with the pieces in my shrimp tank has a lot of green and slate colors.