nabokovfan87

Can he fix the tidal? LOL I'm at the point where I have an idea on how.... but don't have the $$ to do so. or a band saw. Checking out stuff now. Much appreciated.

It might be a good focus as an addendum as to "why" this works well or is a preferred method. I think a lot of hobbyists, myself included, struggle at identifying a plant literally trying to use dead material for nutrients but the outside might look "fine". If we could talk to the plant, we'd have an idea of what needs it has and it's sort of like reading the tea leaves. Even something like.... using it as a test for plant health, might be worth it if you're really struggling to figure out how a plant is doing. Interesting stuff, for sure.

You're good to go. I just mean, you're not using a cartridge, you have a place for bacteria in a high flow area, you have aeration, you have everything setup right. Pump is working, impeller is moving, flow is normal, etc. Plants love to drop a leaf and clog up a pump.

I had a few plants, various types, where the roots just turned dark and basically were dead. What I am seeing is that RR likes to "highlight" dead plant material. It breaks it down. I have one stem of the bacopa today that has ~1-2 roots on one end attached to basically mush but it's still alive. On the other end is the only leaves that are alive on all the stalks on all the stems of bacopa. It is the obi wan of my bacopa now. 😂 It popped out of the substrate when I was re-attaching the diffuser and I went to replant and had to do a double take on which end had roots vs. stalk mush. We'll see! Fingers crossed.

Yes! I would also just do a sanity check on the filter, but I think, from what I recall, everything is setup correctly and you have sponge + ceramic. Just need time!

It likes to use the actual filter as a home. It grows on plastic. It's the worst stuff ever. Yes! I think it was Odd Duck / Guppy Snail both mentioned it. That is the plan for rocks, I just need to get one I can use. Literally need to trademark the word panda pile for a shirt design or something. 20 of them piled up in a corner of the tank is just too much. They are awesome little fish, thankfully recovering nicely!

I might need this for something.... 🤔

Something like a Zero Water 5G filter system (or under sink filter) would work well for the sake of a small tank. Anything 20G+ I think you're just overthinking it and need to focus on fish that do well (and plants) that do well in hard water. This is something a lot of us deal with and ultimately it means that you have well over 300+ ppm of GH in your water. That the TDS in the water is very high. Once you're into the purple range, it's high. Once you're into the feint/ light purple it's pretty high. I have had water like this for many years without issues. Some contamination on the KH pad. Just be careful with it. Here's a great video to demo what I am talking about. I'm guessing you live real close to me! Water looks like low KH, Low PH, high GH.

Rubberlip pleco will handle the glass for you. It won't work too well on the wood or other surfaces, but they love to clean glass. It will work on rocks and flat surfaces if they are pretty flat / wide.

Because you have a good amount of floor space, I would double the amount of corydoras. It will change their behavior pretty significantly.

I went ahead and repeated this technique on my other tank. I'll add this as it's own post, not an edit, because I want to keep the "other tank" notes separate from the project. I entirely blame my motivation for this to @Chick-In-Of-TheSea @Cinnebuns and @Guppysnail and all their efforts trying to help me find so many methods to deal with this stuff. I HOPE..... if I have to scrub this crap daily, this does it. Here is some before shots. Following the scrub down here it all the BBA in the tank before cleaning. Here is the video showing the technique. Lights are out, but I'll grab a photo tomorrow.

Very interesting, nice work. Always nice to see something reused, especially plastic.

Cleaned the tank today and scrubbed the living crap out of the algae on the wood. the S. Repens seems to be doing well and I am seeing that now. The tissue culture I got has some new plants or I was just pretty bad at sorting it out. The Hygro Pinnatifida melted back pretty hard but I think it will bounce back. Moss is ok. Hairgrass seems ok. Anubias is kind of ambivilant with everything, but I will be glueing it back to the hardscape now that I have the layout and the algae scraped. The bacopa.... 95% of it is completely trashed now. There might be one stem that has some life left in it, but that plant did not handle treatment well at all. All leaves, stems, etc. are completely melted and turning into nothing. The "new growth" at the top of one stem might make it, but I don't have my hopes up. I will keep my eye out on everything over the next couple of days.

If you ask the shop manager, maybe they can get some in for you!

I generally only use these as a secondary filter in a tank. Not necessarily for polishing, but as a method to host very strong bacteria and to keep air running during water changes. I have ran 3 of these on a 75 with additional HoBs and it wasn't insane flow, if that gives you an idea of how much or how little these things do with flow. the sponge at the bottom is very, very small compared to something like a sponge filter and you probably could even just replace it with a fine pad if you wanted. I have issues with them gunking up over time, so I don't recommend them as a primary for that reason. After a certain amount of time you need to take them apart, clean out the air inlet to make sure a bit of muck hasn't stopped the flow too much. It happens, but If you had the ability to run your own ziss airstone I think you'd have a slightly easier product to recommend as a solo filter.

I 2nd this idea! Agreed. Temps alone I know the hillstream loaches won't do well. Mine, similar to what Cinnebuns mentions will hang out on large flat surfaces and not necessarily where you'd see them a ton. they camo very well and are usually active at night. Mine spent a lot of time on the back glass and near the HoB filtration, airstones, and on pleco caves. If you have a low temp tank, 70-74 range, then something like loaches make more sense. Panda garra, based on body shape, I would imagine are similar to those care requirements. The betta is going to determine the tank temp as it's the focal. If you want to have something that handles a wider range I think your best bet is a small pleco, shrimp (they usually like it cooler up to a point), or snails.

Yeah. In a non wood tank, I don't mind nerites one bit. They are cool. I saw the photo this morning, was not expecting that result. LOL. oh whale.... I thought it was some crazy scuds or something at first.

Well that's just terrifying. LOL. I don't think I ever saw the nerites with stuff like that. I am officially on team nerite and off team mystery snail 😂

I'm working on cleaning equipment today. I recorded a video as an update for the RR thread as to how the hardscape and plants are doing, but.... then I accidentally deleted the wrong one trying to edit it with my phone. I wanted to show the video followed by the photos I took because I tried a new technique to clean off the wood. I was watching green aqua discuss how to rid a tank of algae and what was interesting was their use of an electric toothbrush on stubborn algae. I'll have to keep a head to use for fish stuff when the one I am using now needs swapped. There is also a tongue attachment that might work too! Something to try in the future, but this time I went a different route. I took the blade side of my mag float and just went to town trying to get rid of these stubborn tufts of algae stuck on the wood. the plants are "ok" and the RR treatment seems to be doing on. Some of the anubias isn't looking too hot, but it all takes time to grow. The filter flow is lowered so I know I need to clean everything. I brought in some buckets of water to cool off from the outside heat. I added bags of water to the freezer so I can use those as well to drop the temp on the tank as much as possible and try to trigger a spawn. I scraped the wood for about 30 minutes until I was satisfied with enough progress and to try to see how the shrimp do now that they can more easily get at some of this stuff. I have these big tumbleweeds of BBA floating all over the place so I cleaned the intake and then I'll go ahead and remove the wood and siphon everything I need to. When I was doing the big clean last week I had the lid drop in the wind, today I found a chunk of glass in the tank. Not fun. Here's the photo update as far as "how well" that technique worked with the dull style blade and cleaning the wood underwater as opposed to trying to see it with the wood outside the tank. Unfortunately, that is extremely hard to do. The video before should show off pretty well what these looked like before. 🙂 Edit: I finished up my black cory water change, cleaned out the pump (filled with plants that melted into the water column, yep there is a prefilter sponge. The magic of seachem I guess. I added about 15 lbs of ice to drop the temp and dumped in a big chunk of food to try to trigger behavior for spawning. I don't expect them to spawn tonight, but it would be nice now that the fish have a proper tank that's a lot cleaner compared to previous nights. I'll watch them under the blue light and see what happens. My next effort will be to move them to an adjacent wall that's a lot quieter to improve their atmosphere. The walls in the house aren't too solid, and two in my room aren't walls (single layer thick panels) which limits how much I can remove noise. Happy to help. Best of luck.

I forget where, but the reference guide I saw for plant acclimation said that if you add EG right away it could potentially just feed algae issues. If you have plants that are severely starved and look beat up from shipping, they might not be able to fight that off, also feeding algae issues. Root tabs I do on the first 1-2 days, but I have been trying to force myself to have a bit of patience with the liquid fertilizers, typically one week. Hopefully that's helpful 🙂 Welcome to the forums!

Ah, very interesting! How do you handle trimming with something like this? Do you trim it and then take photos for competition or do you trim, let it get new growth and then take photos?

ORD but very cool stuff. I haven't heard of that program before. Hopefully the feedback above is helpful!

What software are you using? After Effects? I'm looking at these two photos for reference. I don't know if both with the same camera or not. I assume settings have been changed slightly. The first picture is a bit more "emotional" in terms of the aesthetics of it. I am drawn towards that contrast and the pops of color that seem to stand out moreso. The background is difficult to see just due to light coverage, but the redness of the fish is a highlight for me (especially compared to the second image). If you look at the two plants in the center of the tank, there is this very delicate muted red coloration along with the sage-like veins showing in very good detail in this shot. Having those two details in the final image you decide on seem to be where my eye lingers on the photograph. In the second photo it's much stronger lighting across the plants and the balance is a little better compared to the first one. It's a warmer image. It shows heavy yellow hues and the green is a bit more subdued because the lights show off those details a lot more. The center of the tank is very interesting, texturally and those three plants in the middle are so different from one another, but also very different than the rest of the tank. It's a very interesting focal point and again, one of the highlights for me. If you split the difference between these two photos, I think you'll have the shot you're looking for. Here is the side by side of what I'm drawn to. Especially the foreground on the left side.

I'm off to go work on the black corydoras tank. How are the new fish doing as a part of the horde?!?

Really awesome stuff 🙂 Such a unique species.