nabokovfan87

let me grab it. one sec. @CJs Aquatics

On the ACO stuff it doesn't get hard for me. it is always super stretchy and very difficult to remove from things. I bought some of the "kinked" stuff before it was released, so take that for what you will.

I vote a year. Cause mine says it expires in a year! 😂 I keep mine in the fridge until I use it, cold and dry. Out of light and heat.

It could be as simple as too many fish too fast. Most of the ammonia produced is from fish breathing and the waste from doing so. Yes food is a cause as well. To give you an example, I added fish to a cycled tank, removed one of the filters, it's been cloudy for a few weeks and no deaths or issues. I have been feeding it more heavily as well. Depending what the filtration looks like, how it's setup, you might not have had an efficient setup to support biological filtration. Especially if you're using a cartridge based system where you don't have sponge or ceramic media as well as the cartridge. The bacteria will grow on all surfaces of the tank, so having hardscape in the tank helps. However, the bacteria thrives on the highly oxygenated, high flow areas of the filter too. If you need help please feel free to send photos and ask further questions. I wish you the best of luck on the tank recovery and I'm very sorry for your struggles and losses.

Correct. so based on daylight savings, and other things, you'll need to resync the light. When it loses power it defaults to a specific on/off, but it's not programmed anymore until you sync it again. That should be good. I agree with the method of lower hours, less intensity, and then slowly increase it. Max is typically 8 hours. The hazy water is probably just a bacterial bloom and will clear up with water changes and time.

Rainbow shark? RTBS? Maybe some SAEs? A few rams? It's a beautiful tank! Nicely done.

I think equilibrium (or something like that) might be useful for you to slightly give the plants some GH without affecting PH too much. I would have to verify, but I think adding a GH buffer won't affect KH/PH if it's one that doesn't use those ions. https://www.aquariumcoop.com/blogs/aquarium/ph-gh-kh There are some videos I've seen. I would encourage you to head to Bentley Pascoe's next live stream and feel free to ask the question directly there. Last time I asked one we got a video out of it to reference. I have heard KH / GH discussed and it is beneficial to some plants and crustaceans. I did have concerns in my tank that low enough KH was leading to deficiencies I was seeing. As far as your tank though and the question at hand, agreed. I wouldn't use carbon / purigen because the tank in question doesn't require it's use. If you had sick fish, wanted to remove meds, etc., that is when you'd want to use it.

Agreed! That tank looks pretty awesome. If it's a new setup, I would lean towards a light dose, make sure you see growth, and then add more if you need to. The reason being that if the plants are new, then you might have a ~1-2 week delay on growth while they adjust to the tank. Whatever you determine your "normal dose" to be, let's say it's 4 pumps, split that to one dose at the beginning and then one dose 4 days later. (2 pumps each time). Hopefully that helps!

Of the ones mine have tried: Soilent Green: While they do enjoy eating their veggies, it is allowed, but after a while they don't go insane over it. Super Green: Similar to soilent green, expect more enjoyment of it, slightly. Community blend: The overall "yep it's good" food. You can expect most every fish to enjoy it, they don't go insane, but they do like it. Very, very healthy for them too. Bottom Scratcher: They definitely went nuts over it when I first fed it! They had never had the fly larvae before and boy did they like the new smell. They do seem to enjoy this a lot, especially blended and mixed in with the others. So... to answer your question.... get at least 2! I would probably suggest bottom scratcher and soilent green or bottom scratcher and community blend if you have a good amount of spirulina flake for now. As far as in the future for me personally I am going to try the igapo explorer one next as well as spawn and grow. Igapo: It has the fly largae in it, but also some other nice things that I think would be healthy. S&G: seaweek, spirulina, as well as a ton of other good things. I have heard this is an overall "good food" nutritionally, but it also may encourage spawnings. It has tons of vitamins 🙂

It could be days up to weeks. It happens unfortunately. Normal I would say is ~3-5 days and the upper end of concern is two weeks that I've dealt with it. You could also have it go one week on, one week fine, then it spikes again. In that case, you would do water changes and give the biological filtration a chance to catch up. Dosing the bottled bacteria for 7-10 days usually solves it by the end of the week.

You could have leeching from the substrate or the root tabs and that could cause the constant ammonia readings. Adding the dechlor would make the ammonia non-toxic for a certain amount of time, but it would still show up if not removed and dealt with. Water changes are your friend, dose in bottled bacteria, and then keep testing to track what is going on.

Purigen is a resin based chemical media. Think carbon, but it can be used more than once. It is usually recharged with bleach and is also something used in water treatment facilities on some level. (Someone on the forums has experience in that field and can speak to that) Purigen is used for something like a planted tank to remove unwanted things with the caveat that it "shouldn't" remove the things your plants want available. Kind of similar to poly filter, I imagine that purigen removes whatever organics is in excess at the time of use. It "works" by removing things and there's very little data for me that I've seen as to how to control what it removes and what it can or can't remove. If you ever want to remove something, I'd suggest carbon or purigen. If you're going to use purigen once and throw it away (a lot of people do), then just use carbon. Tannins are a very specific thing and you wouldn't want to remove them because of those benefits. So if your plan is to have a blackwater tank, then you wouldn't use purigen. To speak to what you're saying though, you can have a tank with botanicals and tannins without having dark colored water. You can use carbon or purigen to clarify the water and then remove it and control the color with water changes and keep some of those benefits in your tank by leaving some of those dissolved organics in the water.

I imagine some of that difference is based on the camera too. Sometimes things are just hard to take a picture of. It isn't too bad to wash. Most of the caribsea stuff isn't too bad. Trying to find my tank that had it in it. From what I remember, yeah, it's pretty close. (top, middle sample) It might be a larger particle size, but I'd have to see them side by side. I can't find my old photo of the tank before I swapped it out.

Post the video on YouTube as unlisted or public and then you can link it here.

yes you can use salt at the same time. I would set the temp for the fish and keep it there. The only common tips about temp and disease treatments is that some fish will be more prone to disease if the temp is too high (above their range) as well as when treating for Ich specifically you want to raise temp to ensure that it completes it's lifecycle and is killed by the meds.

First, I will say that after thinking about everything, I think someone who modifies an easy carbon / flourish excel type of product with an actual glass / acrylic dropper top will make life a bit easier on the hobbyist. Even having something like a dropper top similar to how essential oils are used might be helpful (5-10 drops per gallon, etc.) so that you can slowly spot dose from the bottle. Based on my own health issues, I have decided I probably should be using nitrile gloves and I hope it says something somewhere on all of these products about trying to keep this stuff from being absorbed into the skin. I haven't looked, but maybe that's something we as hobbyists need to make more aware of. It reminds me of edd china and why he wears the gloves he does. From ACO this is their warning: A bit of math for the sake of it. 1 bottle = 500 ml = ~500 pumps treating my 30G tank, you're looking at let's call it 165 treatments which would last just under 6 months if you're talking about daily treatments. Considering I'm running two tanks side by side.... this stuff (whatever it is) has to work effectively. I am trying to double check the info, but I read somewhere or heard on Irene's video above that the glutaraldehyde will break down in light, so dosing it with the lights on might explain why it's "not working" as well I as I would like. I may end up moving things to dose right after the lights go out just to test if we see better performance.

Sorry, I mean the black swordtail fry! I think one of the females keeps trying to hunt all the fry down. There's a few surviving, but they are afraid of the pandas and so they are staying at the top. I added some cover and we'll see how these do. I am also going to have to keep an eye out for some cory fry to see if any eggs hatched out. The ones I had moved didn't seem fertilized.

You are going to want to treat with general cure or paracleanse (same stuff under different labels) and that would help with the white stringy internal worms. There is a few tips / guidelines so let me grab that video.... You will need to treat a minimum of 3 times. Salt is also highly recommended, so please get some aquarium salt to have on hand if you don't. Please go ahead and verify this is the best temp for the betta. From what I have seen and others have mentioned I think you want to be in the 78-81 range. It's something to look into and this would help the fish because it reduces one variable of stress on it's immune system. https://www.aquariumcoop.com/blogs/aquarium/betta-fish-care-guide

Gotta love it when the phone can't decide to not blur a photo. Faucet Side: Siphon side: Looks like each attachment has: A. Black hose fitting (black fittings with hose threads on one end) B. Hose barb fitting (black barb type fittings) C. Hose clamp fitting (green rings that go on tube to clamp down on B) So you have one extra "b" piece from the photo above that might need to go somewhere.

If you have BBA / Staghorn in one spot, you got it everywhere. It's the worst. Try to get a good, close photo of the fungus (white patch) that is focused so we can see a little detail.

how does the expression go... "This is my plant, there are many like it, but this one is mine." The little ram said to himself.

A few more fry dropped today. 🙂 How often are you feeding them, 4x a day, small powder type foods?

For brown diatoms it's generally the "easiest" to balance out the aquarium and to get some of the things dialed in and it would normally die off naturally. You can use a toothbrush and that would remove a good portion of it on generally most surfaces. Ease back dosing of fertilizer slightly to lean out nitrates and then just keep an eye on things. If you have issues with ambient light, cover 3 sides of the tank with your preferred color of 100% tint window film and go from there. You can even use an opaque white and it should look pretty nice but help to diffuse some of that ambient light. Because you do have ambient light in the room, it isn't an issue, but it's something where you might cut back your normal light by 5-15% or so to compensate. Algae like the long / sustained light and that's where you'll see the benefit of adding the window film onto the sides and back of the tank. For brown diatoms it's generally the "easiest" to balance out the aquarium and to get some of the things dialed in and it would normally die off naturally. You can use a toothbrush and that would remove a good portion of it on generally most surfaces. Ease back dosing of fertilizer slightly to lean out nitrates and then just keep an eye on things. If you have issues with ambient light, cover 3 sides of the tank with your preferred color of 100% tint window film and go from there. You can even use an opaque white and it should look pretty nice but help to diffuse some of that ambient light. Because you do have ambient light in the room, it isn't an issue, but it's something where you might cut back your normal light by 5-15% or so to compensate. Algae like the long / sustained light and that's where you'll see the benefit of adding the window film onto the sides and back of the tank. From my experience, the brown diatoms show up when you have slightly high nitrates and waste in the water / tank. Just up your cleaning and a big WC usually fixes issues for me.

It should attack to the actual siphon itself (the part that goes into the tank) and it comes with something like 3-5 feet of tubing that attaches to the cutoff part. When you're working on the tank, the white shutoff is essentially in one of your hands to cut the flow when filling the tank. let me grab some photos for ya