nabokovfan87

Are you seeing something I'm not seeing!? I actually added some today on the right HoB. I use it from time to time, but not regularly. I have a very fine foam I like to use in it's place. The water is pretty crystal clear to my eye in person. Any clouding sort of things is either the bubbles from the filter or it's just because I added in some buffer. For reference.... pretty clear! The stuff up top is just breakfast and the CO2 diffuser.

No, I wouldn't think so. If anything it would reduce stress for them. In the 3.0 thread I went ahead and broke down the LED QTY per color channel as well as a spectrum chart for each LED type involved. You can use that along with the details in Bentley's videos about what channels to push if you ever decide to say, push more pink/red to encourage a specific type of growth. Is there any particular reason for having two windows as opposed to one? I don't think that initial window is doing a lot given how short it is. If we look at your second window: 15.45-20.15 is just about the lighting window and that puts you at right around 4.5 hours. Some of your plants may demand 6-8 hours for that lighting window, but given things like the algae on wood pushing spores around the tank and that affecting the plants, I can understand the mindset to cut down on hours and duration of light. It's an interesting dilemma. Bentley's advice to me when things got ridiculously bad was to limit my light to 4 hours or less (you'd cut yours down by 30-45 minutes or so and remove that first block) and that should limit the growth on the algae. You should see it start to cut back as well as the plants able to utilize that amount of time to "catch up" so to speak. Your plants generally seem healthy. They generally do not look infested apart from that bit of moss. Trimming the moss, RR treatment on it, propagate out that new moss into other surfaces would encourage a nice look and reduce or eliminate the algae there. Treating the wood is going to be a bit of a hassle. It's just how wood is sometimes. One of my most frustrating moments with this algae I'll share below, the algae still grew back, but needless to say you have to find a way to remove it, manually, and get as much of it out of the tank as you can. Hopefully the tub / algaecide (flourish excel dip) method works well. You want to be sure you don't have nitrites. This points to some sort of filtration capacity or bioload issue causing the algae to bloom. On your normal maintenance schedule, I'd encourage you to go from 30% up to 50% to ensure that is reduced long term. In the short term, the water changes during the blackout should all but eradicate any water quality issues. Per Green Aqua, you want your GH to be higher than your KH for success. the GH contains some of the nutrients that are used up by the plants. Given you have a discrepancy, can you please verify the GH in your tap water? If the GH is normally higher, it points towards the start of nutrient deficiencies. Your KH looks great, but you might need to add some GH just to balance that mineral demand out.

First step was to go ahead and fix the light today. I messed with the attachment furthest from this camera in the photo below first, couldn't get any improvement and so I just went ahead and repositioned the hole. Another option would've been to leave it "loose" so that the fittings up top auto-leveled themselves, but it's fixed and I'm content with that. I went ahead and cleaned all the prefilters and looked down to see the corydoras searching for their afternoon snack. We had another storm today following the one yesterday and my hope is that the starkly cold water change (very minimal as it was) would be enough to trigger some sort of a spawning behavior. They got some vibrabites, bloodworms, and some pretty high protein foods this week to help encourage that. Time will tell. The Staurogyne Repens is still working through the algae issues. The anubias on the wood has been pulled and is now in the shrimp tank for recovery and lower demand lighting. The shadow from the black trim on the lids is no longer awkward when viewing the tank now because it's straightened. My hope is that this all develops, I can trim the plants and re-plant them here shortly and encourage that fast, new growth. In the unmodded tidal on the right side of the tank I had 2 massive bags of old aquaclear media. I ended up tossing the smaller biomax pellets and putting the ring style biomax into the media bag for the sake of keeping it clean. Just a preference thing and this helps to keep the filter from bypassing without having too much in there. In terms of biological, I still have 2x the amount of media need be compared to normal in the filters and I am letting the HOBs do their thing. I know bypass will happen and there's no real way for me to stop it. I've done what I can.... so to speak. The Hygrophila Pinnatifida is in the substrate now, trying to get it to push all across the back of the tank and "carpet out". I wouldn't mind that one bit and it would definitely be a unique look with a moss background or simply the contrast on the stark black background. Edit: I also fixed the CO2 diffuser. I might make a note of this in future cleanings just to mentally remind myself the cadence for how often to bleach dip it.

I saw this when randomly trying to find a photo of the blue axelrodi rasbora. I didn't even realize there was other version. Pretty much all of the rasbora I have seen are silver with black patters on the body. CPDs I have seen on video, never in person. It would be awesome to have some of these one day, by far one of the coolest colors on a fish in my view. Would go awesomely in a green tigerbarb tank!

Do they come dried and you hatch them?

Definitely look into the prefilter sponges. You can add two (one external, one internal) and they are pretty well integrated for that filter specifically! Looks good. I enjoy that marineland is encouraging reuse as opposed to the wasteful cartridges. It's a nice touch.

Can you show the screen with the line graphs by chance? There's a lot of changes and I'm trying to get an idea for how the white channel looks.

😂 Hopefully not too much of a hassle!

What do you plan to do with your fry....

If you haven't, I would encourage you to check out Bentley Pascoe on youtube. He keeps those same fish and keeps them with a variety of other fish. I'll try to grab a related video and attach it below. He is also a member on the forums here which is quite awesome!

Correct! Here is a really well done and useful video on TDS. Think of TDS as stuff in the water that isn't H20 Ions. It could be anything. I will also attach a blog post on KH and GH which dives into what specific ions are involved in those two parameters. https://www.aquariumcoop.com/blogs/aquarium/ph-gh-kh 3.5 dH is right at 60 ppm. That's my minimum. You should be able to be in the 3.5-4.5 dH range without much issue.

Aren't they just the best! I enjoy watching them do their things so much. Interesting little creatures, especially when you spend a night with a flashlight realizing those specs you see floating are the zoes The rock on that tank is unique, beautiful, and very hard to see! Maybe it's time for a big trim and some aquascaping of sorts to make her want to spend time with the puffers in the bowl. Is that something she would enjoy doing, help to layout the tank? I'm excited for your excitement. One breath of fresh air and a positive mood and you're 95% of the way towards making progress. That's awesome! If he doesn't already use one, let him know that a toothbrush works wonders on the heater and hardscape for that type of algae. It will clean it up like new in no time. I learned that one from Pecktec 🙂 The loach is wonderful. I'm sure it has a name by now.

Some plants might be "nutrient hogs" so to speak and use a certain nutrient more than others. Sword plants are known to take a lot of root tabs. Ferns are known to utilize added iron and/or potassium to keep from being deficient. Moss does pretty well with a little extra iron too. Each plant may have slightly different nutritional requirements, but in general easy green is designed to work well with a lot of plants.

Easy Green Contents: Seachem Equilibrium Ingredients: Esssentially Equilibrium contains things that your plants might be deficient in. You don't "need" it at all. But it might be a useful too if your plants are showing deficiencies in those particular elements. Certain fish and invertebrates will need a minimum amount of GH in the water to reduce things like calcium deficiencies. I can't speak fully on that topic, but as an example shrimp need a minimum amount of GH so they can fully molt and form shells once molted.

Welcome to the forums! Hopefully we can help out in some way to get things on the right track. I feel your struggle as it's something I've dealt with for far too long as well. Please post a screenshot of your light settings. How much during each dose? What level are your nitrates at for the tank in question. From the pictures above it looks like the algae is mostly centered on the wood. I don't see much on the plants, but perhaps it is there in spots? You may need a lot more amano than you're thinking. The state the algae is in right now I would expect them to go ahead and go after it. The only real technique to get them to go after the algae is to keep them hungry. I would also suggest checking on the tank at night under blue lights. They may only be really active at night for exposed and bright spots. Given the tank size I would also go in search of True SAE for the tank. They will help as well. Below are two techniques I used. I would encourage using the Jurijs method for the wood as it's a very large area to spot treat. Pull the wood and rocks into a tote and see how it goes. Hardscape can be difficult to deal with. I would suggest blacking out the tank for 7 days and doing a water change of 30-50% following each day of blackout. BBA sends out spores and you need to perform those water changes in order to remove them. This is advice from Bentley via one of his live streams. During and following the blackout you'd want to do the spot treatment method in order to treat algae on any of the plant leaves or pull the plants and dip them. In my case I had to handle cleaning, excess phosphates, excess lights, and a long list of methods to get things under control. Your tank has a good plant load, but that piece of wood is directly under the strongest part of the light. The algae will almost always want to grow there. A method to alleviate that might be to raise the light up higher using risers or by mounting the light in some way.

This is my experience 🙂 For anyone who is curious or was unable to make the trip they are streaming live some of the scape challenges as well as some of the talks from speakers. (someone needs to help out and fix the mic buzz for them, I swear it's been going on for years at this point)

I was thinking about this again this morning and there is a video that Cory made on the topic. I'll try to find the details and link it here. Light directly on the rim: Center of the tank with glass top: 66 Par Center of the tank with glass top removed: 90 par (light is slightly FWD) Comparison of placement, center of light vs. rear of tank (light is slightly FWD): 84 vs. 33 par Comparison of placement, light moved from FWD of tank to center of tank: 90 (no glass) vs. 72 par (with glass) Light raised up 10" via canopy: Center of tank: 38 Par (was 66 par on rim) *unfortunately there isn't a corner measurement*

For certain. I appreciate it. I wouldn't have gotten as far as I have without the help of so many different sources. The one on one advice that @Bentley Pascoe provided was (and is) so valuable. It's a hobby of trying to help one another and sometimes it's so easy to feel confused by what is the right thing to do. Watching @Irene's talk at aquashella right now and it's related to that same struggle. I am anxiously awaiting more plants and things to try out. I am looking forward to observing how plants I have failed with previously handle the current setup and to understand what I will learn from those experiences.

I was waiting for you to put a box over it. 😂 I don't think mine is that noisy, but it's fine... it's the noise of fish surviving!

I totally understand how she feels. What's that word, snoopy has snail misophonia.

That's terrible. I'm very sorry. I don't know what that critter is. Maybe someone can help us ID it. I'll quote the photo below for ease. @Odd Duck @Colu @Biotope Biologist @modified lung

The literal term comes from chemistry: a substance capable in solution of neutralizing both acids and bases and thereby maintaining the original acidity or basicity of the solution" Buffer simply meaning something used to raise the values of a specific nutrient. Think of it like your easy green fertilizer. It's an ingredient you can use in your recipe to keep the tank, fish, or plants happy. It comes in a variety of forms, but in my case I use pre-made powders. GH Buffer: Seachem Equilibrium or Seiryu stone KH Buffer: Seachem Alkalinity buffer to raise KH, Seachem Acid buffer to lower KH This might be helpful to see visually. Here's an example: This method is very common for things like dwarf shrimp, african cichlids, and other species that have specific requirements. Caridina shrimp: Active substrates buffer the water down to an acidic PH (sub 7.0) and low TDS by absorbing nutrients in the water. There is also RO water "buffers" that are used specific for these shrimp that will get the correct mineral contents when added in a certain ratio. Neocaridina shrimp: It is very common to use RO water and "buffers" in the form of shrimp salts which are premade to match parameters the species need. African Cichlids: Again, you have the same type of thing as Caridina shrimp, but instead of buffering the PH down by absorbing nutrients, the method is to use coral substrate to buffer the minerals of the water higher into the ranges where the fish originate. There are also cichlid salts used to provide nutrients for the fish.

Hello Everyone, I wanted to review and follow up with my status. I want to review some of the things mentioned above and provide some insight as I tried to tune my methods and continue learning how to deal with this stuff. There have been some ups and downs, but ultimately my goal is that I want to try to help people who were (or are) in my shoes and feel like they just don't know what they are doing wrong. Even in the past couple of weeks, I've had some dramatic changes and it's been illuminating, shedding some light on why exactly my plants were failing me the past few months. If we recall from the post above, this was my initial goal: This is the most recent view of my tank now, 75G, following the move of everything: The most pivotal thing here is that the moss is growing, doing very well. I think a lot of my issues previously were not dosing, not having enough light, and not really putting the moss in a place to succeed. In the 29G I had the moss right under the HOB output and it worked so well there, but the BBA also loved that spot. The BBA grew faster than the moss, which meant that the algae won out most days. Once I moved to the slightly smaller tank, you can see above, the moss is finally winning that battle. I wake up every morning and watch the amanos graze on the algae. Placement of plants does matter, and it's one of the tools we have to fight this stuff. Even recently, I learned that I needed to test my GH/KH better. I was using a method, but I was not verifying accuracy. I assumed the test I had was accurate, but it wasn't. My own inability to read the test alongside water issues with some invertebrates in a different tank led me to discover I had fallen on the wrong side of the equation yet again with the buffers I was using. GH was lower than KH, nitrates were low, CO2 was finally working, but overall nothing was growing. I tested the water constantly, but nothing was working. I added more ferts, no real change. I made some other changes which we'll dive into next, but ultimately... Knowing what my water was doing and how that related to the plants was key. Getting my GH > KH (thank you for that tip green aqua!) was one of the key things I learned and it's something I will monitor moving forward. Everything is a tool of sorts. Maintenance, fertilizer dosing, water changes, manual removal, trimming, testing, and monitoring are all tools. Sometimes you need to sharpen your own skills using those tools in addition to everything else. Stay motivated, stay invested, stay hopeful, but you do need to put the time in with your tools to get to the core issue. Finding out what your core issue is in your tank varies, but have the patience (years in my case) to get to a point where you feel confident enough to grow some moss. I will start by saying that algae is not the enemy, but it's simply a natural indication of certain things going on. Algae, much like aufwuchs, biofilm, detritus, and copepods are normal things that show up in your tank. There is a need to keep things in check, but seeing some algae is not the end of the tank. Having algae, might even take years to get the plant in question to recover, but you can get there. There is a video by Jurijs Jutjajevs that shows a method of using flourish excel / easy carbon to dip plants over a few days to get rid of BBA. That is a fantastic way to handle algae issue on a lot of plants. My testing tells me to do so with a bucket, lid, and airstone, but ultimately it was used recently with success and I now understand.... yet again still learning... a bit of my prior struggles. Listening to a livestream with Bentley it was brought up to do a blackout to help the tank start fighting the algae. To soften it up so that the shrimp and algae eaters could then go after it. What I realize now is where I failed previously. You're trying to kill the algae by choking out light and nutrients. Alright, the algae is going to respond like most things by trying to spread and grow. The tip on the stream was to perform daily water changes to minimize the spores in the water. What a novel concept and an easy way to try to minimize the effectiveness of the algae to fight back. Brilliant. Then we have the video by Jurijs mentioned above. It notes that you don't want to simply dip the plant once, but that you want to weaken the algae first, then repeat the dose again. Further this enforces the idea that one method, one step in the right direction isn't enough. We need to be diligent with how we fight off algae. The most recent video I watched was from Corvus Oscen, trimming plants and discussing his tank and algae issues. His bit of advice was to trim your plants much more than you normally would because that alone is how you encourage new growth. My best example of this method is moss. I've talked with many hobbyist who don't cut / trim the moss. Who don't propagate it out and encourage those fine bits of moss to grow into longer strands. The best thing I've done is to keep the moss trimmed, the S.Repens trimmed, and to encourage the new growth on the plants. This gives the healthiest part of the plant the best opportunity to use light energy and the higher chance of pushing past the algae battle. Manual removal helps, spot treatment is effective, but can damage plants, the dip is a really good way to handle things. Ultimately, none of these fix the issue until you find out why the algae is returning and where your flaws are in eradicating that algae. The other major change I did was my light is no longer on top of the tank. While this doesn't seem to make a ton of impact, I find that it really does. Not only does it change the refraction angles on the light, but it does also help to spread out the light itself. There is no longer the hotspot affect across the middle of the tank. The spread (lighting technical term) is across the depth of the tank, front to back, which helps to ensure that I can turn the light up without burning out some of the plants in that midground or higher up on the tank. From the very crude example above, if we look at the blue lines as our "optimal light beams" you can see how the refraction is slightly different. First note that in both cases the lid and the water refraction is ignored. Those both worsen the scenario. As the light is lifted, those beams to the front and back of the tank are at say... 15 degrees off axis compared to 25 degrees when the light is right on the rim. Then you have to ask yourself, if it's easier to get those rays of light to the bottom of the tank with the light lifted. Surprisingly, my gut tells me it's helping. I definitely look at the photo above and still feel that chicken and egg issue. I am mostly utilizing moss as a plant load, but I do have some other plants that are slowly growing. I did end up moving all of my very low demand plants to a separate tank with very specific controlled parameters. In that tank, the algae is still there, but I have seen all of those plants double in size. Again, I need to find that balance of nutrients, lights, and plant demand, but I am fixing the same issues I was on the bigger tank. Due to some testing on this low demand tank, I discovered the GH vs. KH issue in the main tank that was causing my plants to stagnate. Ultimately, as mentioned, finding that reason for your issues is the most beneficial thing you can do to fix the algae. It is also the most significant challenge, especially given that we all tend to avoid testing the parameters that matter unless you're following an EI dosing regime. Right now, I dose in GH buffer as one of my weekly ferts. That's just where my water is at and I need to make sure the plants have those nutrients available. I dose in iron as well as the easy green fertilizer. Ultimately, my goal is still to simply grow moss. My goal is to get better with moss. My goal is to get better with all plants in general. Whether it's herb garden stuff for cooking in the kitchen or the aquatic garden in my room, the goal is to have these pieces of nature thriving. In the past few months it's become clear that I have so much t learn on a basic level. There is so much to digest on an intermediate level. I think I will always be in awe when someone has all the pieces put together. That admiration of being able to produce nature, I don't know where it comes from for me, but I do cherish it. I hope that skill develops over the coming years. Just like everything, it's something I have to try for and not just blindly hope that things work out. I think the biggest advice I can give since the last post is to constantly search for advice from people who have the skills and aquascapes you admire. Check out some of the green aqua, Jurijs, George Farmer, Corvus, Bentley, and so many other wonderful sources of information. Hop on a livestream with someone who likes plants and ask those questions. Try to figure out that puzzle as best you can and I wish you the best of luck in doing so. I'll end here.... the introductory statements about why from George Farmer here are profound. I think I need to watch a lot more of his content, but I really do appreciate the mantra and not just the visuals behind so many aquascapers.

Follow up, considering I have had much more time with these nets now. Mesh: Works so well and the fine mesh is great quality. Very soft on the fish and works well with delicate species. It does collapse on itself very easy, so it's not the best for shrimp catching. Everything else, it works just fine for. I still wish it was slightly deeper, even box shaped would be nice. There is room for improvement with the design / shape, but generally speaking I have enjoyed that aspect of the net. Handle: The injection molded piece on the end is perfect. It's a high quality handle and the spacing for the hook to hang the nets is perfect. I much prefer it over the cheap-o nets with the plastic + metal wire type of material because it's smaller and easier to hide. Because the handle is one piece, you cannot simply put it into a bucket and cover it with a lid easily. The ones I have are all long size, so they demand hooks for storage. Having to dry them first, nuisance, but not an extraordinary one. Honestly, someone takes this net design and replaces the plastic with steel rod, powder coated, it would be one of the nicer products in the industry. The shape / function of the handle is great. Just note it's plastic, so be aware. Ease of use / overall design ergonomics: Using this net to catch fish is nice because the net itself is slim and sleek. It moves easily, feels soft, feels nice in the hand, and it just works. For some, I can see an argument that the handle would be difficult to grasp with poor dexterity, but for me I haven't had any issues catching fish. The net is comprised of the mesh wrapped around the tube area. That fitment is small enough to get very small species into the net. Heck, I caught baby shrimp in the net easily yesterday multiple time and I attribute that ease to the way that mesh and the tube interact. It's easy to get against a surface and work with. Keep in mind.... all of these nets were under $3-4 at time of purchase. Probably worth a lot more than that, even adding an extra $1 or so in materials to up the quality for a "deluxe" model would be perfectly fine. The color is good, the mesh is nice, the handle is great, and the price is fantastic. If you need a long handle / fine net.... I wouldn't overlook this one as an option. I do plan to get the smallest size for use in a specimen container, but I think these will do nicely for the a long time in my tanks!

Agreed, I had to run them off air. That's very frustrating, I'm sorry.