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So, the surviving gold gourami (asbo-fish as I call it) is being collected by someone on Tuesday and taken to a bigger aquarium where it'll no doubt have a better life. Since the gourami it bullied is now dead I did consider keeping it but I think this is for the best. It is now chasing the...

All good thoughts everyone, thanks. I must say I do wish there was a way to quantify this. Being an engineer by nature I'm used to precision so I wish I could somehow know the specific quantity of food x amount fish require and be able to provide exactly that. But I can see that's not really...

Thanks - I'll try that...

The general word I read is that the trick is to only feed as much as the fish eat in a few minutes but that doesn't seem easy to determine with my cardinals. I crush the flakes as much as I can but still nearly all the food floats on the water surface. The gourami goes up to the surface to eat...

Now that I understand. I know next to nothing about fish keeping (clearly) but in my business (I'm a recording engineer and producer of 30 years standing) we are bombarded with "wisdom" from an industry that wants to get us all to buy into their products and their workflows. Unfortunately, new...

Is it possible (he asked, trying to be the diplomat) that there's more flexibility when you're talking about large (300L plus) tanks with complex external filters, compared to small (100L or less) tanks with basic submerged filters? Even in my still very limited experience I have already seen...

OK - so one thing we all agree on is I will now being 'doing the water' once a week, and that I won't be rinsing the filters again for a while. Only thing is - and note that there's still a lot of blanket weed I'm dealing with, which tends to detach the odd plant leaf - when I rinsed the filter...

Thanks for your thoughts, PJ. As ever, lots of different useful views from whoever I hear from. I inherited the tank with an insane algae infestation and I'd been keeping the temperature lower in the hope of slowing it down while I dealt with it. I am now incrementally increasing to 24...

The tank I inherited is now about as stable as it's going to get, and I'm sure it has finished 'cycling'. Up to now, I've been changing small amounts of water (about 10%) every day and rinsing the filter sponges every 3-4 days in used tank water. I'm now ready to contemplate starting a regular...

The small gourami died a few minutes ago. The hiding log intervention was a good one and I should have thought of it sooner but inevitably the small one wasn't going to stay inside permanently; by this morning, every time the big fish wandered off the small one was venturing out and trying to...

Indeed you did. I should have seen your post before I replied to Slaphppy7's. But I'm still learning about the varieties out there and didn't know 'dwarf' was another type...

truthfully? I don't know. But these are not obviously gold in colour and in fact the fish shop wrongly sold them as pearl gouramis, probably because they look pearl in colour.

They're gold gouramis

It wins me a bit of time while I try to find someone who'll take the big one off my hands.

Finally I did something right. The little gourami kept trying unsuccessfully to hide from the bully fish in the base of a particular plant. So I bought a little resin hollow log ornament and put it just by the plant. After a few hours the injured fish figured out it could park itself inside -...

You're right about the shrimp!

Indeed. Hopefully those carpet plants I've put in there will spread and grow. Your tank looks great by the way!

Oh I don't dislike it. I'm just thinking what I can do to improve things and that piece of wood is displacing at least 10 litres.

You'll note from my other threads that I inherited this tank and the fish population isn't ideal. It's nominally 125 litres and contains 13 cardinals, two gourami, four algae eaters and two shrimp. I can either get a bigger tank (not an option), get rid of some of the fish (not ideal) or try...

Stupid question. If I'm wondering if it's too big, it probably is. It reaches within 1cm of the front wall and within 3cm of the back wall at its widest part. There's a big hollow in the back of it that you can't see in the pictures and this is where the two shrimp spend most of their time.

Give it away? Worth a try...

I gratefully received lots of good advice from my first thread, and I haven't ignored it but I decided to 'let things ride' while I try to stabilise everything and be sure the tank is fully cycled. My routine is now that every morning, after checking pH, Nitrite, Ammonia and Phosphate (I don't...

Thanks for that. I'l struggle on... the regret-ometer is moving back into the amber range...

Now I'm completely confused...

I found "zebra barb" here (number 7 on the list): https://www.thesprucepets.com/barb-species-1380768 which looks vaguely like my fish. I suppose I'll have to phone the fish shop and ask them what they sold me!

Thanks! Any thoughts as to the identity of those algae eaters I was sold?

100 US gallons is 378L i.e. 378Kg of water. Add the tanks, stand etc and say 400Kg. That's 881 pounds (US) - about the weight of 8 people. Does that help? I'm not familiar with Brownstone construction but I guess the floors are wood planks over wooden joists, like an older property in the UK.

Managed to get a shot of the 'new' Pearl:

oh, and - the substrate is gravel over soil, and I didn't disturb that when I moved the tank to my place (I left about an inch of the water in while I moved it).

Blimey Essjay. A wealth of helpful info in one post. Thank you so much. (1) I'm obviously not changing enough of the water. I wrongly assumed that if the tank was still balancing I should change as little as possible. I also learned from another thread that I'm wrong in having been...