nabokovfan87

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.

It's basically formed in mud (or comes filled with mud. So maybe the clay on the surface just hydrated and changed coloration a bit.

It looks to be some solid progress @Crow. Keep on doing all the little things and I am sure it'll be a really special tank. I love the way you did the gravel on the sand around the wood.

I believe that's just part of the stone itself. @TeeJay has one with a similar color as well. I think I have 1-2 with that darker shade. It also might be a different type of stone. It looks like a layer of material when the stone was cracked down to size and that's the layer that split. Similar to how Seiryu has the marbling of calcium, this one likely has something similar going on. It kind of reminds me of maple leaf stone or some sedimentary stone.

😂 There's a few! Caves on the shelf. Ziss in the back, Pumps (I think), and the obligatory sponge filters.

Plant selection was a very critical one for this for me. Some worked fine, others definitely did not. It was tied to water parameters I had at the time, I'm assuming, as well as just the setup I had. When I first started getting into higher quality planted tanks using things that were from ACO and learning a bit more, it almost seemed like dumb luck when you get the mix right without really understanding what's going on. Hopefully you're able to balance this one long term. It looks great. Both of the project tanks do!

I'm definitely not trying to overthink it. Some people, very rare, have reported issues with it happening. I've seen it once. It's not something where I will say it's anyone's (or any product's) fault, but just a word of caution to try to add things diluted if you can or pour it to where it will disperse well. If you see a random death and that's something that was added in the timeframe... it's worth mentioning, so I did.

Prime time has a video on filter bacteria and he talks about a study and the dieoff rates of bacteria. Basically, if it stays wet, you should be ok. I would just use something like bacteria in a bottle. I prefer seachem stability, but there's a lot of options out there.

when you're adding the Easy Green, try to add it to a container or jar or something and dilute it into the tank away from any fish. Some sensitive fish can have it hit the gills as they are trying to swim up and expect feeding or something and it can cause some stress/issues/deaths. I think I saw someone on the FB group had an issue with half-beaks that they lost this way. That being said, temp could play a role and the shock in water from the tap going into the tank might be an issue here. Normally things are going to be ok with a slight temp change, but if you're talking a good shift in one direction it can be stressful. Stress leading to issues and whatever is going on leading to an issue. Hopefully that helps. My condolences and I'm sorry for your struggles and losses. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0144860914000041 Check out figure 3 Here's another interesting read as well: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8944636/

It is incorrect. It adds nutrients to the soil when they decompose. If you're concerned, you can pull off leaves and plant the stems. However, the main thing is to make sure you're planting it deep enough. This is something I struggled with a lot at first when getting my tank up and running with the fine plants, shallow roots, and corydoras.

I see the stand, wonderful. I am totally captivated and distracted by that chunk of rock on the co-op towel.

Really cool pattern. It might also look cool as a 4 piece panel. Add another cross bar to the bottom section and then you have the line in the middle with "color" with the mesh pattern on the 2 or 4 "panels" of the door. Whatever you decide, it's going to be pretty special. Great work. I can imagine CA calling you up to want to use the work in their promo stuff when you have it completed.

It's a stem, so you would just plant it like S.Repens or any other foreground stem. Trim it when it gets too tall. I would recommend looking at Tropica's video for the plant in question. They show how to care/plant the stems.

My tap is ~40-50 KH, 100-120 GH. My PH is ~6.8-7. There are charts out there that give you PH vs KH ratios used to determine CO2 levels in your tank. It's not a hard and fast rule, but.... When you're talking wild caught corydoras the max can be around 7.4 or 7.6 for other species. Your best resource is going to be textbooks, studies on the species in question, or a source like planet catfish. Yes, asking the seller is a great idea. Yes the point about bacteria and things at different PH levels is a very valuable one, but also keep in mind what the fish tend to want. Normally you're talking 7.5ish or below for PH, meaning KH of ~80-100 or below (based on my experience with adjusting KH up in my water). That being said, everyone's water is different. I'm going to suggest running something like fine active substrate in that tank (fine controsoil is good and comes in extra fine) or you can use standard size substrate with a feeding dish. That being mentioned, wood, botanicals, peat balls, and using RODI water is a good way to lower your minerals over time. I cannot say if it is required, but from what I have seen with my fish, when they had PH issues they had rapid breathing issues and turned reddish (not their normal bronzey-orange color). This was something I experienced with my pandas when the PH shifted due to KH shifting too high on me for several weeks. They may have been able to adapt long term, but it was definitely stressful for them.

I had a 404 error. Not sure if that's the same one. It was just a broken link.