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I am trying to set up a new aquarium but there must have been some mistake because all I've got so far is a giant sucking vortex where my wallet used to be. I've spent $NaN so far and I haven't even got to the point where I can spend way too much on moss and shrimp, let alone fish 
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Oct 9, 2022 21:58
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| # ¿ May 4, 2024 22:27 |
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Lareine posted:It feels that way for me too. I'm hoping that most of the aquarium costs are frontloaded. Once you are established, all you need to do is occasionally buy food or chemicals, right? I am already mapping out where all the cables for my second tank can go  I don't think this is a hobby where you stop running out of things to spend money vs running out of money (you're willing) to spend.
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Oct 10, 2022 00:27
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My biggest expenses this time were an external canister and an inline chiller, and for both of those I'd rather buy new so they're under warranty if anything breaks. Honestly my complaint wasn't really about the money, it was that the time between spending the money and getting to the 'fun part' where I get to set the tank up is too long! On the plus side, I now have everything that will have wires or tubes in the tank ordered (and most are on hand), and all my powerboards squared away, plus my rough tank layout planned. So I should be able to at least get the tank on the cabinet and most of the cables in place this week. Chiller won't be here til later this month, but I can work around that and don't have to wait for it. Then I just need my aquarium foam and extra substrate to show up and I can start finalising the driftwood placement! And then soon enough I too can reach the place where this tangent started, where my tank is full of water and I am full of aquascaping regrets 
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Oct 10, 2022 01:29
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You in Aus Stoca? If so, try these guys. I literally just got a custom lid for my 2 foot tank from them and it was $170, and that was 6mm acrylic with a ton of extra cutting that probably added a chunk to the price. I reckon if you want 4.5mm and a straight rectangle you'd probably get closer to $100, maybe even less. Still not as cheap as Americans get it, but not $250!
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Nov 20, 2022 07:09
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Is the TurboStart a dechlorinator, or are you using a separate one you didn't list? Also I used one of those bacteria-in-a-bottle products (API Quick Start) and I still had a lot of spikes I had to treat with SeaChem Prime before my tank was properly stable. Do you have a test kit to check your ammonia/nitrites/nitrates?
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Jan 4, 2023 08:26
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Lareine posted:I got 20 which was probably too many because all of the females got berried and now I've got way too many shrimp. 
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Jan 23, 2023 05:11
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Lareine posted:If you don't have fish eating the babies, a good portion of them will live to adulthood provided you give them enough food. A single berried female can have up to 30 young at a time. It takes a few months for the babies to get to breeding age. Since I have a 29 gallon, I might not be in trouble now but I know in the future, I'm going to have hundreds. I didn't expect me to be this good at shrimp keeping straight out of the gate. I was half expecting me to murder the drat things with ineptitude. I have kept shrimp before (I'm actually currently building a 6-chambered acrylic tank just for breeding cherry shrimp, so I can breed multiple colours without them diluting into wildtype). I just find the phrase 'too many shrimp' hard to accept, since I can never have too many shrimp In my heavily planted 20G I had easily a few hundred shrimp, but only ever saw maybe 10-20 at a time because they had so much moss and driftwood to hide in. I'm also a weirdo who loves breeding ramshorn snails, though. I just got a half dozen blue ones and my reaction to seeing eggs on the glass was 
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Jan 23, 2023 07:12
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nwin posted:Just dosed ammonia an hour ago-here’s where I am: My experience using bottled bacteria is that you'll get ammonia>nitrate initially, but it's not stable the way a cycled tank is. I'd start getting random ammonia and nitrite readings throughout the week and have to re-add more bacteria or do water changes to bring it back in line. It took the same amount of time to actually fully stabilise as the times I've cycled (fish in or fish out) without it. In my opinion, the bottled bacteria didn't do what it advertised, and I wouldn't recommend it for skipping cycling. If you do stock the tank, I strongly recommend stocking it extremely lightly, and being very vigilant about testing every day, and have some Prime on hand so you can make sure any random spikes aren't toxic to whatever stock you add. Treat it as basically fish-in cycling with a slight safety buffer, not an already fully cycled tank.
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Feb 11, 2023 23:11
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Looking for recommendations for dense-ish carpeting plants, ideally that grow shorter than 5cm under high light conditions, that don't have a hard requirement for high CO2. So far the list of options I've got is: Lilaeopsis brasiliensis Echinodorus tenellus Eleocharis bellem Micranthemum tweediei Marsilea hirsuta Glossostigma elatinoides Utricularia graminifolia I know some of these grow taller in lower light, but I am aiming for a high light tank setup (and don't mind trimming those that might get up around 7cm if necessary), and I know some will do better with additional CO2, but will still live without it, unlike something like HC. Am I missing any obvious options here?
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Feb 23, 2023 04:45
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drilldo squirt posted:Is their any reason that https://www.amazon.com/Tetra-Crescent-Aquarium-Efficient-5-Gallon/dp/B00324X5L2?ref_=ast_sto_dp&th=1 would be a bad tank for a beta? It's 5 gallons. Look for something 10G (or ideally 20G if you can swing the space). In my opinion 5G is only suitable for shrimp and snails. Even nano fish like chili raspboras are better in a 10G.
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Mar 24, 2023 10:06
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My first thought is that maybe he got caught next to the heater and got a burn, or maybe got himself trapped against some hardscape and scraped himself up?
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Apr 12, 2023 01:45
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It reads like you seeded the tank with media from an established tank and then let it sit for a while with no livestock in it? If so, all the beneficial bacteria in the seed media would have starved due to not having a source of ammonia to eat. You need to either add seeded media to the tank at the same time as the first livestock, or to feed the bacteria ammonia yourself until you add some livestock. Your water parameters looked fine because you didn't have anything generating ammonia in the tank, so ammonia/nitrite/nitrate were obviously all steady at zero. As soon as you added the cories there would have been an ammonia spike because there's no beneficial bacteria left alive in your filter. If you add anything else it will happen again because you still have no beneficial bacteria established (especially if you let the tank sit empty again after the cories died). Basically your tank isn't cycled (unless you were dosing it with ammonia before you added the fish and just forgot to mention it). Don't put anything alive in it until you have a plan to get it cycled. Sorry about your cories  it always sucks losing fish.
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Apr 12, 2023 21:24
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Get a nerite snail if you want to spend $5 on one snail. Get a ramshorn snail if you want to spent $5 on infinite snails Or just wait and see what hitchhikes in on your plants and save $5.
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Apr 18, 2023 08:51
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The Nastier Nate posted:Anyone go to Reefpalooza this weekend? As a freshwater person, I appreciate the hard work that salt water people do to make my hobby appear frugal and low maintenance.
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Jun 26, 2023 00:57
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Just had a nightmare of a moving experience, where I hired what I thought were professionals (from a proper LFS), only to have this happen: 1. Only one guy turn up, who expected me to help him move a 20G tank down one flight of stairs and up another 2. He did not remove the livestock from the tank first  3. He drained the water down to '1 inch' but ignored the fact my substrate was on a nearly 45 degree angle, so '1 inch' at the front of the tank was more like half an inch for ALL my livestock to crowd into 4. He moved the tank with substrate and most of the hardscape in it  5. When we got to the new location, he immediately put the big centerpiece of driftwood back in, before refilling the tank, which meant any fish trapped in the plants under it had zero hope of getting free 6. He also didn't bother leveling the stand at all before putting the tank on and refilling it, so now I have to try to jam shims in when I do water changes until I can get it level. 7. He reattached all my cords in the dumbest way possible (a minor thing compared to all of the above, but annoying considering my cable layout both super basic and 100% colour-coded) Luckily almost everyone survived - it looks like I lost 2 green neon tetras and maybe 1 or 2 glowlight tetras. The betta and all the corys made it and are happily out and about and eating again already. If I weren't already planning on upgrading to a new tank I'd be extremely paranoid about the integrity of the tank, considering 'do not move your tank with anything inside it' is literally point number 1 on basically every aquarium moving guide I've seen. But it's holding up for now, and I do have an emergency tank in the kitchen that I can move things to in case of a leak. But yeah. Next time I move I'm definitely going to make getting the tank out goal #1 as soon as the new place has electricity, because leaving it to 1 day before I had to hand the keys to the old place back meant I had basically no ability to say 'hey this seems like not the correct way to do this' and find another option to help me move. Very glad it's over and that I got mostly lucky with the outcome.
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Nov 19, 2023 04:07
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Stoca Zola posted:
Show her some instagram photos of people with emmersed plants added at the top of the tank and try to convince her to do the same. I have 3 Philodendrons and a variegated Syngonium over my 20G and I just straight up don't need to do water changes at all anymore (and the plants have zero upkeep as well, although I might need to split the Philodendrons soon because they've grown so many new leaves). The only thing to be careful of is that some plants have toxic roots or leaves, so you'll either need to be picky with which plants you use or have some way to keep them where the fish can't eat them. It might still not be enough to filter for two big goldfish, but it would absolutely help, especially while they're smaller.
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Jan 7, 2024 21:51
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Fishkeeping can be such a disaster sometimes.
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I personally would not keep a betta in anything smaller than a 10G even if you weren't worried about the shrimp. They're really active and curious fish and I don't think 5G provides enough space or enrichment for them.
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Feb 12, 2024 05:57
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drilldo squirt posted:I got a betta in a 10 gallon and it spends most of it's time in a little fake log I bought it. Sounds to me like your betta could use more space and enrichment v  vI've never had bettas in anything smaller than a 20G, and I've also never had a betta that didn't spend all day swimming around and exploring and mugging for my attention. And the betta I had in my biggest tank (a 70G I had when I lived with my parents as a teenager) was also my longest-lived betta - he almost made it to 8. It's just my opinion, but I think a 10G is the absolute minimum for anything bigger than chili rasboras. <10G tanks should be shrimp and snail only.
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Feb 12, 2024 07:51
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a7m2 posted:Thank you for the feedback. I found a tank that will fit that's 11.1G. If I want a betta and some cherry shrimp, is it going to be a problem that the tank is only ~10 inches/25cm high? I'm looking at a tank that's ~11 inches wide, ~23.6 inches long and ~10 inches high (28*60*25cm). In general most fish (including bettas) prefer longer tanks than taller tanks, so you should be fine there. Make sure you have a lid though, as with a shorter tank you really don't want to lose any water space just to keep a gap at the top to prevent fish or shrimp jumping out. If you're open to other types of fish, you should definitely look at getting a school of chili rasboras (which, as noted, are small enough they won't even eat juvenile shrimp). Or you could do a small school of dwarf/pygmy corydoras if you don't mind juvenile shrimp occasionally getting eaten (but corys won't actually hunt them, and they won't hurt healthy adult shrimp, at least in my experience). I've kept bettas and cherry shrimp together successfully in all my tanks, but they've been heavily planted 20G and the bettas all definitely ate whatever shrimp they could manage to catch, so I'd imagine it would be harder to balance a colony in a 10G. If you do go with a betta, I would recommend having a lot of sußwassertang in the tank, since it's dense enough for shrimp to hide in but not so dense its a trapping risk. Moss is also good, but you need to let it grow pretty long before shrimp can actually hide in it properly. Vertical plants like pearlweed or valisneria will also break up lines of sight and give shrimp something to escape into if they're getting picked on in the middle/top of the tank.
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Feb 12, 2024 13:58
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| # ¿ May 4, 2024 22:27 |
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I imagine basically every big fish keeper has seen at least one genuinely horrifying case of fish abuse, and that that probably has a big impact on the advice they give to strangers online. Like yeah, a responsible fish keeper can absolutely keep more than 1 oscar in an 180G, but once you've seen someone keeping 3 in a half-full 180 with water that's more ammonia than H2O by weight you're probably going to recommend that people stick with 1 in a 180G unless you already know they're responsible fish keepers.
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Apr 14, 2024 23:24
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