nabokovfan87

I have officially tried all 3 varieties. Aqueon: Overall, can be the best quality, hinge material does not like hard water for some reason (there are wear issues on some size lids, not all). Handle is good, slightly too big on small tanks, but the adhesive is very good and works extremely well. Just make sure you put it in the right spot. Top Fin: Same as Aqueon, but slightly nicer hinge (vinyl material). The rear trim is exactly the same, the handle will fall off and you need to buy your own tape and a better handle. Amazon variety: Glass is thin, the rear trim is essentially pointless and does not sit correctly with the lid installed (it's thin, cheap, not stiff enough to sit flat and is there purely to "cover the gap" and it cannot even do that. Handle is fine, adhesive on the handle is a joke and you'll need to replace it. 29G 30" tank lids: Aqueon: doesn't fit 1/4-1/2" too short (wrong trim piece length) Top Fin: doesn't fit 1/4-1/2" too short (same trim piece issue) Amazon variety: Fits, but the rear trim doesn't sit right, glass is extremely thin for the span of tank.

Nice progress, very cool that you were able to capture it!

This might be a good place to start! It covers a lot of the questions you have.

Cleaned out the HoB this morning. It was covered in worms in the pump area. I couldn't tell you if they were alive or not, but it had brown algae that you'd typically see and just caked in worms. I saw one floating but it was dead inside the tank, didn't see any others. I'll likely clean the HoB every 2-3 days just so I can monitor why on earth they are using that to repopulate. I am considering tossing on the 75 just for the sake of having more flow with how badly the pump seems to struggle right now. I have 6 days until I can treat with the other med and trying to just maintain and monitor. I'm pretty surprised they are repopulating so heavily where the tank is so clean and everything is "good" except for the worms. Even holding back food and light feedings, I'm not sure what's up with these guys. I hope the algae doesn't either! 😂

Very cool, nice work!

This would be my choice. Second option would be PSO or dwarf chain sword. PSO tends to grow like crazy and easily, it grows in thick and massive and sturdy for me. It does have some leaves that might get broken off but it's a pretty tough one.

Fed them this morning to the tank without the HoB so I didn't really care how long they floated. It's been 4+ hours and still floating. Just to give an idea on the flake vs. pellets for those who do have top feeding fish! Some will sink immediately, the other stuff might take a while.....

Considering the height of the tank, probably is "good" for a while. If anything I'd upgrade to the nano version or 2x of the nano version. I have a 29G tall and I had a lot of issues with the 24" light reaching the substrate. I had ran a 24" light for several years and struggled to really get anything beyond anubias working well. I left it as an anubias tank and that was perfectly fine for me. If you're running stems, running something higher demand, the plants will thank you for having the plant version of the light because it has a different LED variety and spectrum. If you're growing anubias and java fern, you're fine with the light you have. To your question, 24" is probably perfect for the size of tank you have. I use the 30" on my 29G now because after the struggles above, I realized how small the actual span of LEDs is compared to the width of the light itself. (remove 1.5" of dimension on either side. so a 24" light is really a 20.5" light and your tank is 30" long) It's not to condemn anything, but just to point out plant placement and other factors if you run into issues. The Fluval LEDs do have a 120deg spread on them compared to others that are more directional. I do have the 24" aquasky and the 24" planted 3.0 if you need to see anything of them side by side. No worries at all and I can happily test or show off anything you need to. As for settings, I would keep blue below 15%, typically below 5% for most everything. The aquasky tints blue for me and so I tend to push the reds pretty hard. I would set white at 80-90%, red at 80-85%, green at 70-75%, blue at 3-5% and then see how things do. this gives you some room to turn things up or down but that's the typical ratios I'd run. You can opt for a reddish morning and greenish evening if you'd like to play with the pro mode.

No water issues for me. Cory made a repashy thread, I'd recommend checking it out as well as vlog videos when he feeds it in the fish room. My fish, panda corys, definitely enjoy the food and it's easy to eat for them. After a certain period it is either gone over time or slowly dissolves into the water column. The difference between it sitting there or not is down to how you mold it, what your fish like, and what the flow on the tank is like. Essentially, think of it like a better version of sera o-nip tabs when feeding it. That's the type of interaction. I feed it late at night for most fish that eat after lights out. Works really well for that type of use as well as just normal feeding for very active fish that go after it. I try to always have some around.

Update for the night while I mull over how to move forward. This is from one of Jimmy's video. Again, I don't have anything in the tank to predate on these things. They are massively small in comparison to everything I see online for detritus worms. I mean.... these ones are gigantic compared to what I am seeing, shown in the OP. I'll go and try to record another video to try to explain the scale. You can see the little legs or whatever it is. From the video, the comments section had the following: I'm posting this all here because I am trying to understand, identify, and determine what these things are. If they are related to earthworms you'd figure they would be in the substrate. If they are roundworms / nematodes than the planned expel-p should do some work for me.

Not sure I understand, but yes I have used it plenty of times. There's nothing to be afraid of or intimidated by and it's an extremely useful food to have around. It allows you to dose meds pretty easily if you need to as well, vitachem, and other additives you'd want to feed your fish (ex: turmeric). I use it for the sake of specialized diets and mostly having omnivores. Coming to the forums and seeing other's methods for how they use the product has been pretty interesting. I never would've considered it myself, but mixing blends is a great way to feed omnivores as well. (community blend + soilent green, as an example)

That reminds me of the "how to make a PB&J challenge" we did in school growing up. HOPEFULLY everyone laughs when I say that and doesn't go "yep, I'm the one that didn't get a sandwich" 😂 I'll have to think of something with directions that need improving. I do have an idea, but potentially it's too simple. 🤔

I have a "pretty hard" GH in my water, off the chart over 300 ppm. My KH has randomly dropped from 80-100 ppm down to 40-50 after moving. As a result of this my tanks went from a PH of 6.8-7.2 down to about 6.5-6.8 and I am having issues with PH crashing if I don't change water often enough. As a result of this I tried to add crushed coral to my HoB and that wasn't enough. Then I tried adding crushed coral to a ziss bubble bio air powered filter and it did not work correctly (there's a thread about it on here if you want to see full details I can grab the link to it). Because of all this I was in a "panic" of sorts and I opted to buy some of the alkaline buffer from seachem due to it randomly being affordable (50% off, basically). In my view you're going to need to do a few things to keep it "safe" for fish and this isn't a guarantee, but it's about your specific setup and trying to keep things as stable as possible for the fish. 1. Extending water changes when you DO get things stable and have KH high enough will be a benefit to stability. 2. Adding wood, botanicals, planted substrates will help to lower PH and counter balance the buffer's affect to raise KH and adversely raise PH too high. 3. This is likely going to cause issues for shrimp and/or snails, less so issues for shrimp depending on species in question. 4. KH may also be impacting plants, just a note, and it's something to research into. First steps: A. Take a sample of water from the tap and test it for KH, GH, PH. B. Take the same sample of water from test A and aerate it with an airstone for 24 hours, retest KH, GH, and PH. (THIS is the value that actually matters for your tank) C. Compare test B to the results of your tank parameters. Let's say your KH right now is pretty low. 0-20 ppm. Let's say your PH is 7.5-8.0 from the tap. Let's say you add crushed coral to the substrate (best method) and you buffer your KH slowly. You PH might only go from 7.5 up to 7.8. Relatively tolerable for just about everything. If you don't add the crushed coral you can very likely see your 7.5-8.0 crash down to 6.3-6.5 without too much effort. It's pretty much a question of how much time does that take? That's how you'd determine how often you need to be changing water right now to keep the PH stable without modifying your KH. Let's say your KH is buffered and your PH is stabilized slightly. Instead of crashing every 5-7 days, you can now last up to 10-14 days. Eventually as the crushed coral does it's thing, this will stabilize further and you can perform a water change once a month. Maintain filters and gravel vac more often, but large changes are spread out. What I do in my case, which is similar in chemistry to your parameters in the OP, is to change my water and add a small amount of the alkaline buffer to the tank. Seachem sells the Acid buffer and Alkaline buffer which are designed to be used in a ratio. One raises KH+PH, one lowers PH. Depending on your target, you'd dose this like anything else during your water change. I used a 5G bucket and buffered it to figure out what amount would get the KH where I wanted it to be. I have wood in the tank and other things to drop the PH so it went from 6.5 up to slightly below and slightly above 7.0. The main thing is that PH doesn't crash on me anymore and the tank itself is pretty stable when it comes to every parameter we test for. I do have amano shrimp in this tank and I'm dealing with a parasite issue (there's a thread in disease section where I have details). The shrimp deaths could be associated with the KH adjustments and I've gone from targeting 80-100 for my range to targeting 50-70 for my range. Once things are stable there, I'll try to get it up to 80. The key thing is to do this slowly, over time, which is where the crushed coral makes it pretty easy. If I wasn't running corydoras and running black substrate, I wouldn't mind having the crushed coral at all.

This is what I do. Especially in my case where temps weren't insanely high but as high as I could get them. You very well might have ich cysts in the substrate, that's what you're treating. For the sake of clarification, I did use Ich-X to treat mine when I had ich in my 75G

Worms update. I am done with round 2 of paracleanse, I don't know if I need a third. The salt seemed to help and I heavily disturbed the substrate, replanted the entire tank and moved substrate around to try to release everything need be into the water column. I am still seeing signs of them in the HoB itself but not in the substrate or glass. I saw one tonight and haven't seen any the previous 2 days after adding salt. I don't know if I'll add any more salt but I will have to inspect the HoB pretty thoroughly when I clean it out here shortly. I have more plants on the way to add to the tank, I'll eventually be adding CO2. I'd really like to get these things out of here before I end up having to stress plants. The cleaning and adjustments and what not seem to have nearly worked and I'm hoping I'll get whatever is causing them to repopulate. The reason for posting is because I found another dead amano. Definitely could've been due to stress and there was one that was still showing half of the body being red. It could also just be age and a random timing. The amano had a pretty severe red spot on its head and on it's body section. I'll keep monitoring things and keep things clean. EDIT: I guess I'm going hunting for that worm tonight. @Odd Duck might or might not be valid, but something to note for your parasite treatment guide we are all going to borrow from now on. EDIT 2: Yep.... there's still a ton of them. Filter is bypassing, and I can't think of anything I can really do to actually fix it. What a frustrating issue.

Might've just got caught on a decoration or something. Glad things worked out.

Rimmed tank = you support the outside walls of the tank (black trim) and you need to be careful not to add stress to the bottom glass. Rimless tank = you need to fully support the base of the tank and very likely you want to have a rubber mat of some kind to help cushion the stress.

very funny. nice find!

Can you please let us know the test results currently? Nitrites usually can be handled by adding aquarium salt / water changes without too much stress on the fish. https://www.aquariumcoop.com/pages/water-changes First thing I can say is to just take a breath and let's work through the issue before we do anything to cause more stress. We need to fully understand the issues, potentially run some tests, and then verify everything before we can really offer the best advice on how to fix it all. The best thing to do right now is to test, absorb information, report issues, and then we go ahead and determine the path forward. This is where we just need to figure out what's going on and find the source of the ammonia. Waste? Overfeeding? Tap water? Once we find the source, we can figure out how to deal with it, so to speak. The main reason not to is because you might have an issue with tapwater. The tank should be large enough to handle the betta. If it's not from the tap water, moving the fish to a QT tank and determining what is going on will help you to stabalize his water with daily WCs and will help you isolate problems with the tank.

Might be due to chloramines in your tap water. Can you show what you mean by seachem balance? I'm not finding the correct thing when searching online. I'm trying to figure out what it is specifically. For prime, do not dose it more than once per 24-36 hours (per their website). They also have other things that are very similar to prime which get dosed to help with ammonia and you might be unknowingly double dosing. Carbon might be the easiest way to handle the ammonia from the tap, especially if it's chloramines. (Adding a carbon block filter to your water supply, basically)

I would trim out a lot of those plants to give fish some room. Entirely up to you! Chili rasboras might be a good one in this tank given the wall of green. Aquahuna has some black emperor tetras that look pretty awesome as well. I don't know if they will be compatible with the gourami though. I'm trying to think of something purple or something that would pop off the green in your tank. That's where my mind goes if I was to add something to the tank.

There is a betta, nano, and then just a generic "pellet" that might or might not be renamed. There is also larger ones for cichlids and stuff. Let me go check what size the ones I have are. I have the "semi-floating 1.5mm pellets". I actually think after these things sit in the water for a bit they are too big for a lot of my fish. There are smaller varieties. I've kept tiger barbs, odessa barbs, and other things around that size. They ate them, but I think they would've had an easier time with something 1.0mm or smaller.

That's basically what happened when I tried to keep them. Anubias, very few issues, but java ferns I had success once and then never was able to grow them again. The roots are pretty fragile and is likely why (trying to glue them was difficult for me). Essentially I think what you have going on is the plant is just absorbing nutrients from the old leaves to grow new ones. If you see it continue on newer leaves, I'd check nutrients and what not and consider upping dosages on fertilizers or modifying the lighting. They could be getting burnt out or not enough.

If you haven't definitely try the semi-floating pellets. The smaller ones seem to work better for me (depends on your fish). But those definitely separate to different parts of the tank. I keep mostly corydoras, so I definitely prefer things on the bottom of the substrate for them.

There's been a few points of contention in my own experience, but I've seen enough videos on strips vs. liquid to understand they should be reading the same. In my case, I had strips reporting 6.5-6.8 and liquid reporting 7.0-7.4. I figured it was inaccurate and moved on. I didn't have an understanding of KH, GH, and PH relations at the time, so it very likely did drop because I had added wood and so forth, changed to a planted substrate as well. SO..... In order to remove a few variables, let's check a few things. 1. In the API test kit there might be something that says "shake vigorously" for some of these tests. I don't know off hand if PH is one of them. If it is, spend a long time shaking the liquid pretty well 3-5 minutes and make sure it's fully incorporated. This is just something people tend to avoid doing after the liquid sits for a while and separates. 2. Verify the date on all the liquids and verify they are still viable for use. Date is usually around the neck or the bottom of the bottle. 3. Verify your strips didn't get wet accidentally or haven't been left open for a long period of time. Verify the little descendant thing inside is still in there and they were stored in decent enough conditions. You can also verify these things against some known liquids depending what's around the house. https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science-fair-projects/references/acids-bases-the-ph-scale I would say repeat the tests and see if you notice any difference. Results look valid to me and I do see a little cross contamination on the strip test / pad from the water jumping from one pad to another. Rest it on a towel (something that absorbs water) and just be aware of it when you move it around to check coloration. I'd be interested to see what a retest lands you after the above 3 steps. Here's a video showing the contamination that can happen. Looks like 100-140 to me. Here's the results in a colorblindness tool which helps me sometimes to read the results.