nabokovfan87

They like to sift through the sand. Sand is preferred. Like Corys, they can handle other substrates, but it's just not optimal. They might mess up some plants during mating fights, but usually they are pretty good about it.

Skimmer I would seal, the others I would only open up the lower intake (it's not really a full opening) by cutting out the little half-moon piece and removing the mid-water blue dial. then you seal the hole where the dial is leaving the other mid-water intake slots open. That should alleviate pretty much all of the issues you're having with chunks getting stuck.

Looks great, they are smaller than I thought they'd be!

I think there's a few things going on, but I wanted to ask if you see a ton more snails at night? Maybe there is that many hiding? The filter goes from right to left as well as bottom to top in terms of flow. This is similar to the Aqueon with how the flow is and it's slightly difficult or weird to setup. I used to use a half height sponge in the rear and then have a full height sponge to try to take the majority of the muck out. Here is how I would try to set it up in future. I don't think there's an issue with where you have your ceramic media, but that would also be a good place to stuff your seeded media and just let that flow into the entire cavity. There might be added muck in that input section, but that's difficult to know without having it on hand. Hopefully this helps with the detritus a bit! The gaps you're mentioning could be allowing bypass and allowing the detritus you're seeing to flow right back into the tank. It's so frustrating when filters bypass like this. I've wasted a lot of sponge because it was slightly off. If you're doing it by hand, always try to go slightly over and test fit. Easier to trim very small bits at the end. It's definitely not easy when you have weird shapes and stuff to deal with as well. Keeping sand clean definitely isn't easy, especially when it's new. Eventually you will find a balance. I would use the tip of the siphon to get stuff in the water and then try to vacuum it out. You can see the separation here where the red particles from the food are going into the sand quite a bit. Having a longer siphon (the rigid siphon inside the tank being wider in diameter and longer) and using the method Cory demonstrates of crimping the tube and stopping flow is really going to help. Because you're going into the substrate to remove the food from a little bit deeper than just the top surface, I would try to plunge it in about 1/2" deep and then see if that helps. EDIT: This post might be helpful as well for setting yours up.

Looks great. Hopefully it's easier to maintain. Just remember to clean the media and stuff with dechlorinated or tank water from now on. Keep an eye on test results, but you should see things settle down a bit easier now.

There's a thread/category where they post the fish available in the store. You can probably get the answer by checking or posting in that thread.

Charcoal/carbon is fine as long as you're not actively running meds. It is not required for day to day filtration. The AC50 sponge should work well for your use. I believe the other one shown is the same sponge but a different thickness. The ziss ones from ACO are really nice airstones because you can adjust the flow. There's a few of them that have this feature. I would recommend not getting the very cheap lee's or others because I've broken the stems off about a dozen times and been stuck without an airstone. This is a pretty good point and this is one of the main reasons I don't like to treat ammonia by using prime daily. Sachems website states that prime works for the time specified. It also says DO NOT dose prime more than once every 24 hours. One of the safest ways to manage ammonia, nitrites is with water changes. Given the issues with cycle and tap, hopefully this gets easier!

I would suggest starting here. Please let me know if you have any questions. You're talking about the skimmer intake?

You can do the slow acclimation method, put the shrimp / water into a specimen container or something similar and slowly add water from the tank into that container. This video does discuss how to do so with a breather bag. I hope it helps!

I'd add an airstone to try to break this up. It's likely from the food or that slime stuff that shows up on equipment (white film) in lower flow tanks. Understood, so you're saying it was in the tank itself? or inside the intake where the grill is? I appreciate it! Based on just the shape of the foams I think part of the issue, reason for the film and stuff is just the way the filter is loaded. If you remove the green cartridge you'd want that foam to completely cover the bottom of that filter cavity. It would have some sort of an oval shape and then water flows up, into your media. You'd be looking at something like this: If it doesn't make sense please let me know and I'll try to find a better video or photos. If you have any concerns about bacteria in the tank and interrupting the cycle you can take the cartridge that you have now and just set it near the filter in the tank for 7-14 days and it will allow the new sponge to take in some of the bacteria and start colonizing the new media. If the ceramic has been in there a while, there's no real need to do this. This should help to remove the film as well that you're seeing if this isn't the while biofilm I was mentioning earlier.

I've never had luck with JF, I've never tried swords. I very much love anubias and how easy it is to make it happy. I think the biggest issue here is going to be light power and, equally, your fertilization schedule. Essentially, anubias loves very lean dosing. Something like stems or root feeders will need tabs as well as light as well as dosing to do well. Step 1: Get the plant to acclimate to your water (this is the same issue I'm having) and if you run into issues here it could be care, but it could also just be vast water differences between your water and where the plants are at now. Step 2: Get the plant to beat out the algae. This is where lighting and your ferts come into play. I believe even Cory has said it a few times on his farm tours, that phosphate is typically in high qty in the food we feed. If the tank has a high load on it, that's typically where you'd get that from. I can't imagine your tanks not having enough food in them!!!! Very interesting point here. Try to keep nitrites as close to or below 10. If you can keep it lower, it might be an indicator on your dosing being effective. I can't speak to the fert you're using and how it shows up on a nitrate test. I was running mine a bit too high and having similar issues. Lowering it, being able to visually see where my fert levels were, helped me a lot to determine how often to dose. As far as plants, I think a stem plant is a good place to start. Specifically I'd suggest PSO, Vallisneria, or something like bacopa that's pretty easy to get going.

LOL.... I definitely don't have any of those left, but might have to find something similar. Nice mod! I have one of these to try as well. Do you hang it on the rim or float it on the top of the water/substrate?

I would add a few amanos and call it good. I really wish I had a 15L or smaller tank for plants like this.

It would be. It's used on a tank without a lid, I don't really want to move lights and lids every time I add some water. The "pasta basket" strainers seem to fit that dimension, but just have to dig into it. I did buy a small strainer, I'll take photos and what not and test it out.

100% agreed. I would remind people though that having hard water vs. soft water is NOT entirely tied to PH. I have 300+ PPM GH on my water, my tap comes out mid 6.5 up to about 6.8. corydoras I've kept, 3 varieties so far, all do perfectly fine in hard water. I have "good PH" for them and I use wood and such. I actually enjoy blackwater tanks. I think a lot of others are going to have much better insight for PH, but i just wanted to note.... you can have high GH apart from other parameters, especially PH. Do you have the option to pre-condition water? Make a weekly or bi-weekly run to fill a water tank on a truck or something and move that to the house? Even something like a 150-300G container might be easier to find than you think and have enough water for 1-3 months for the fish.

Any chance this is that weird zebra thing from the moss ball? (doesn't look like it at all) Such a bummer too because I love having moss balls in my tanks. I think the worm mentioned above is correct. As for treatment, I don't know what would be best.

Exactly what I was thinking

@jeNks@Vince C@ItsaDreamFrodo First, welcome to the forums 🙂 Rocks I would first figure out what you want, then try to find it. If your goal is "cheap" and you need a good size rock your only option is to go to a quarry or to collect it legally in your area from somewhere. Wood is a bit more difficult and I can't honestly recommend "skimping" on the wood. I have ordered wood once as a WYSIWYG type of experience. I got to pick out the exact piece for my tank and I'm extremely happy with that. If you have a local shop, you can get wood cheaper by going into the store to purchase it and sort through the piles yourself. If you're looking for a large piece like that, find a good source, pick it out, and you're going to end up paying for that. I would think of it as the time saved trying to make the tank right.

I would start here.... I really wish we had a tool where whenever someone types in "oto" this thing pops up as a very nifty and very cool check this out. Secondly, here is the care guide. To your question though. I would bring in the otos, QT them and then take a piece of wood even from an active tank, a stone, something that has some stuff on it. Feed them for a few days, then start the trio.

@FyaNyan How is the fish doing?

What is his behavior during the nighttime? What is he doing? Plecos sometimes do have a discoloration due to stress or just simply their camouflage as well. Here's an example. My clown plecos get almost pale and lose all of their stripes. At first I thought it was a severe disease until I found out about this stuff. I hope that's all it is and the behavior stuff is something else we can work on.

This is the part that concerns me. The gaps here. I also saw them when looking down the length of the stand on all of the supports. If the floor isn't flat, the base was assembled on the floor, the question is how "flat" is flat. If you can, try to detail the hardware placement and people can chime in on how the construction is attaching the vertical supports to the horizontal panels. Red = no gap or less of a gap blue = slightly bigger gap.

They can get over a foot in some tanks.

Yeah, and I was thinking about the paint strainer thing Dean had used as a fry tub and then finding a way to add a handle to it. I also found some that suction cup to the side of the sink but might not hold up to the water pressure of a bucket of water. I've got "an extra" specimen container, might have to spend a day chopping it up.

OK. I have an idea. Doesn't require new "major" tooling by any company and should be easy to make. 1. Specimen container. 2. Trim the faces off, leave the hook on the rim. 3. Drill in the slots and then you're good to go. You make a jig / tool for the box to sit on, CNC just machines them one by one, very easily. If you sell enough, you launch a tool to mold the boxes with the holes and cuts already in place. Depending how the tool is currently manufactured, you can make a plug to fit in the internal space of the box as-is which would fill the regions you don't want plastic to be and allow you to add pins / slots for the water to flow into the tank. You would see a seam line if you went this route, which wouldn't make it viable when you try to run the specimen containers as-is.