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learnincurve posted:Oh god heat is the bain of my life. I have to do 20% changes every day, sometimes twice, just to keep the temps down. Buy a chiller? No idea what's involved in that. I've never dealt with it before, but at what point should I investigate water temperature? I don't have ac or anything but don't live anywhere particularly hot (Calgary)
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May 28, 2018 17:48
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It would depend if you are cold water or tropical - with goldfish 23c will force them to the top of the tank, 24c can kill them. I can get it down to 21c with a water change but in this heat it wants to be 24c no doubt.
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May 28, 2018 18:30
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With no power a chiller won't help; if you have battery operated bubblers that can help drop the temperature a bit and more importantly improve oxygenation. Much like a warm soda goes flat, warm aquarium water holds less oxygen. Mostly you don't need chillers unless you are running a salt water tank with lights that run so hot that you need to counter it somehow. I think it's much less common now with LED lights that often have fan cooling and big heatsinks. Oh yeah, pointing a fan at the surface of the tank water can drop the temperature a bit too from evaporation. I've used a manual pump to bubble my tanks during a long power failure, better than nothing I guess. Why monitor temperature? For tropical fish, ie if there's a heater in the tank, a thermometer is a quick and cheap way to make sure the heater hasn't failed off (cold fish have sluggish metabolisms and become prone to disease) or worse, failed on (hot fish can't get enough oxygen, and after a certain point it's just too hot to live). Tropical fish prefer stability and measuring stuff is how you can tell how stable things are. Some fish can handle much bigger swings in temperature, I believe wild guppies can survive 10-30deg C, and similar with some rainbows and other native fish from harsh environments. Fish that have adaptations for breathing surface air can usually handle, or sometimes prefer, warmer temps. But for the average tropical community you want stability around 25.
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May 28, 2018 18:37
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Been having heat issues myself - not too bad, but need to get the A/C serviced and running. Tank was creeping up towards 26 celcius the other weak, and the fish were definitely unhappy. In other news - I have more baby panda cory's. Just two, but it means the adults are still breeding. They're so friggin small and cute.
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May 28, 2018 18:43
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w00tmonger posted:Buy a chiller? No idea what's involved in that. With tropical fish you should be fine most of the time. When you get a heat wave where your indoor temp is over 30C you can use ice to keep the tank a little cooler during the heat of the day. Just fill some bowls with tank water, freeze 'em, and then in the morning dump in an ice chunk and refill the bowl with tank water to put back in the freezer. A second ice blob when you get home from work. (If you are home all day, I find one at 10 am and one and 4 pm usually work best, maybe with another between 12 and 2 if it is crazy hot, but on days you have to go to work/school one before you leave and one when you get home should work pretty well). This unfortunately means the temp is unstable, going up and down a few degrees everyday, so it could be trouble for super sensitive fish but hardy fish seem okay with it. Calgary is also pretty arid as I recall, so you could probably use a swamp cooler/evaporative cooler effectively to keep the room a few degrees cooler. A swamp cooler is just a fan blowing across a bowl of ice/water. As it melts and evaporates science makes the air cooler. Cooling the air in the room prevents the tank from overheating without rapid temperature changes. You can buy one if you think fan+bowl looks too ghetto, but honestly they seem a little pricey for what is essentially a fan blowing over a container of water. https://www.amazon.ca/Comlife-Portable-Evaporative-Humidifier-Conditioner/dp/B07CPHJYG2 https://www.amazon.ca/KuulAire-PACKA44-Portable-Evaporative-Capacity/dp/B0078XFFDO
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May 29, 2018 00:14
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Fish Noise posted:What size tank are you working with, and are you thinking of taking in whatever you catch, or being a little more selective? I plan on going with a 20 or mybe bigger depending what will fit in the spot i want to put it in. I want to be more selective since with a smaller tank I won't be able to keep a whole lot of fish in it. We've been to a pond catching stuff just to see what's available. Lots of little shrimp, some minnows that look to me like mollys, and small tilapia I think. I need to take pictures to identify them. But now my son is going back and forth with the local fish idea, since we've been to the local fish/aquarium store, he likes a lot of the fish there and wants those too 
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May 31, 2018 06:49
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Applebees Appetizer posted:But now my son is going back and forth with the local fish idea, since we've been to the local fish/aquarium store, he likes a lot of the fish there and wants those too ahem. These may be useful: https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/fish/discover/fish/fl-native-fish-id/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fishes_of_Florida sort by Native and Freshwater Also, if you're still set on native fish and spot anything you can't find, Florida happens to be where a bunch of fish distributors are concentrated, including some that specialize in native stuff, such as Sachs Systems Aquaculture. Fish Noise fucked around with this message at 09:34 on May 31, 2018 |
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May 31, 2018 09:32
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Any good tells to see if there's too much flow in a tank for a female Betta? Messing around with my fluval spec 3 and I want to increase flow to handle filtration better
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May 31, 2018 19:09
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For female bettas with shorter fins I don't imagine they'd be affected as badly by flow as a male, for a male you'd see torn fins, being sucked against the filter inlet etc. I do think its a fallacy that faster flow = better filtering. There's a certain amount of "dwell" time that you want the water to be in contact with the bacteria in order for the waste processing to happen. Did they use a smaller pump in the Spec 3 to the Spec 5? I think just sliding the pump flow control all the way open made the flow pretty strong in the Spec 5. All the way closed was even too fast and I ended up making holes in the outlet tube so that some of the water was returning to the chamber instead of going to the outlet. Right now I have an airlift tube running my Spec and I don't think I'll ever go back to having it powered, it works really well. I just put the spout through the existing outlet hole and run the airline where the power cable goes through the notch in the back of the cover. Anyway watch how your betta swims, is she buffeted about? is she hiding? I think you can see a fish visibly struggling to hold its position if the flow is too strong.
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Jun 1, 2018 11:57
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Just starting to dip my toe into this whole thing... I wish the substrate was cleaner but I redid it a few times... it's trickier than it looks.
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Jun 2, 2018 00:20
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Mozi posted:Just starting to dip my toe into this whole thing... Something about this makes me think an elder god is going to move in. Good job on the substrate tho, I've tried the multi-substrate thing a couple time and it always ends up a mess. I have a cardboard box full of failure and miscellaneous mixed substrates I mean to sift out into it's component parts someday. Someday.
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Jun 2, 2018 02:55
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Mozi posted:Just starting to dip my toe into this whole thing... I really like that driftwood, that's a pretty solid hardscape layout which will go a long way towards making planting easier and look good. I like loaches, and corys and I guess the striped Raphaels count too, and the crays - bottom dwellers who either have strong feelings about how the bottom of the tank should look or gently yet relentlessly turn over the substrate until it is uniformly mixed so I have given up on doing mixed substrates now. Works best for shrimp tanks or epic aquascapes where the fish are added for movement rather than as the focus of the tank. For sifting I have kept a number of improvised sieves over time, the old grille off a heater for separating out big rocks or sticks from soil mix, the grille off a ceiling fan for a slightly smaller grain size of gravel, and a bunch of beat up old nets for splitting sand from gravel. Sifting and sorting substrate is something I find to be extremely soothing, one time I wanted dark gravel to cap the sand and picked out all the darker coloured pieces from a mix and that took hours, rather than just going and buying a bag of dark gravel. (I did look but there wasn't any at the store). Worth it to get the look I wanted? Yes, I think so. Right now I have a heap of gravel/sand mix that I am going to separate which is from the old busted tank, wherein I found that yoyo loaches will flatten everything while looking for snails. Reminds me, I can probably do a water test on that tank today, it's been days since the repair so the silicone should in theory have set and cured by now!
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Jun 2, 2018 05:20
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Facebook Aunt posted:Something about this makes me think an elder god is going to move in. Thanks! That's just what I thought when I saw the driftwood. Thanks for the comments Stoca - this is what I'm planning on planting and stocking, all seem OK? Planting: Water wisteria (back left), Microsword (front gravel), Cryptocorne parva (right side and rear), Fissidens fontanis and/or Anubias nana petite (attached to driftwood) Stocking: A few cherry shrimp (the crystal ones, I think), a couple of Thai micro crabs, and a couple of Nerite snails.
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Jun 2, 2018 16:44
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I think I can pretty much picture that working although maybe for the crypt at the very back you could get something slightly larger like C. Wendtii "Green Gecko" and have the lower/smaller C. Parva in front of that. My experience with parva is that it stays small and grows very slowly. The water wisteria will grow up and towards the light then fan out at the surface, and will most likely need the most trimming and replanting. You can't go wrong with anubias nana petite, it is lovely plant in my opinion, and I love fissidens mosses too; I've never had much success with microsword but there are a few varieties and I think I lucked out and got one that prefers more light. Anyway it is a good mix of faster and slower growing plants and I think you should do well with those choices. Be careful picking your shrimp, Red Cherry (RC) shrimp are neocaridina species that prefer harder, non-acidic water (but are fairly hardy and adaptable) but Crystal Red (CR) are caridina species, prefer soft acidic water, are much more touchy about water conditions, (so are usually kept in bigger tanks for more stability) and also more expensive and more fancy. If you've used an active substrate that lowers pH your cherries might not thrive but any crystals would appreciate it. And then you would want to check which are more compatible with micro crabs and nerites; I don't know anything about the crabs but I suspect nerites might like conditions more similar to cherry shrimp than crystals due to the minerals they'll need for their shells. There are a lot of colours and patterns of both kinds of shrimp, some that will interbreed if you mix which might be desirable or not depending on the species. So anyway, I'm sure you'll be able to find some that suit your conditions! I think it will be a fun tank as long as you get all your basics lined up; filtration, cycling, temperature, water dechlorination, etc.
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Jun 2, 2018 17:42
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Thanks! I have well water and a RO system if needed, I did use some Fluval shrimp stratum (on top of soil) so I'll check the pH after the plants are in and see how well the shrimps might fare. Biggest issue might be heat in the summer as I won't have AC in this room.
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Jun 2, 2018 18:34
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Anyone have experience with the UNS brand of rimless tanks? I'm thinking of picking up a 90L for a real simple riparium setup. Aqua Lab Aquaria has them for $210 with free shipping, no freight required.
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Jun 2, 2018 20:17
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Stoca Zola posted:With no power a chiller won't help; if you have battery operated bubblers that can help drop the temperature a bit and more importantly improve oxygenation. Much like a warm soda goes flat, warm aquarium water holds less oxygen. Mostly you don't need chillers unless you are running a salt water tank with lights that run so hot that you need to counter it somehow. I think it's much less common now with LED lights that often have fan cooling and big heatsinks. Oh yeah, pointing a fan at the surface of the tank water can drop the temperature a bit too from evaporation. I've used a manual pump to bubble my tanks during a long power failure, better than nothing I guess. I remember reading in here when it comes to heaters, get two, that way if one fails off the other can take over the load. But yeah, without power anything but water changes aren't gonna help it and I can't stay home round the clock to deal with it. I figured now since I'm gonna drop shrimp in there that I'd replant the tank too, so I yanked all the Pothos, cleaned the filters and substrate while leaving the rooted bamboo and stuff alone. 4 days later algae bloom, lol. So now there's some new aquatic plants in there and had the shrimp come in last week, one of the adults was berried. I hadn't seen many of them around but with the Cholla wood and stuff there's plenty of places to hide. Did a 50% water change today and goddamn, the shrimp are all over the place, must be 50 of the little buggers in there. Once I get all the plants in there and everything settled, I think I'm gonna drop a school of Neon Tetras in there. I used to love watching them school in our old tank when i was a kid
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Jun 3, 2018 17:51
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Ugh, I dropped the glass hood for my aquarium and it broke  My aquarium is a 36gal cube/column tank and the top area where the glass goes measures 16.xx" by 18.xx" in depth and width respectively. I cannot find for the life of me a 16x18 glass top online. Is this really that much of an oddball size? Does anyone know where I can find one?
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Jun 4, 2018 19:27
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Jim Silly-Balls posted:Ugh, I dropped the glass hood for my aquarium and it broke Could go get glass cut at a local glass cutter?
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Jun 4, 2018 20:05
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Next time I do a water change will it gently caress up the fish if I put the water aging/de-chlorination stuff straight in the tank rather than treating each bucket as I fill it?
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Jun 4, 2018 22:04
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gay picnic defence posted:Next time I do a water change will it gently caress up the fish if I put the water aging/de-chlorination stuff straight in the tank rather than treating each bucket as I fill it? Drain tank, put in half decholorinator, fill tank, put in other half.
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Jun 4, 2018 22:07
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omnibobb posted:Drain tank, put in half decholorinator, fill tank, put in other half. This was a game changer for me. Not sure if splitting it is strictly necessary, but I do it regardless
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Jun 4, 2018 22:15
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Made a short video of my guppies in the little container pond out on our deck. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiAc9myWV80
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Jun 4, 2018 23:15
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Female Bettas playing nicely with the 2 cherry shrimp and nerite in my little 2.6g fluval spec 3 tank. Would it be reasonable to add more Chery shrimp? If so how many?
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Jun 4, 2018 23:24
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w00tmonger posted:Female Bettas playing nicely with the 2 cherry shrimp and nerite in my little 2.6g fluval spec 3 tank. Plural females in a 2.6? You're going to have issues with more than just the shrimp.
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Jun 4, 2018 23:42
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Typo sorry, just one Betta. Not a crazy person
w00tmonger fucked around with this message at 00:03 on Jun 5, 2018 |
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Jun 4, 2018 23:48
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Jim Silly-Balls posted:Ugh, I dropped the glass hood for my aquarium and it broke What about making something out of plexiglass?
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Jun 5, 2018 17:00
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Enos Cabell posted:Made a short video of my guppies in the little container pond out on our deck. Love the one going wild on the stem in the background
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Jun 5, 2018 17:03
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Fish Noise posted:IT BEGINS Cool, thanks for the links that will come in handy. We went back to the local pond the other day, and threw some bread in to attract some fish, I was amazed at the amount of Mollys, all looking very healthy and colorful, all with different color patterns. Also saw what looked like a huge Pleco in there. Would using native plants out of the pond be a good or bad idea? I'm trying to talk my son into doing a native tank first, just because I'm curious to see how it plays out, would be way more interesting than buying from a store imo.
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Jun 6, 2018 00:56
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Who keeps guppies? https://phys.org/news/2018-06-guppies-eye-deter-rivals.html I always thought it was that some guppies always had dark eyes, as a variation in pigment; turns out they can change their eye colour and use it to signal dominance/aggression. I'm going to watch a lot more closely next time I feed the guppies.
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Jun 6, 2018 09:05
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Applebees Appetizer posted:Cool, thanks for the links that will come in handy. Fish are one thing. I don't think plants would work too well without planting them with the same soil they were in and giving them the same water qualities. Changing plant environments like that is stressful on the plant and makes it really easy to kill off or melt.
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Jun 8, 2018 16:17
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Man, lesson learned... be careful with the superglue, once it's on, it's there for good...
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Jun 8, 2018 21:17
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I'm setting up a 5 gallon tank on my desk for blue velvet shrimp. Been doing some landscaping and set aside some pieces of stone, mainly local basalt. Took a couple of free floating crypts babies that popped up recently and an anubias nana that got uprooted by my dojo loaches from my 55 gallon tank. Seeded bacteria from my established tank as well. I'd like to try and get some low groundcover going, some kind of moss or microsword maybe. Any recommendations on the hardscape or plants? Used to have a thriving population of MTS in my 55 gallon. However, when I went looking for them to put in the new one, all I found were empty shells. I knew the dojo loaches were going after the bigger ones, but didn't realize they had killed the whole population. I'll have to get some from a buddy to seed the new tank. :*( 
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Jun 9, 2018 05:10
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I think that piece of stone has a lot of character! I had two ideas for the way your tank is laid out. Right now it looks a bit bare but it looks like the start of a triangular aquascape to me. First idea is just to get a bunch of bushy stem plants to the rear left, and keep them trimmed to follow this kind of diagonal. Needle leaf java fern would probably work well too, or windelof, but I find regular java fern gets too big and probably wouldn’t work.  Second idea was to put something with more rounded leaves to the right (to contrast with how angular that stone is) and then maybe some frogbit floaters to the left, I think they’d stay over there due to the current from the sponge filter pushing them that way. I’m a sucker for hydrocotyle in smaller tanks and it can grow in really nice layered cloud shapes but there are probably a number of plants that would work too. Monte Carlo is supposed to be fairly easy going as a carpeting plant if you didn’t want to have a spiky or grassy carpet, I have some that I’ve neglected a bit in a little tub in one of my shrimp tanks, and while it hasn’t taken off, it certainly hasn’t died and looks green and healthy despite not getting any particular care. I was trying to work out if driftwood would work in this tank but I don’t know where I’d put it with the layout that you have. Maybe a trunk/roots kind of shape to the left, that would fit the triangle shape? It’s an excellent start anyway, they say the hardscape is the skeleton for a good planted tank to grow from and this looks like a good strong skeleton to me.
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Jun 9, 2018 11:10
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Monte Carlo really calls for some c02 if you want to have a thick carpet. I have it my 55 and love it
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Jun 9, 2018 16:22
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My surviving sterbai cories were the only fish I brought with me to my new place, all three of them. I guess they're happy though, because now I've seen fry  Guess I'll hold off on adding more fish to the tank for a little bit and see how the little guys do.The random feeder ghost shrimp I bought for cleanup crew are also breeding, which I did not think they liked to do at all in tanks. That's cool too, if a bit bewildering. The MTS are also multiplying but nothing short of draining the tank would stop that, and only then if it stayed dry for like a week
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Jun 11, 2018 04:16
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I've had some water quality problems in my 15g sterbai cory tank, probably due to the gravel in the tank, trying to feed an ever growing population of fry plus still adding food for the adults. Even with water changes every few days I don't think I was getting enough debris out of the substrate and it culminated in a crash earlier this week. So I don't have an overpopulation problem in that tank any more. I did a massive water change as soon as I noticed the fish behaving weirdly but the damage was already done and I've been pulling tiny bony corpses out for a couple of days now. Pretty sad, kind of gross, but also interesting seeing how solid even the smallest ones are. When I first noticed something was wrong in that tank, I moved a bunch of fry out into the big tanks hoping the larger volume of clean water would do them some good (and if they died the resulting wastes would be very dilute). Sadly there were only 3 survivors I could find from that experiment - 2 are still a bit iffy and one is fully recovered and settled in to the big planted loach tank so I'll have to move some friends in for him at some point. Since the iffy ones were still alive but not particularly perky, I've moved them to the plague cory tank just so that there's less bustle and less competition, and hopefully they'll survive to be company for the 2 plague pandas. In the main tank all the adult sterbai seem fine now, and maybe four or five of the largest fry are still alive. I can't tell if the smaller fry were starving/dying and then polluting the water or if I was overfeeding, but once the little guys started dropping dead it went down hill pretty quickly. A learning experience for sure, in future I will know not to leave the eggs to hatch, the tank wasn't big enough for the resulting population and letting nature take it's course didn't really work to keep the population down - these sterbai breed too well for a small tank like that. Trying to work out how much to feed the tank, whether the adults are eating all of it etc, it's definitely just easier to raise the fry separately. I won't be using "small gravel" for a cory tank again either, their barbels have been fine but with small fry in the tank it was difficult to give the gravel a good deep clean. I think when I set up the big cube tank for them I'll use a thin layer of dark iron sand and see how that goes. That project is inching ever closer and I have got all the bits I need lined up, the big problem right now is working out exactly where the tank will go. I thought I had it worked out but there isn't as much space as I thought so plans will need to change.
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Jun 11, 2018 21:30
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Does anyone know that's wrong with our plants? They're losing their color but their lighting conditions haven't changed at all and we're treating the water with Fluorish Excel, as we always have. Maybe they need fertilizer pellets?   Related question: what should I do for a tank that's plant-only? We need to keep an Elodea tank and I already have it set up. They don't seem to be photosynthesizing at all (no bubbles forming on leaves) so maybe they just need light?
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Jun 11, 2018 23:43
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Mak0rz posted:Does anyone know that's wrong with our plants? They're losing their color but their lighting conditions haven't changed at all and we're treating the water with Fluorish Excel, as we always have. That rotala in the top picture is coloring up the way it is because it's really happy and getting lots of light. The crypts (I think that's what they are?) in the lower picture may well be melting. They'll come back, that behavior is a mechanism the plants have for dealing with rapid changes in their environment. For what it's worth, your lighting conditions *have* changed quite a bit in the past couple months, given the window right behind the tank. Re: your plant only tank, I found it's helpful to drop a little pinch of fish food in every now and then...with fish, your plants get their nitrogen from decomposing waste, without that you've got no source of nutrients. Lack of pearling (bubbles on leaves) doesn't mean that the plants aren't photosynthesizing, it just means that the tank does not have sufficient amounts of dissolved oxygen in the water for the plants' production to immediately bubble out of the tank.
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Jun 12, 2018 00:31
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kaosAG posted:That rotala in the top picture is coloring up the way it is because it's really happy and getting lots of light. The crypts (I think that's what they are?) in the lower picture may well be melting. They'll come back, that behavior is a mechanism the plants have for dealing with rapid changes in their environment. So there's... no concern then? The plant we have below the Rotala is really lush and healthy looking. kaosAG posted:For what it's worth, your lighting conditions *have* changed quite a bit in the past couple months, given the window right behind the tank. Fair. I live in the PNW so the sun hasn't really been coming through the window until about a month ago. kaosAG posted:Re: your plant only tank, I found it's helpful to drop a little pinch of fish food in every now and then...with fish, your plants get their nitrogen from decomposing waste, without that you've got no source of nutrients. Lack of pearling (bubbles on leaves) doesn't mean that the plants aren't photosynthesizing, it just means that the tank does not have sufficient amounts of dissolved oxygen in the water for the plants' production to immediately bubble out of the tank. I'll be sure to do this. Thanks!
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Jun 12, 2018 01:51
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