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Aquarium Record Keeping


Daniel
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I am thinking about keeping records for my aquariums. I think I would like to track water parameters, foods fed, tank events. Maybe even miscellaneous stuff like water changes.

I am leaning towards an old fashioned notebook, sort of a daily diary. But the techie in me is saying, no…not  paper, go electronic like Word or Excel.

I want some easy otherwise I am concerned I will not keep up with it in the long run.

Edited by Daniel
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I used to do this on Excel years ago. A spreadsheet made it look nice and organized and easier to come back to. Then 5 tanks snowballed into 25 and I gave it up. I say go for it. It was fun while it lasted. You can always print charts to scribble on through the week, then plug data in Excel at the end of the week to keep it organized. 

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14 minutes ago, Lynze said:

I used to do this on Excel years ago. A spreadsheet made it look nice and organized and easier to come back to. Then 5 tanks snowballed into 25 and I gave it up. I say go for it. It was fun while it lasted. You can always print charts to scribble on through the week, then plug data in Excel at the end of the week to keep it organized. 

I am leaning towards Excel because it is so versatile, but I am still thinking about the 'nudge' to write down what I am doing if there is a physical notebook in front of the aquariumJournal.jpg.849c1720814c161b233568cdd6c5d163.jpg.

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This is a great way to keep your aquariums looking and running the best. I quickly found out that I was doing too much/many water changes on my planted tanks and wasting ferts. I also changed the cichlids tanks to 50% water changes (usually do 33%) as nitrates were accumulating faster than I thought. Never thought math would be helpful with aquariums. But I think the tanks and fish look better since I started tracking and adjusting accordingly. 

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I have used notebooks, software, and spreadsheets. I have not stuck with any of them. But I found TRELLO is free, and a great way to track multiple tanks. Here's a couple screenshots (I name my tanks after famous worlds).

I can't recommend Trello enough!

Bill

 

 

 

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Edited by Bill Smith
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9 minutes ago, Bill Smith said:

I have used notebooks, software, and spreadsheets. I have not stuck with any of them. But I found TRELLO is free, and a great way to track multiple tanks. Here's a couple screenshots (I name my tanks after famous worlds).

I can't recommend Trello enough!

Bill

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Annotation 2020-07-16 103609.jpg

On the advice of a friend I downloaded Trello a couple of weeks ago to keep track of our mutual machine tooling projects but I have never entered anything into it. Just reading your entries in Trello is educational in itself. Looks like the earliest entries are in February? How many tanks are you tracking with Trello? One of the cool features is that if you and I needed/wanted to share information we could do that just by one of us inviting the other into the project, right? Thanks for the tip!

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7 minutes ago, Daniel said:

On the advice of a friend I downloaded Trello a couple of weeks ago to keep track of our mutual machine tooling projects but I have never entered anything into it. Just reading your entries in Trello is educational in itself. Looks like the earliest entries are in February? How many tanks are you tracking with Trello? One of the cool features is that if you and I needed/wanted to share information we could do that just by one of us inviting the other into the project, right? Thanks for the tip!

Thanks, I just updated my photos to be easier to read (have to host them off-site to do this).

I use Trello for 12 tanks and a pond.

I "archive" months as the page fills up, so they do go older than February, and I can "unarchive" them when I need to revisit. This keeps it clean.

Yes, you can invite external users to your board for collaborating on a project. 🙂

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Edited by Bill Smith
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For my tanks, I use a clipboard to gather the info (one per tank) and load the info into excel  until tank established. The clipboard comes.back out if testing or fish/plants indicate an issue. 

I tried notebooks, loved them, but they keep disappearing right when I need them and so I would miss data. Setting up the clipboard/pen with just the right columns meant I didn't move it around to get lost.

 

Trillo looks great! I am going to check that out

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I'm using aquarimate....You can pay for more monthly from it but it is pretty good.  I wonder how it compares to Aquarium note. Exit31, I have the same journal and was thinking of putting the stickers on it.

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On 7/16/2020 at 12:36 PM, Daniel said:

I am thinking about keeping records for my aquariums. I think I would like to track water parameters, foods fed, tank events. Maybe even miscellaneous stuff like water changes.

 

I am leaning towards an old fashioned notebook, sort of a daily diary. But the techie in me is saying, no…not  paper, go electronic like Word or Excel.

 

I want some easy otherwise I am concerned I will not keep up with it in the long run.

 

I do this for pretty much all my tanks. I write down every week the water parameters, size of water change, amount of fertilizer added and any new observations in fish behavior.

 

Edit: I write this down in a notebook.

Edited by Shadow_Arbor
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8 minutes ago, Kevin said:

I'm using google sheets. I'd be up the creek if I had to read what I wrote (no I'm not a doctor).

Probably one my favorite methods here, because it's so much easier to search in the past. Lack of searchability is definitely one of the limitations of a physical journal!

Edited by Bill Smith
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I also use Aquarium Note. I've found it great for keeping track of parameters with an easy image output of the log for sharing on forums and Facebook when asking for help and such. It also produces graphs and such for comparison, and if you really want to dig into the weeds and get yourself in trouble, you can add prices to track how much you've invested in a particular tank... That could be scary. Lol

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No, no, no on tracking prices for stuff! I have agreed with my wife to only spend $150 a month on aquarium stuff and at this point I think I have spent every months budget out to November.

Edited by Daniel
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So I work for an environmental database software company.  A couple of our modules allows users to customize collection templates and load data to a database via a mobile device.  This is letting get some real world experiencing using modules that I didn't use in my consulting days and making my inner data geek happy.  

🙂

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