nabokovfan87

I recommend keeping amanos with EVERYTHING except for what will eat shrimp. Amanos are awesome. I have been getting mine from aquahuna. When they say small, it's small. You get more, so that's cool but just expect some molts up front 🙂 Also.... WELCOME! Forgot that bit 🙂

I definitely wouldn't worry about it one bit. If the main tank has wood, you'll never see him in any sign of an issue. He will camo and take care of himself like they do in the wild (hide all day, out when others sleep!)

Get the candles ready. Turn the lights off! I'm exhausted. I'll post all the photos and what not shortly, but I do not EVER recommend BDBS for corydoras. What a nightmare.

120 G it looks like. Massive tank! I can't speak to it being overstocked or not, but I bet it's pretty awesome looking!

Not even joking. You have a Basilisk in your tank. 😂

I hope you're genuinely doing ok. Please remember to keep your chin up and try to find a reason to smile each day. Yes, EG can be used for plants. I would however, just use tank water! Dose the tank, then scoop some out, and then feed the plants. You get a WC out of the way, they get fed, and water 🙂

The real problem is there's SO MANY amazing corydoras. I need like 15 tanks! I wish you the best of luck deciding. I think my next ones are the venezualean or the slate corydoras.

No matter what your filtration, you'd want to use a diffuser or reactor to get very fine bubbles.

I give it two weeks before they get feisty 😂 Then I'd feed the heck out of them and do a big WC.

The simple way to look at it.... when the water is flowing vertically, you have gravity pushing it back towards the bottom of the pipe. If the pump is at the bottom of that pipe, that's just the actual force of backpressure. If your pump is at the top of that vertical run, you have to pull the water up against gravity. If it's horizontal you have to push it along the pipe and your force against the pump is the friction / resistance of the water against the surface of the pipe itself. I'm sure there is a sump expert around here that can help us with the numbers! 🙂

Yeah. Adding wood, that'll help stability and stuff too with them. It's the equivalent of crushed coral for KH in terms of PH for me (obviously down, not up) Looking forward to seeing what you end up with! I hope they do well.

what size tank?

Has anyone seen these in the wild or been able to try them out?

Yeah, they'll be back! Might be worth emailing them just to ask when 🙂

Do you have wood / airstone in the QT tank or is it on a nano type of HoB filter? I would say that you're fine as long as you want, but I'd be a bit more reassuring if it was a 10-20G tank. The pleco will more than likely hide all day and then pop out when the lights go out and the barbs and everyone are taking a nap. He would do better in the bigger tank because it's going to have the surfaces with the aufwuchs and stuff for him to feed on.

aquahuna should have them! They might be listed as brigittae rasbora

As a general guideline (not always the case) most barbs prefer the 74ish range. Tetras generally prefer it slightly warmer. Just based on that alone I would steer your towards the tetras. I think cherry barbs are more of the 74-76 range as opposed to the 76-78 range that you're keeping the tank at right now. I always try to keep my tanks cooler, but like most everyone it's hot here right now and my ranks are way too warm for my enjoyment! So, that just means they can "tolerate" the temps that are higher. You can read care guides by ACO in the blog and other places that clarifies that when you take a fish meant to be cooler and run them warmer you add stress. This stress does a few things, but the most common one is going to be a higher risk of disease and a shortened lifespan. PH looks to be on the high side, so in either case I'd recommend some wood in the tank or something to try to lower PH. (botanicals, etc.) These are all slightly irrelevant in terms of care, because we are more than likely discussing tank raised fish that are acclimated to wider parameters. For me.... Cherry Barbs - Moreso Red, will get slightly bigger in size Ember Tetras - Moreso orangey red and I'll add another for you: Chili Rasbora - VERY red, unique pattern, very small mouth (needs small food)

ohhhhhh this makes sense. Good job little wheel. very interesting.... Good to know! I think that stuff you have is probably the exact same stuff I have. I guess I forgot to paste the image! (added it) but I meant these ones! I think you're right. They'd probably appreciate bubbles to play in, but they seem to be trying to get oxygenation and struggling slightly with the flow. I think your baffle is a good idea! I totally should've connected the dots here. LOL. Yeah! it might help if you ever have any issues 🙂

Yes, this is your biggest issue right here. Say you take something like this and hook it up to a solar panel (they make them). The boards on those "stations" are a lot more complex. 9 times out of 10 they are charged by plugging it into a wall. That means from the gate you're running AC power to a DC battery. That creates issues with what type of battery you can use and issues with what specifically is driving the output. Power circuitry itself is pretty straightforward but can get pretty complex depending on how things are designed. Do they make everything from 120V down to a 12V rail and then break that down into smaller amperages to give you what all of the low power circuits need? If so, this is where you're spending the majority of the battery's effort doing something that you won't remotely need or use. There is a video I'll send in DM because it links to a competitive store, but it's a very good technical analysis of one situation using the exact same batteries in 4-5 different devices. There's a few pretty basic ground rules to minimize the impact. A. A smaller batter is actually better at reducing losses on extremely low power loads. If you're overhead is 5-10%, you're going to lose that % of the battery no matter what you're actually drawing. The draw is essentially 0 in the eyes of the battery and your loss comes moreso from resistance of the wires, the individual components on the board, and very little power is drawn from the items that you're attaching. What does this ACTUALLY mean for you? This means that you might be better off running a pump that is 4-5x the wattage and running multiple devices off that one pump and using a gang valve, than you are by connecting 2-3 smaller pumps. I did the math for this on the difference between the nano pump and the ACO usb+battery pump and it was negligible. The difference isn't anything that your circuit is going to notice. 0.6-1.5w compared to 2.5w or power draw. This simply means.... how do you not kill the battery and keep the battery alive as long as possible under this load. With the majority of these things, 100% down to 50% is a pretty constant drain in rate. This means it's a pretty consistent timing from 100% down to 75% and from 75% down to 50%. When you start getting towards the end of the charge it might happen a lot quicker than you think. i.e. this is why you usually don't want to fully charge lithium ion batteries over a certain % or down to a certain %. This extends their life and the charges last a bit longer as a result. This is also where something like "cycling the battery" every so often, especially under high use cases and retrain the batteries to work a little better longer term. These also suffer from the above mentioned AC --> DC --> AC conversion issues and a high loss in terms of how long the power will last. In my use, one of those lasted about 8 hours (a big one used to power a portable "station" as well as have enough current/capacity to charge a car battery). While my little DC-->DC battery bank lasted 4 days. It's a crazy interesting, frustrating issue because the "best way" to create what you need is usually by making it yourself. From my own hassle trying to set this up longer term I can only recommend what others suggested to me, wiring it yourself, or going ahead and setting it up to use solar power. This is what I messed around with, some test results in the thread are there, but it's by no means complete. The "best" backup available is the ecotech stuff, but all of that is specific, proprietary connectors too. I found out that making these for reefs is something a ton of people do, but it's not something where you get a long life of power from that device. And the real problem is that while you start with ~10% for the yield, it's going to be 8% and then lower and lower because of it being a certain type of battery or temperature changes over time. A lot of batteries aren't designed to be run 24/7. Because of the change in the way we use batteries, you're even seeing cars and other devices with different battery technologies to handle the different loads a lot better. I can't find a link with the full details, but needless to say it's being "worked on" now because LEDs are much more efficient and used in a higher rate. Most things are USB as a standard these days, etc. Interesting stuff for sure. https://www.saftbatteries.com/media-resources/our-stories/three-battery-technologies-could-power-future

They have air based oxygen stones for very fine bubbles that might be super helpful for you to try to get oxygen maxed as high as possible given what the water can hold. Sometimes they are marketed as anti-algae devices, sometimes they are marketed as sterilizers, but it's just a very fine membrane to make tiny bubbles similar to a CO2 system. Aquario also makes the neo ceramic varieties for air (ACO sells the co2 varieties). Atomizer/sterilizer:

Dean might have some videos you can reference as well as fry shots. Very cool stuff though. Looking forward to seeing the journey!

I can probably help you with this one! I apologize for the delayed reply. I use one that might meet everything you're looking for, but I wish to better understand what it is you're specifically trying to find. 1. Capacity is listed, but obviously there is overhead as well as a difference in type. Some batteries hold charge for a long time, others focus on having a long lifetime, and others try to have their own advantages. Is there a specific battery type you're after? Holding a charge without draining fast for emergency use storage? Or is this something where you would use the device and have it available when need be for the tank? 2. Pretty much everything has this now if it's decent. I will say.... You're speaking in terms of a battery backup for a pump which is a very different thing (unless I'm inferring it differently). That being said most portable batteries will charge and drain at the same time without real issues. There is some loss there because of it. I would recommend having one that hooks up to a USB solar panel as a SOLID option to charge it as well. The added cost just being the correct wattage panel to charge it via USB. 3. No matter what, it's likely very common that you're going to run into issues with this. It's not a negative, but it's just a thing. My biggest issue was the AC to DC to AC conversion and how much that drained batteries of a good capacity. Using a DC battery to a DC based pump worked best. (My battery bank to the nano USB charger) This lasted about 4 days if I'm remembering correctly.

awwwwww. 😞 I'ma clean a filter RIGHT NOW just for you. I was thinking about the issue... You said the biowheel you enjoy so I wanted to figure out a way to make it work / look cool / spin nicely for you. This sponge here, I don't think you need, but it's there acting as a high porosity biological media (this is good!) One way to help might be to just try to keep it under the waterline so that the flow is more even exiting the HoB container. I know it's tight and you have a bunch stuffed in there so no big deal, but that was my initial thought. (Edit: Here's the photo 😞 ) I just realized.... next time you order from amazon look up silicone grease. They use it in surf shops and stuff. I have food grade grease (super lube) and I used that for a while. I now use the grease stuff and it works well. It's kind of silly to get onto an impeller shaft, but for o-rings and what not it's a brilliant thing to have and it's super cheap. On either end of the wheel, add some of that and it should smooth things out. Either there's some crud in there or flow is just uneven or something, but yeah..... biowheels are goofy fun.

If the tank is not at 80. They should do ok. It all depends if you add wood, if PH goes down (not up), etc. We've had recent issues of hobbyists where they had PH take out a few too many corydoras, so I really don't recommend them on the edge like that. Mine have been in the 7.3-7.4 range and done "ok" but definitely weren't happy. Loaches in general are going to be cooler water as well. They tend to like high oxygenation, cooler temps. Similar to corydoras, white clouts, barbs, rasboras, etc. Honestly, the best "bottom dweller" you can probably add is going to be a bolivian ram. Second to that it's likely some varieties of bristlenose plecos. For bolivian rams, PH might be right on the edge again.

My water is liquid rock. I use the blue kitchen sponges and it works. On stuff like the trim it's a pain. On glass, The lid. I use the sponge or I'll use my glass scraper. It works well enough for that limestone type of crust. When it comes to something not glass, it's always annoying to clean! This is why I get so annoyed at the lids not working well 😩 and why I have 3-5 suction cups to route an airline to the middle of the tank, LOL.