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If you are as much as a nerd as me you can make a spreadsheet; in months to come the data will tell you what to expect your pH to be and what changes you have made that have altered it. You can monitor how stable your nitrate levels are and get some idea as to what might have caused any...

Do you have something like limestone or coral sand in your tank? The kH may be raising gradually during the week, only to be reduced every water change if the tap-water has very low low kH. This reduced alkalinity might mean any acids in the water from peat and such can now effect pH where...

8ppm overnight seems sudden and weird though. Regardless of whether you are overstocked; you were equally overstocked on the previous day. I would not regard a "steady 0.5ppm" ammonia as "great" however. Have you any dead fish you need to remove? Do you have any helpful children or visitors who...

I've only seen the LoveFish range on sale in Pets at Home. I'd like to hope it removes ammonia the normal way and is meant to be used in conjunction with another water conditioner they also sell. My suspician is that is snake oil designed for Pets at Home employees to sell to people who have...

I mean it looks fine to me tbh, and the brown algae will eventually go no doubt. If you exterminate algae in a plantless tank it will be worse for the fish.

tbh I would not call that problem algae With that few live plants thats the best you can accept unless you scrub every surface every morning, and that much light will just make it worse

I have read that Bolivian Ram, a different but related species and a little larger, is happy at slightly lower temperatures and in general slightly hardier and slightly more gentle to other fish. Maybe that is just wishful thinking?

Irrelevent question here... But what is the limiting condition? Is it the availabilty of nitrogen compound? I mean given unlimited resources a hetrotrophic bacteria like E Coli will double in just 20 minutes (this despite the fact the DNA takes an hour to replicate; the daughter cells have...

When I had a Ram it tried to bully the cories, but only when it wanted to keep food for itself, so I just fed them in opposite corners. After a while, the cories started to ignore all attempts to bully until the Ram politely waited its turn at the food. Cories have no concept of territories...

My gourami, though they prefer the top of the tank, especially while eating, using their labyrinth or blowing bubble nests, generally seem to consider the whole tank theirs. Similarly my female apisto while preferring the lower third, even hanging around in caves with the cories, also considers...

Don't know if it matters about size of food for cories. They seem to bite/slurp off crumbs from pieces that don't fit in their mouths. Any food made specifically for cories is in wafer or even tablet form. After bug bites my cories second favourite food is FishScience corydoras tablets. The top...

My fish seem to go mad for food made from insects. I use three types of bug bites atm, but there are other companies that make insect based foods such as FishScience. I assume the nasty pet cockroach tank odour is what they go for lol

Isn't it each 1.0 is 10 times? Just checked wikipedia and the equation used for the scale is log-10; for what you are saying it would need to be log-100. I apologise for being petty though, as your point still stands, pH 8.5 is 100 times more alkaline than pH 6.5.

If you are gonna have diatoms, it's good to just be on sand rather than your plant leaves. Is this a problem that trumpet snails would sort out? I don't see that on my sand, but I think that's an army of cories ploughing through it every night looking for goodies. If you are still cycling and...

I often wonder if my crypto is dead then i notice the young fresh leaves in the middle. I think they are opposite of delicate though.... mine spent months smothered by black algae, then months more literally underneath a new piece of wood I'd bought. On removing and re-arranging my hardscape to...

If you have whole new filters and such remember you can swap all the media over

Have you tested ammonia and such yet? as I've heard that those plant substrates cause an ammonia spike in themselves There are some stickies in the tank cycling section of the forum that give instructions about the different ways of cycling, but if you have have actively growing plants, you are...

Well it's not just the volume. The colour chart is assuming the yellow colour will be read by looking through a certain distance of coloured solution. Try and get a 5ml syringe or pipette, will be way easier, even when you have tubes with the line on it....

In my limited experience hatchetts, cories and gourami (at least the gentle kinds) ignore each other. An issue with hatchets is jumping, main reason I have two remaining. The two remaining no longer hide for 3 hrs after every time I do something in the tank though.

Some filter intakes will take a sponge meant for an air powered sponge filter - with the added bonus of a simple to clean mechanical filter and extra biological media

Broken API test tubes is another reason I favour alternatives to API lol

I've long suspected that the bacteria are much more robust than received wisdom suggests, but it's not worth the small risk of killing your filter bacteria imo. That said, if you genuinely find using old water is insufficient, which in the case of ceramic media I'm certain it will be, your...

Haha - you will be the expert after all this. I've only started a tank once (properly as an adult I mean), and it went fine luckily. When I come to this website these days it's still via a bookmark that goes straight to the post with the fishless cycle instructions.

Totally agree. But..... I'd be lying if I said I didn't understand the temptation.

Not that my tank is lidless, but I've been going by the theory that if you have to top up in between water changes, you are not changing water often enough. And if the amount you top up "by accident" during a regular water change is enough to alter parameters over time, the amount of water you...

Problem with taking the affected plants out is that the algae now have less competition and may grow back even faster. Sometimes it's easier to ignore unless there's so much it looks ugly or it's literally killing the plants.

The days of our elders no-one had heard of a fishless cycle. All of the books suggested adding no more than 2 fish every few weeks; I suspect few followed this advice, hence the deiliberate murder of cheap goldfish to start off a tank faster. Sorry - I don't really disagree - but I think my my...

or get potted plants from the pet store tank if you notice snails in there.... that ofc means you will have to put up with hitchikers I told my shop - last plant I have from you have snail - I was happy with free gift but want to let them know because maybe other customer complain

I had a bottle of the tetra version when i started hobby. Quickly decided pointless - but more recently I did use it every water change just to get rid of the damn stuff... I partly blame trusting the lying test strips telling me I was at 0.25ppm.... my theory is the JBL app does that to make...

or squeeze a sponge from the first tanks filter into the new tank filter.... can't hurt, even if it dont work haha - we all have less patience abt cycling your tank than you do :P

my guess is americans scientists say ppm because they dont like to talk litres, even though US use metric like the rest of us do for professional purposes 1 million mg of water make 1kg water which is 1 litre

off topic sorry... but are pygmy cories the ones that behave more like a tetra?

I agree but I have to admit that is based on a feeling after having used several. It seems easier to read than API for instance, and appears to be more sensitive at lower ppm, probably only because the colour charts are based on looking down through the deeper part of the test tube, and the...

JBL also has three for ammonia, while salifert just has a large bottle of (I believe) sodium hydroxide. JBL has two for nitrite rather than one, and that also will be yellow with a negative reading (well they say <0.01). All nitrate tests seem to use powder, the API storing the powder in a...

I was going to ask if you have room for a bigger shoal of Emperors, but going by Byron's experience that might not work either.

Despite what I said above, that could be true. I got impatient with my cycle and added safestart midway.... it ended up taking only about 3 weeks.... which seemed shorter than I was expecting... I only have the one tank - so I cant say for sure my opinion that the bacteria made the cycle...

Some would say (ie the label and the fish shop employees) a couple of days. I would guess about three weeks. Without safe start I'd say more like 4 - 6 weeks. I think it varies for everyone and probably varies with the freshness of your bottle too. Also how much ammonia you are trying to grow...

As the leaf is sorta melting and breaking down, they either eat the leaf or more likely the infusoria, that forms from the breakdown. My totally unscientific evidence is that the leaves seem to last twice as long when there are no shrimp present. I also suspect that any cory fry that survived...

If the issue is overfeeding (although it looks like the issue could be simply cycling), I wonder how much feeding of actual food can be reduced for shrimp simply by tossing in an Indian almond leaf? I don't know the answer, I am thinking out loud, and might one day start a small shrimp tank of...

It's illegal for us in the uk... but I do wonder how many people who claim to breed guppies "for fun" do it to feed a tank of carnivorous fish. I once got some pet rats from a public aquarium that kept and showed reptiles on the upper floor. The staff patiently explained they only breed rodents...