nabokovfan87

Essentially, if you have a rimmed tank the load is on the vertical sides / edges / corners. So the goal is to structurally support those. This is similar to having a wall in a house, you have structural vs. non-structural (decorative) walls. You need to make sure the load path is through the structure! If you have something like the bottom pane of glass on a rimmed tank with stress on it, the load itself will likely twist and cause it to shatter. You can see a really good demonstration of this when ACO was building the store. It's an awesome video and I highly recommend those videos. For a rimless tank your structure is the footer. Which means, if we go back to the house analogy, your load path is the entire base/cement/floor of the building. If that shifts or deflects in some way, it is likely to cause twisting, which causes the shattering of glass. The idea being for either situation, what is the load, supporting the load itself.

If you can, might be a good idea to QT the fish and give them a break from fighting.

You can try cyclops. It's from one of Cory's older vlog style videos where he feeds it and demonstrates it can stay in the water column a little bit easier instead of just sinking down. I would recommend feeding something like repashy also, just the powder, without turning it into a gel food. Sera sells o-nip tabs as well which is an awesome food for mid-water feeders and you can stick it to the glass. If you feed flake, just try to break it into smaller bits so it has a tendency to stay afloat a little bit.

Depending on neocaridina vs. caridina shrimp you might be really good with the hard water. Amanos in my tank don't mind it one bit!

If you have any excess you aren't sure what to do with, but feel like you need to find a good home, I can help you out. We've all been there. It's fun to get things.

Very cool. I'm excited for you. The PSO will grow like a weed if you get it happy. you have a lot of good plant choices. The anubias likes "shade" or lighting that isn't direct so it's a good plant for the side of a tank, front, or back of a tank where it's not directly under the light. Both of the other plants you have really like light and ferts. Going to suck the nitrates out of the tank like nothing! 🙂

If it's a newer tank and hasn't ran these light settings for a while (or this light for a while), if you start to see algae pop up, I would lower the settings to: Pure White: 65-75% Warm White: 60-70% Cool White (increase): 55-65% Blue: 1-5% (during lighting window)

Whenever the tank is able to be setup again, I think my next tank is going to have Melon barbs, a horde of green tiger barbs, and some odessa barbs from Greg Sage. I'll be excited for it! What a fun tank to feed.

Glad the little one is doing well. I am terrified of finding something in my HoB now... I miss my plecos. I have two clowns, I had 5 at one point. Very cool little fish, very beautiful.

I wish you the best of luck. Pull through little one! Beautiful fish. Very good point! I have recently added this to my fish meds case. I just wanted to say as someone who is / recently dealt with a sick tank, I really appreciate this. It's a thoughtful reply from someone who clearly loves the animal/species in question and wants what is best for them. It's an amazing thing to have as a resource and I love this forum for being this way. You two got this!

Adding this here for later use. IF you have one of these things, I highly recommend this method for cleaning. Again, I don't use foams for biological filtration, only mechanical. You'd want to preserve the bacteria in tank water and clean the filter (especially the pump, skimmer, and intake) in this way to ensure it's functioning properly. I post this partially because it's an amazing tank to me!!! But, I also really appreciate the mythodical nature of this cleaning for this filter in particular. Enjoy 🙂 A note regarding the impeller, there is a cover, you take that off, it's difficult to do by hand on the 75/110, much easier on the "cheaper" versions of the pump on the 35/55 and can be done with your hand. You take off the cover, please do this!, and then you remove the impeller, clean it with the brush as shown, clean the shaft cavity as well, then add silicone grease (scuba shop has this or amazon), and then reinstall everything onto the pump and re-assemble the HoB. This is what I would consider as a "deep clean" and this should be done at minimum every 1-3 months. Alright, I'm amazed. I JUST found this and had to post it. What a great video about mods and trying to fix this filter with "tier 1" fixes. If anyone has some gutter guard they want to send me..... I'm down to try that out as well, seems like a brilliant idea to fix the foam being crushed and give the filterbox a chance to work.

Just means it's coming from the tank then. Not the water. I heard a stat yesterday. Not sure on accuracy, but essentially that 85% of the ammonia comes from respiration of the fish. When things get like this, I'll usually feed, an hour later vac out the extra. If you want to feed them later in the day, fine, but that's how I worked out how much to feed as oppose to trying to dump in a lot of food and letting it sit all day.

That's awesome. Best of luck.

I had that happen to my rasboras. Something I learned from the fish vet talk on the members only channel video was that it could just be thickening of the slime coat of the fish. If they look "pale". Just a note. I don't think that's what this is. I think you're on the right track with treating as mentioned above. (Bacteria + Fungal + Salt) If you see it pop up on other fish one by one, that's what happened to my rasbora. 😞

I would have to verify the dimensions but the filter should be fine. I have my opinions about how it's setup! But that's just because I used the normal shark ADV internal and got frustrated by it. I'll explain this at the end to try to avoid confusion. For what you have you might want to have one of those on each side of the tank. For the short term I'd recommend the filter on one side (the output goes across the length of the tank with the spraybar) and then on the opposite side of the tank add an airstone to make sure there isn't any dead spots and the tank has good aeration and good flow. The corys will also play in the bubbles sometimes too! What I will say, if you have a 20G tank, you probably want a 40+ Gallon rated filter. On my 10G I used a Tidal 35. On my 29G I run Tidal 55s. On my 55G and 75G I ran TWO Tidal 75s. Some fish absolutely love to have good water movement, some don't, so the fish will tell you if they want more or less. Redness in the gills, breathing rapidly, staying at the surface, or hiding from the flow of the filter and now swimming normally would be some of those indicators. The "middle" one is rated for the tank you have in terms of the advice above, but I don't like how sicce has designed these in one aspect. Essentially, I would use whatever one has the right height for your tank and that's the only dimension I would use. This would be just under 12" tall. So you do have room for that middle size or to add on another foam section if you can find just the add-on box itself 🙂 This is how the cartridges are designed. The bottom most looks like this. I do not like that it's 3 pieces of foam. I think this will cause issues long term. It also makes absolutely no sense to differentiate between a foam section and a non-foam section because the intake grill grates are on every box no matter what. So it's very likely the highest power intake is simply going to be whatever is closest to the pump itself. It's a weird design choice to me. If you buy any of the other sizes of the filter the boxes will be filled with this: Now we know why it has 3 pieces of foam. and I really, really, really don't think those small pieces of foam on the outside are thick enough to protect the media too well. The grey box in the middle is for media. Could've easily just been a media bag, but this is what they chose to use. I would suggest ONLY using foam in this filter, not ceramic media because of the design issue mentioned above. It's a weird choice to me and I don't think it serves the fish too well.

There might be two things going on and it's important to narrow out issues in the long term. Discolorations could be linked to something like "tetra disease" which is just difficult to know. Here is a video on the topic. I think it's a really well done video on the topic and one that everyone should see! It could be "open wounds" from something like decor. This is easiest to diagnose with behavior of the fish. Flashing, things like that where the fish might be trying to "scratch" or remove something from their skin. This could lead to a wound. You can also get a wound pretty commonly from just fighting and breeding behavior. If the wound looks smooth, not like a cotton ball, then I would lean towards this type of treatment. (bacterial). It could be fungus. This also could be a secondary issue and not the primary. So maybe it had something, then that developed into a fungal issue. I would start with what was suggested and proceed from there: I would also add to this, and @Colucan confirm, salt would be a good use here as well. Don't be! It's very, very easy to use. Dose it in the tank whenever you change water for the bacterial med. Add Ich-X and you just let it sit until you do so. Here's a pretty awesome look at it's use. I also recommend a review / rewatch of this one. I always find myself going back to it whenever I need some advice on meds.

That's where my mind was at too. I don't know if the shell gets different over time. I would think, based on what it is and what it could be, it might. Maybe if you had a picture of the snail with it's body out of the shell too might help? I don't know if there's other features that might narrow down the results.

Very similar water to us slightly west as well. Question, why do you need it at 6-8?

No worries at all! What you said is accurate. To me what matters is that it's important for people to understand you're not getting away with JUST flourish. My favorite is when you call, they say "no, it was delivered" and then "well did you wait a few days"? Call the local office that had it, talk with the manager. They usually actually can help. Sometimes.

corydoras and rams works too.

Let me know! I'm intrigued. 🙂

I feel ya. Hate when I get clutsy like that. Theory 1: Swap the lines to rule out the diffuser. This would isolate it to either the valve itself or to the output (check valve / diffuser) itself causing the issue. Theory 2: Verify all seals are installed correctly and not dried out or damaged. I would also make sure you don't have issues with something like hard water deposits causing a narrowing / issue. Theory 3: Fix 1 and 2, then if that's not the solution, fix 3. I had an issue with mine and essentially I screwed up my regulator for just over two years before I figured out how to fix it. I had turned the main knob the wrong way fully and didn't realize it. So working through troubleshooting steps with the manufacturer really helped. I started at the actual attachment to the tank itself then through to the first valve, etc. Each time verifying the gauges and everything was working correctly. That's the process I'd recommend to make sure everything is working as it should. Sidenote. If anyone knows of those little bases you can set the canisters in so they don't fall easily, apart from using a wall / chain, I've been trying to find them and would appreciate a link!

Easy Green = Flourish and Flourish Trace. There is a difference, but those 2 would be the bottles that equate to it. Easy Carbon = Flourish Excel Easy Iron = Seachem Iron I didn't look up or determine exact % for dosing differences, but that gives you an idea of the equivalency in terms of what's in there and what is similar to the other. To your question, I wouldn't dose the carbon / iron unless you absolutely had a deficiency showing that demanded it. I would stick to just dosing Flourish once or twice a week. If you have Flourish Trace, I'd dose that once a week. I don't think it's worth the effort to go track down seachem's nitrate bottle or anything like that. Phosphorus you're most likely getting from the food you're feeding to the fish / bacteria. When I used the flourish stuff, this is all I followed. I'm very certain that using capfuls is not very scientifically accurate, but it's cheaper than providing a pump head. If you have one of the dosing shot glasses, I would just use that or a syringe or something and save yourself the hassle of spilling it all over the place. Honestly, even by their own directions you're using capfuls. I just dose mine for a 29 (i.e. 30G) aquarium dose and it's been fine. If your plants are brand new, be sure to give them 1 week to acclimate before you start dosing the tank with anything specifically to feed them. This was one of the tips mentioned on this video....

I have some of those suction cups you can put on glass. I'm trying to think of something that's "easy" for them to get attached onto. Maybe a piece of kelp or lettuce on the glass? I am very unfamiliar with their behavior, but that's about all I can think of.

Hercules snail? It came up when I looked up what pagoda snails looked like (Brotia pagodula). the scientific name for the other one is Brotia herculea