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I'm not a fan of Wardley foods - read the label closely. I'd switch to a higher quality food like one of those referenced in Commercial Fish Foods.

No real need to even get your hands wet. Check out Partial Water Changes - Fast and Easy. :) Plants, especially fast growing floating plants, along with good filtration and don't overlook The Very Best Aquarium Filter.

Checkout the live food section of Aquabid. You would likely also find them on ebay.

Along with a mix of high quality commercial flake food as a staple, I feed some live foods. I culture micro worms, white worms, and Red Russian daphnia. I also collect mosquito larvae from several outdoor daphnia bins in season. Of the foods I culture, I find that the white worms are the most...

I remember a time so many years ago when Abbey had a ten-gallon tank for her goldfish (Gracie the Wonder Fish) with an undergravel filter. At the time I foolishly thought that the undergravel filter would handle the waste by itself and a goldfish makes a lot of waste. After a time, the water...

I've lost track of the number of times we've seen a newer hobbyist post that he started his tank and it's been running for a month, the test parameters were fine, but when he added fish, they all died. The test results for ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate may appear fine but that doesn't mean the...

I normally don't fast fish. However, there are different schools of thought about fasting fish. Charles Clappsaddle of Goliad Farms, a fish farm in South Texas, describes two types of fish feeding habits. These are grazers and gorgers. Grazers take in small amounts of food throughout the day...

It sounds like you already have quite a bit of filtration. We often hear on one discussion forum or another about over filtration. In the minds of most hobbyists, this typically means more filters or more filtration in terms of gallons per hour throughput. This is fundamentally wrong. More...

The bacteria in a bottle products that are now being marketed are good products. I think the problem lies in the storage and handling of these products. Bacteria is very resilient, however, if not handled properly and if exposed to extreme heat, they can perish. I think that Dr. Tim's one and...

What follows is perhaps redundant but worth another read… When We speak a cycle we're talking about the nitrogen cycle. This is where ammonia is converted into nitrites and nitrites is converted into nitrate. Ammonia is converted into nitrites by a bacteria called Nitrosomas. Nitrite is...

As you point out, when squeezed into a bucket of tank water, the resulting dark water is excellent fertilizer for plants. However, you might want to only clean the sponge filters every other week or even every three weeks or more. And when cleaning, don't go overboard. This better insurers...

When we think of parameters we most often think of ammonia, nitrItes, nitrAtes, gH and kH. However these are merely the parameters we can currently a test for. However, there are many other parameters and pollutants we simply cannot test for. There is a wealth of knowledge in books and who...

Sure, you can have an aquarium with fake plants and as long as you perform sufficient volume/frequency of partial water changes, the water quality should remain high. But with a proper substrate, live plants, and good filtration you get closer to a biotope where the biology in the balanced...

Thank you. I used to think that we needed to clean the filter and substrate often in order to get the crud out of the system. But the reality is that unless you were to clean the filter say every hour or so, organic material is going to decompose in spite of your best efforts. What makes the...

For a very long time I resisted live plants. I felt that I would need to spend $ money on better lighting. Plastic plants were easy and frankly I cleaned them in the dishwasher from time to time so that they always looked really good. But plastic plants do nothing to improve water quality...

The Balanced Aquarium

Partial Water Changes - Fast and Easy

I've seen that Pothos is a good terrestrial plant for taking nitrates from the water....assuming there's enough light in the room.

I believe that the point being made was that if the 'o' ring in your canister filter fails, the canister will leak. With all the plumbing pipes and connections, a sump could also leak. To the OP, setting up a sump is pretty straight forward, but as @Colin_T points out, the bulkhead for the...

We often hear of hobbyists that unplug heaters when warm weather arrives and I often wonder why. If/when the room temperature gets above the operating set temperature of the heater, the heater never comes on anyway, so why unplug it? In any case, as previously mentioned, goldfish (*like many...

Although it's true that anything in the water gets into the fish through osmosis, most aquatic plant fertilizers, when properly used are safe for fish. As a matter of fact, I culture Red Russian Daphnia (among other things) as a live food source and daphnia are extremely sensitive to water...

Fish obtain their internal temperature from the water so it's always a good idea not to have dramatic changes. This is why we float fish bags to slowly equilabrate temperature. Water used for a water change can be a few degrees either way from the tank temperature. Remember that even when doing...

PET and HDPE are considered safe for fish however they should be cleaned well prior to use as they will often contain remnants of silicone mold release from the molding process. I scrub using Dawn dish soap and rinse well.

I wouldn't push it. If they had you sign an NDA, they're understandably serious about protecting their processes in a very competitive business. Even writing about it, let alone photo's, could cost your employment or worse (like a breach of contract lawsuit)! The world we live in. (just my dime) ;-)

Very true, but it must also be a fish in demand, at a price people are willing to pay. I've seen a lot of high priced, unusual fish that live in fish stores. Truth be told, there are very few hobbyist breeders making lots of money...but then for most of us it's a more a hobby than a business...

Wholesale fish sales is about 1/3 the retail price so unless you can scale to produce in bulk, it's a revenue source for food and supplies but not a real money maker. 'A tropical fish breeder won the lottery and was asked what he was going to do with the winfall. He said "I guess I'll just keep...

It all began many years ago when Abbey saw some balloon molies at the pet store and thought they were adorable. So I bought a pair and soon after there were 18 fry. This brood was followed by two more broods of 18 each hat all eventually went to the LFS. Then along the way I began breeding...

Let me know how selling Duckweed works for you and I'll get in the biz to become a zillionair!!! lol

Ah, but once waste decomposes to a certain point, any resulting 'evil' is in the water column and the resulting mulm solids are relatively inert... although it does provide a home for beneficial bacteria - perhaps not nitrosomonas or nitrospira, but beneficial none the less. As I mentioned, I...

Ah but in your previous post I'm pretty sure you claimed that hot water would melt the gravel vac. And even if hot water was to leach anything, it would likely be rinsed away. I'm not really wishing to beat a dead horse so he'll go faster, but the no soap for aquariums is such an old myth...or...

I used to think this too, but then was somewhat re-educated by Charles Clapsaddle of Goliad Farms. He is a breeder in south Texas with numerous vats in 2-3 greenhouses. The vats all have several inches of mulm that Charles is convinced is beneficial - full of beneficial bacteria and paramecium...

I thought I'd drop in an offer another two cents! There just is no real answer to the question. As with each and every tank there are so many variables that to make a rule for waste removal is almost silly. Now all waste decomposes and pollutes the water. But if there are sufficient plants...

As I re-read this thread a couple of additional thoughts came to mind. Mentioned several times was overfeeding and of course we don't want that. But an important point when discussing feeding is the quality of the fish food you're feeding. There are many quality commercial fish foods, but there...

I tend to subscribe to Charles Clapsaddle's 'Grazers and Gorgers' fish feeding tips. I think most of our fish are grazers and as such might be fed small amounts several times a day. Having 'said' that, I feed most of my swordtails twice daily (fry 3 times), but there's always plants and algae...

Oh boy...I'm going to have to differ from both @Byron and @Colin_T... I culture Daphnia as a fish food item. Daphnia is very sensitive to water quality and is often used to test waters for purity. I have repeatedly used Dawn dish soap to scrub daphnia bins clean to remove algae. I've also used...

:hi: Welcome back!

The Under Gravel Filter was quite the rage back in the day...and I speak of the 60's and 70's. It was very inexpensive and a superior bio-filter. With proper gravel vacuuming it could be run nearly forever. But this was before power filters of any kind, let alone canister filters. (And a UGF can...

Please see my article about Mulm, and Algae, and Snails, Oh My! :rofl:

As I wrote: Then again, in the average home aquarium, fewer fish is typically better.

Accu-Clear is a water clarifier intended to bind tiny (cloudy water) particles together so the filter can trap them. Not really the case here and these clarifyers are really hard on fish gills.