nabokovfan87

You don't want to be using dechlorinator that often. It is recommended at most once per 24 hours. So my suggestion would be to do one 50% water change per day until things resolve themselves. At most, do a water change every 12 hours (morning and night). Anything more than that, you're likely doing more harm than good. You can see it here in the FAQ section about how often to dose it. https://www.seachem.com/prime.php fritz complete is going to be very similar to prime. I'm sure they have their own FAQ section as well on the website, but I happen to recall these particular questions being answered by seachem.

LOL I've never used the "stick-ems" or seen them before. Can vouch for the nutrinsect stuff tho. I try to limit myself to two, but YEAH.... I understand that!

They just had it on amazon for something crazy like $2-3 for the jar. I'd be very interested to hear your review on it! I haven't. No. It generally looks like a good food. The aqueon one is 3 types of bugs, where the fluval ones tend to be just BSF larvae. It's just a preference thing for me. I think both work well. I also feed the bug version of repashy which is BSF too.

For ref. this is moonlight, I believe. my 55g was the sunset gold. I'll see if I can dig up a closeup on the sand of that. Same stuff in this tank: This is the sunset gold. Algae on the front, but that gets cleaned. Little bit of debris in the back, but generally clean. If you want "clean sand" it's definitely achievable.

I switched from xtreme towards northfin. Of the xtreme, I use the spirulina / krill flake. The pellets, my fish couldn't chew on and they didn't sink for me. the nano pellets might be better than the ones I had (1.5mm semi-floating) I am talking 4-5 days later and they'd still be floating at the surface in the corners of the tank. It got to the point where I ran some tests just to verify what on earth I was experiencing. Simlar issue with the shrimp food where it was so dense and so hard that the shrimp couldn't actually break it apart. Soaking it didn't help much either and it would take ~3 days for the shrimp to eat some food as opposed to 6-24 hours for other stuff I've tried. In terms of the bug pro and things like that I will mention is oft because the food is that good. Aqueon Nutrinsect is fish free and there's an advantage to that when it comes towards something like shark conservation (personally something I care about). The food itself, apart from all of that has really solid ingredients from everything I can tell, but most importantly.... the texture of the food is spot on. It's like a firm squish. The fish can get in there and break it apart, but it's not going to leave a mess on you at all. Pellet size if good enough that it works on any smaller mouth fish. I have used 2 northfin foods so far, the krill pro pellet (1mm size) and the cichlid veggie pellet (1mm size). I use that in replacement of flake just because I only have corydoras and shrimp right now. High flow, that stuff sinks extremely quickly. With less flow, it is semi-floating. It's not too hard that you can't break it up, and it's got good stuff in there. I like the addition of things like rosemary on the ingredients list. I was not a fan at all of the algae wafers, which is pretty much the exact same recipe as the cichlid veggie pellets. NLS I haven't, but want to try the algaemaxx stuff when I have some fish in the upper regions of the tank. Omega one, I've used before, but it didn't last long once I just decided to get food online. But yeah, to your question at the end there.... crave flake is a mix of the krill and spirulina. It's a good one to have on hand if you have upper dwelling fish.

It's very dirty, a lot of fines, and it's slightly finer, but similar to the sunset gold stuff above. The sunset gold is like the "deluxe model" version and it's got some of the junk removed from it. SG is definitely beach sand in texture while play sand is like that stuff you see in sandboxes (of course). It's hard to explain, but hopefully that makes some sense.

I thought about this view today and magically here it is. 🙂 I have a really, really cool little clip to share with you. There's a "newbie reefer" series on youtube that's easy to follow and fun. I would love to see some coral. Chasing Coral is a really wonderful film and speaks to hobbyist efforts like NANF/CITES species and the other species program where hobbyists are trying to breed fish that are endangered or lost in the wild. 10G is a little tight for salt, so just think on it and enjoy the phase of endless possibilities that you're in.

As an example of bba before it goes a bit crazy and it forms like a diatom I have two older photos. The first is just this discoloration on the pleco cave and the second is discoloration (grey-black) on the red lava rock. You can see one rock looks fine, the other has shaded out over time as the algae takes hold. That was taken down and set in tubs, then in the new tank it went nuts and thrived on me. I had a mix of staghorn / BBA develop. Some of your photos show the cyano, which you are aware and looking at, the other stuff you're showing reminds me of the above. I was looking at the tank this morning and I have a dead corner in the front left just because the intake is pretty weak. I am planning to swap it out, but it looks like circulation is playing a role in my particular case. Do you happen to have SAE in any tanks you can move to this one for a month or two? The above is what looks like BBA to me. This is what looks like cyano pretty clearly. I dig the plan! keep us posted.

Really beautiful. Nice work! Welcome to the forums. 🙂

Mark's shrimp tanks uses it to collect duckweed for making shrimp food! Awesome work. I've gotten rid of it twice. Don't fear the duckweed! I used a specimen container and 2-3 buckets. I would pick through it manually and remove it by hand. Dip it in the container to remove the duckweed and then just put the "cleaned" plants in the bucket of water. Repeat that about 5-15 times and you'll feel like you got most of it. Cross your fingers and find out.

magnet sticks! Really cool trick. Alright, so I want to start by showing you a comparison, and then let's break down what's going on. Fine sand: Moonlight Typical Size: 0.25 – 0.75mm Sunset gold Typical Size: 0.25 – 1.0mm medium-course sand: Crystal River Typical Size: 0.5 – 1.0mm Torpedo Beach Typical Size: 0.5 – 2.0mm In terms of something like grain size is where you're going to run into the issues that you're experiencing. The smaller the grain size, the easier it is for it to be suspended into the water column. The larger the grain size.... or the larger the smallest grain size is.... then you run into a situation where sand can actually act exactly like gravel. Because of my experiences with the first 2 shown above, I've ruined pumps and equipment and siphoned many a tank worth of sand because it's that light. Once I stopped really putting myself in that position, it's been enlightening and something where I won't ever use a fine sand like that. Now, let's take a look at an example. This is my shrimp tank and it has the #3 example above as the substrate. I think it's actually extremely fine sand visually, but it's just a scenario where I am having an ease cleaning that sand because of the grain size. I'll attach two photos, both of which show very, very dirty sand and I am working on cleaning it. After cleaning, ignore the algae up front, but you get the idea. The yellow tinge is due to the botanicals in the water. The photo above just has the wrong color balance. Above you see a bit of a "peppery" look to the sand, below that's been cleaned out. So I would start with grain size, based on that you're going to have to adapt your tactics on how you clean things.

Welcome @Mercfh, beautiful plecos! A lot of people would tell you to not worry as much about pH. Essentially, KH is tied to your pH value. I'll link the blog article below that expands on this, but it's a very fun and interesting research aspect of the hobby. As your tank builds up, KH drops, which in turn destabilizes your pH! This does not mean that the drop you're experiencing has anything to do with the KH value being too low, in fact, you're pretty good on that front. What you're experiencing is something called off-gassing. As the water comes out of the line it "stabilizes" to a normal value. You can double check this by running a test where you take water from the tap and aerate it for 24 hours, then test your PH, KH, and GH. You'll get values and those would be indicative of what your tank should test at when you're doing proper maintenance. Those would be the parameters you want to select some fish for. https://www.aquariumcoop.com/blogs/aquarium/ph-gh-kh You can always do a sanity check by running the low pH test. It is a bit weird being in that 7.0-8.0 range with how the high range and low range PH tests are setup. Anytime I'm in the low 7's I run the lower pH test to get a better understanding of high or low 7's.

I wanted to share this for the sake of it potentially helping out someone in the future. I've been in the middle of it and thank goodness everything was "ok". Japan just had the earthquake hit yesterday morning and it was a pretty sizeable one. The duration of it was similar to the one I had experienced locally and it just goes to show you that there are certain things you can do to make the tanks a bit more equipped in the case of something like this happening. If you want to see some of the clips, CNN has a video showing an office building video that was taken. Essentially, little things like keeping the waterline a little lower or buying a tank with a very big piece on the top to hide the lowered waterline, might be helpful. Certain heft of lids, stand construction, and all of those things definitely play a role. One other thing I would note is power placement, mentioned above in the thread, making sure things won't get splashed or that if they do it won't pool in the socket and cause further safety issues. Ryo's stands, he just had a video a few days prior showing them built, talk about SOLID. They are 4x4 beams and some really cool specialty saws used to construct and cut out the connection points.

If possible, try to get a photo showing the other side of the head. I'm very sorry! Hopefully someone can chime in with a bit of advice. @Tropicalfishkeeping201

Congratulations! Here is a fun, related barb video.

Keep it up. Keep them happy and they are an extremely rewarding fish! I had meant to share this too. Really fun photo.

Found this today, just wanted to share.

Expanding on your conversation @anewbie I have a similar issue and experience. The two things I would recommend is a month of seriously good siphoning to remove a lot of the debris in the sand. It could be compaction, causing stagnation on that part of the tank. Getting in there with a chopstick or a net handle might dislodge a lot of debris, but doing that stuff once a month might help long term to alleviate the issues. If you don't have a lasagna setup on the substrate I would mess with it as much as you can after you get the siphon side of things situated. The plan in my setup is to remove the heavy / compacted top layer and replace it with something slightly more course as the base layer (the base then becomes the top, it'll be a fun hassle! I'm sure in the end it'll all mix up, but I'm guessing that debris and organics sitting in the sand might be causing some dead pockets on you. Mine, I think is just due to the composition of that particular substrate and being heavy in iron/metals and encouraging BBA in spots.

It looks similar to a 29G aquarium, very slightly bigger. If you're going the tetra route, I would check out trilineatus or hastatus/hasbrosus corydoras.

@TeeJay or @Guppysnail might be able to share some killi photos! I would think tanks 1-2 are pretty awesome for a few things. The cube, potentially just go plants only and scape it really well. Stick towards just otos, amanos, clithon snails, etc. There's a ton of fun options out there. If you can do live foods, it does open up some really beautiful species that would be extremely unique and interesting. Something like elassoma species (cc @Fish Folk has them breeding! ) would be great as well in a setup like what you're working with. Nano size tetra, rasbora, minnow species, danios, and fish under 1" would be where I personally start. If it was my setups and all things were possible: 1. Bolivian ram or German blue ram solo tank with some shrimp culls maybe. 2. Plant only, fancy scape tank, maybe a centerpiece killi or a small group of white clouds. 3. The world of nano is really your oyster here. Find some nice branchy style wood and then try out 2-3 schools of very small nano cypranidae (rasbora, danio, minnows) or if I was brave it would be for NANF species like elassoma types.

I'll second amazonas. I forget who, maybe it's primetime aquatics. They have a referral link you can use as well if you want. If you're in the EU, I am certain there's a lot more options out there, some centered on shrimp as well. (maybe those are quarterly) If you're in the US then as a substitute I would say go check out biotopia and Chris Lukhaup's channels.

Fingers crossed!

I checked on the moss I do have left and it's... mostly dead. I don't think the tank is getting enough light, but then other parts of the tank are getting a ton of light and having algae issues. I'll need to move a rock or something and adjust things, but the event of the day was discovering that the mesh wall I have for the moss is basically empty or dead because it slipped out of the mesh on me. I relocated it to get more light and fingers crossed I can get it thriving again. It'll take a lot of time and the backup plan is to get some pointed spear moss if need be. If you really do want to attempt success with moss, potentially try a plant only jar or tank setup near a window. It won't take much more than feeding the tank some ferts at that point and a very gentle air stone to keep the water from stagnating. It's a "windowsill project" that you might have success with and get comfortable. Temp I am finding is a big player here, but the other thing is that moss usually doesn't get propagated out or have enough light. Algae loves to grow on dying plants is something I've found out as well. So sometimes algae moving in can be a sign of the plant struggling. 100% Me too and thanks!

We got a line for rams at this point! Very cool that you're sitting on eggs. 🤞

totally easy. you got this! use a net, place it over an airstone or over a sponge filter just resting on the rim of the tank.