nabokovfan87

That would be awesome. I'll find out tomorrow if I'm moving the tank or what not. I'm "excited" because I don't really care where it goes, it's going to mean new home for the fish! They got a deep clean on their tank today and I worked really hard to get stuff ready for em. I would absolutely love to run the little pumps off a "solar pump" type of setup. I honestly contemplated going down the street to tractor supply and getting a tub for them. Awesome idea, just doesn't work for this specific setup. It might for.... 6-8 hours out of the day though. The window nearby has partial direct sunlight, but it's also frosted. So I don't think it would fully charge the batt., especially if I am running the light.

Update on this: d-cell pumps: ~18-22 hours Nano pump on 20,000 mAh (first run): 3.5 days Larger load: TBD

I was watching some Pecktec tonight, this one popped up. It reminded me of this thread, enjoy!

Honestly, I'd just get some strips from the ACO! Up to you. I do find it easier to read the Tetra ones, but the ACO ones are a steal with how many you get and the ability to test so often. As far as the fluid itself, you can get the bottles by themselves in individual tests to refill your setup. https://www.amazon.com/API-130-Test-Freshwater-Saltwater-Aquarium/dp/B0002566TC/ref=sr_1_2?crid=3URZDXC1G8DBS&keywords=api+ammonia+test&qid=1653884503&sprefix=api+ammonia+t%2Caps%2C697&sr=8-2 If you're seeing 0, you're good to slow down. Especially 0 ammonia is a big one.

Sidenote. I would like to know how you enjoy the peppers! I am very much wanting some these days.

Aesthetically, This is one of the nicest setups I've seen. I'm very jealous! I really enjoy everything you and the family have done with the tanks to get them to this point! Looking forward to seeing it and how much that bench gets used!

All good sir! I linked it above 🙂 I definitely think a lot of the "aquarium ingenuity deserves some highlights. Especially when you have someone explain it, it really helps to make things seem achievable by others.

Cool. I generally test before I do anything, but it's a valid test either way. If I ever see ammonia, I'll test every 12 hours or so. Hopefully next time it's the same / reduced.

Part of it, but definitely not the full breakdown. Here you go.

it was def. a ACO video. I'll see if I can find it. It's one of a few. LOL.

A lot of planted substrates unfortunately leech a massive amount of ammonia. The corys being on the bottom get the worst of it 😕 . It happens, unfortunately. If you can I would immediately move the fish to a tank with something else for substrate and perform water changes until the tank cycles and is stable. The ammonia itself needs to be 0, nitrites need to be 0. In a "worst case" scenario, put them into a bucked with an airstone and change water out daily. Some salt might also help them, high oxygen, water at around 73 degrees will as well (slightly more oxygenation). Keep an eye on their kills and breathing rate, it should normalize when they are doing "ok". This is a great way to handle it. I generally don't rely on prime to detoxify water parameters in this capacity. It's easier for me just to move the fish to their own space and fix the environment. If you do remove all the fish in the tank, you can perform daily 75-90% water changes without issue. This will remove the ammonia that is leeching as well and give the tank a quicker chance to stabilize. As a sidenote. The gravel substrate is fine for corys. Smooth river pebbles will be a little easier for them, but they tend to dig to get food. If it's difficult to dig, that's when they get issues and damage (thank you to Rachel O'Leary for that little tip). I have kept my pandas on basically every kind of substrate. If you have something finer that keeps the food up top, that's best. A lot of the big box stores will sell "fine gravel" and call it sand. Works well too.

Awesome! So now you have the second stage of bacteria in there. I would test Ammonia towards the end of the day and see how things are going. When you tested ammonia, how close was this to your feeding for the day?

I will chalk this up to "mistakes were made" but this is why it's so frustrating as a customer when you call the company and tell them they messed up. They argue, but it's pretty clear what happened. As mentioned above for my Aqueon lid for a 20L/29G Aquarium lid they send me the wrong trim. I have the "correct trim" on hand and it's pretty clear what happened here. 29G fit - Gaps around the rear trim piece. With the longer trim piece from my 75G - No gaps The issue being.... They used the wrong thickness glass, or the wrong dimensions for the glass itself. There's definitely some quality control issues and it's pretty disappointed to see something like this knocked down to "tolerance issues" with glass products. I have a piece of marineland trim I purchased to alleviate the issue, which does work with the thinner glass.

Minor update, I don't have a new "fix yet" for the specific issues, but I did clean the filter and optimize the basked slightly further. I also prepped some of the parts for when I do use the black silicone on the few parts I need to. I also need to verify this, but I think seachem added an in-line change as a product improvement to help reduce vibration noise and improve fit on the pump slightly. It also might be flow related, but I don't have any real way to review that. More details below. Here is the details on the cleanout and the potential improvement someone can see with the upgrades so far on their filter. This is the "window cutout" sponge that I use to protect the media from much. This shows you how bad it is to have this cutout in the basket itself. I wanted to record this for posterity. Essentially, this is just to show the fitment on the sponge being slightly loose and the water was able to push it upward and expose some bypass avenues. This could simply be movement when I removed the basket itself, but it's worth noting. I did re-cut sponge to fit a lot more snugly into the basket. Those are in there now and I have them for future use. This is the underside of the basket, showing the amount of muck trapped in the sponge before it was moved. Improving the flow into the basket itself shows how the restriction is impacting overall performance. This is the top of the sponges after removing the media itself. I was hopeful at this point that I would see a lot of muck on the underside of the black/fine sponge. There was some, but not much. This leads me to believe it's just remnants from the window cutout. Here is the medium density foam. I am showing this to highlight the slight improvement of switching out from the flat style sponge to the bumpy sponge. I will run a test with the original sponge compared to my custom fit sponge after all the improvements have been made. Secondly, here is the cutout details I did to clean up the basket itself and the intake tube blockage. I used the sanding disk to remove any burrs or sharp edges. I recommend going slow and taking your time, let the wheel do the work. The "cleaned out" window is the one on the right side of the basket with the pliers only cut on the left/center side of the basket. You can do this by hand with a file or a sharp blade and sandpaper. If you use something like that, be sure to be careful and protect yourself from any nicks if the blade jumps on you. I would try to leave the "tall posts" intact on the right and leftmost edges of the cutouts. These give the sponge a flat surface to rest against when installed and filled with media. Secondly I want to note that the basket itself is a pretty soft material. In terms of filter boxes it fits exactly what you need it to do and the engineering choice for this material was a very good one. It's pliable and handles movement well but definitely strong enough in terms of it's rigidity as well as taking some abuse day to day. The black plastic is a lot stiffer and reminds me a lot of other plastics I've worked with. It's very hard, not very pliable and the dimensions themselves are pretty thick in some areas. This does mean that some tasks like removing the pump cover can be difficult, but it also should mean that overall the tolerances on the black pieces of the filter are pretty good. This also means that the tolerances on the white plastics might not be as tight as they could be when you need them to be. Finally, of note.... There are these pads added to filter cover itself. It may be there to help "seal off" part of the flow from the grate on the right to the intake tube. Because the pads themselves are very soft, I think their only use is to reduce vibration noise of the pump itself.

From a manufacturing and production side, this video in particular fascinated me. He was using reinforced cement, reinforcing rock piles, and a lot of techniques I don't see in my specific experiences. It's more based on metal and plastics for what I've worked on. I totally understand what you're saying. I would love to just have a simple moss wall / tank that I can enjoy. Minimal effort to maintain, but I think aesthetically that might be something I work on one day.

Mine definitely could care less about anything else in the tank, it was a very relaxed personality fish. He had a little hide in the plants and it was in the corner away from everything. The fish would be a bit more active during feeding time, but it was just protective of it's area (seemed to be quiet, flow was ok for the fish as well, but a lot of sight breaks). My ram never came into contact with snails, but I would think it wouldn't really want to bother snails. They prefer pellets, chew, sift, sand, etc. I am assuming entirely, but I don't think the ram would really do well with snails trying to go to town in it's area, but I don't think the fish would necessarily eat snails. It's just not designed for that. Zebra loaches on the other hand.....

What do you think? Am I going to wake up with eggs!? Update! I was watching the fish last night, just checking on things and I saw the big female cory going all over the tank. Extremely rare! Her stomach was yellow and it looked like she was trying to hold eggs out, but entirely difficult to tell. Obviously she was by herself and there was one male who swam with her for a moment. I think her being so big just sort of scares off a lot of interaction, difficult to say. I did not wake up with eggs in the tank, the party of 1 was definitely not fruitful, but it was pretty fun to watch the fish interact. A few notes.... For me, it's always nice to see breeding behavior in some capacity because I know there are issues with the tank, but it also means that they want to breed and don't have a spot to lay that they are comfortable with. I see something like this and I think to myself, "if the glass was scraped maybe, if the moss was there, maybe, if the mop was there, maybe." I have gotten eggs from these guys and this female twice before, but it's been very far apart in time, which is fine! I think her behavior was based on the wind storm we had, as well as the KH buffer I had added to the tank this week. I also wanted to note, that's it was fun to show off to everyone my shark interacting with the rest of the tank. It goes to show their normal behavior and how she can act. I think she grew up with my pandas and just really enjoys them. She does get a bit "big shouldered" and bumps them from time to time. She gave an amano shrimp a hip check, but it was still nice to be able to show her normal personality! I will be very excited when she gets to move to the new tank and when all the fish themselves are able to have a bit more space. The corys might relax a bit and hang out under her little cave, and she will be back with her panda bros in the main tank. I did turn down the lights, because I do see some algae going to town. (90-->80%). I am still seeing a lot of success with the growth of the plants, low nitrates, but I want to do another deep clean and then work on getting it past this stage of having the staghorn/BBA everywhere. I'll add parameters after I've testing them today and I'll go ahead and try to record a video showing the growth instead of just a few photos. PH 6.8-7.0 KH 60ish GH 300+ Temp 76 Nitrite 0 Nitrate 10-20 *I added 3/4 of a tsp of Alkaline buffer to the tank during this WC* (this is about 1/2 the recommended dose)

How are yours doing?

Water direct from tap: Water after 24 hour Aeration 1/8 tsp of buffer added to ~4 gallons of water, then aerated for another 24 hours. I apologize mif the testing is difficult to read. I did see a small improvement on this initial test. I also feel like randomly I'm having very low GH from some test results or my eyes are just tripping me out. I hope it all looks "correct" as far as the way the buffer is supposed to work. I will give it a second look in the morning.

I know there's about a billion of these on YT but it always feels like watching something incredibly amazing when I see it. What do you all think, would you ever attempt to build something like this?

Yeah we have something similar on hand (I asked to use it). Electrician should give us an answer Monday I think on whether or not power can be added. Because those things run on giant batteries it helps, but I really didn't know if the batteries were directly connected to the USB and just have the voltage stepped down or how it was setup. Usually 18v or something for the battery and need 5v ok USB. But the question I had was whether or not it would go from DC (battery) to AC (motherboard/power circuit) then to the I/O and be converted again back to DC out. If it does, there's a huge loss. The one we have is supposed to be for a car / emergency kit. It has a standard outlet out. But USB as well. I'll likely run it as a test as well just to see if I can find it.

Definitely the best choice! I'd recommend amanos as a replacement for algae issues depending what else is in each tank.

Yes they do sell them. Might be cheaper just to get a replacement. I've taken to literally using 1/2 of it at once when I do WC and scraping by hand. If you have a larger tank, might end up being easier to use both parts. If you're leaving scratches, it's likely substrate or something stuck on the pad from it's adventures. https://www.amazon.com/Replacement-Felt-Mag-Float-510A-Acrylic/dp/B001EL91EU/ref=sr_1_54?keywords=Mag-Float&qid=1653788797&sr=8-54

I've heard Cory mention this. I would think it's similar to seachem safe, part of that formula as well.

This was exactly my thought. Especially after seeing the difference on my 29G (30" long) going from a 24" to a 36" light. It looks choked off by the rock and I don't see it lit "well". It looks to me like something where anubias would do really well in that spot or java fern. What kind of light is on the tank, what is the size of the tank itself?