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Well... CO2 should never RAISE the pH. When CO2 builds up it lowers the pH because of carbonic acid. Doing it with a powerhead is a quick and easy way to diffuse it. As long as you don't have much splashing to cause the CO2 to escape, it should work well for you. Just get a KH test kit and a...

I just picked up a copy of "The Complete Book of the Marine Aquarium" this weekend at Petsmart, of all places. It seems to be pretty comprehensive, going through the equipment needed.... what you can expect to see during the cycle.... what types of algae you can expect to see showing up at what...

Tonight I was looking in my tank at all the algae growing in it during its early phase.... and I noticed something odd on a piece of LR. I started looking closer, thinking it was just another patch of algae that had grown a bit big. Then I started counting.... 8 little "tentacles". Then I...

parker: I think I'm just few days ahead of you with mine. I had a big outbreak of diatom algae a little over a week ago. Then, one day, it was gone as fast as it came.... and replaced with a short bushy green algae. When it showed up, I added some hermit crabs. I put in 4 hermits at first...

I don't know why I hadn't read this before... and why I'm not doing this too :) I just started a 20g FOWLR last week.... with two damsels as of Wednesday. Mine showed .25 ammonia for a day.... NEVER showed nitrites... and now nitrates are somewhere between 10 and 20. I had a diatom outbreak...

Yeah, as best I can figure it either came in with a bunch of java moss where it could easily hide.... or on an amazon sword plant sent to me by a member from another board. Most likely the java moss though.... big clump that would be easy for that thing to hide in. What amazes me is that they...

spAcE and Samage cleared it up for me on IRC just after I posted this. It's a dragonfly nymph. Samage says they're predatory and can eat small fish, which would explain why I'm missing 4 neon tetras. -_- :unsure: :-( Well with the help of my nephew we managed to net it. Quick little...

Just a few minutes ago I was crouched down looking in my planted 55g... when this "thing" swam out from under a rock. I jumped back, fell over on my back, and immediately reached on the table for my camera. So what the heck is this thing, where the heck could it have come from, and is it...

I'd prefer a fish only. I love how reef tanks look, but I simply don't know enough at this point about corals to feel comfortable doing a reef tank. Besides that, I already have a planted 55g and a planted 20g.... and I know how overwhelming it can be just taking care of the plants, you kinda...

The guy at the LFS said to go ahead and add 1 or 2 damsels to cycle the tank... but with the LR and all it should have been pretty much done to begin with. The fish have been in since Wednesday and not a trace of ammonia showing up... so apparently it's already cycled!! Here's the current...

Yes and no. Petsmart sells Mondo grass because they also sell reptiles and terrariums. It's a great terrarium plant. The problem is, they sell it submerged with the normal aquatic plants with nothing to signify that it is a bog plant, not aquatic.

It's not just big pet stores, though. Most pet stores don't give a crap about plants. They either focus their energies and learning on saltwater, because that's the big money and beautiful fish..... or they're usually a general pet store that sells all kind of things, not just fish. I've yet...

Pictures: Those were taken not too long after adding the coarse arogonite. It hadn't finished settling yet. I've also added 3 more small fragments of live rock that were covered in a reddish/purple coraline algae, and even noticed a bit of purple coraline on the live rock that was in those...

Great Barrier Reef, I'm assuming

For now, fish only. I don't know enough about corals and what's aggressive to try to do anything in a tank that small. Once everything is settled with it and it's cycled and the LR has some time to show grow out, I'll consider some corals.

Keep in mind that's gonna be a direct wire hookup with a chain switch... not exactly ideal. You'll have to find some way to get electricity to it, which is probably gonna mean wiring up a normal two prong plugin for it. The chain isn't gonna be a wonderful idea either.

It's cured. It's been in a tank since he got it, and it smells just fine. The only thing I could smell was the standard saltwater smell.

Over the last week, I cleaned out an old tank a co-worker of mine gave me and while joking with the wife, we put it at the end of our garden tub. It sat there while she took a bath, and she loved how it looked, and gave me permission to go ahead and setup the SW tank I've been thinking about...

Hornwort. Works as a floating plant or you can use a plant anchor to weigh it down to grow like a normal stem plant. It has overrun my tanks in no time flat. With low light, it grows tall.... with high light it grows bushy. Also giant val (tape grass) might work for you.

Everything CFC said is spot on. Once you have it, you can either deal with it by just using a stick or something to kinda twist it around and remove it..... or if you can find Amano Shrimp, they'll eat it right up. My algae scraper is the cheap Petsmart kind, but it has a forked end to it...

It could, but I highly doubt it. Citric acid is... well... acidic. But, the amount you'd get on there would be trivial, and it would probably all rinse off or dilute down to nothing.

Mine doesn't harm the plants. In fact, the plants in my 20g are growing a lot better since I added the carbon to it. Reason being, the water was so stained from driftwood that the light couldn't effectively get through to my plants. I added the carbon, cleared up the water, and BOOM... new...

GE Daylight 6500K flourescent bulbs. About $4 each from Lowes

I'm surprised nobody has suggested the most common blue fish around..... standard neon tetras. I added a school of 11 to my 55g tank a few weeks ago and my wife absolutely loves them. They're a bright contrast to the green plants and reddish Harlequin Rasboras. Blue and red and absolutely...

One thought real quick.... would keeping Mollies in a tank with loaches and cories be advisable? Don't Mollies require some salt in the tank..... and doesn't salt burn loaches and cory cats?

A co-worker of mine gave me an old tank he had, and I told him don't go to any trouble to clean it or anything... just give it to me.... because I wanted to make sure he didn't use any soap in it. Well... this morning I told him I had gotten it down and soaked it in Oxyclean to clean it up...

Bedrooms are supposed to have some ambient "white noise" :) I've lived for years with computers in my room with the fans humming at all times, and I loved it. After I got married and the computers have to stay in another room, do you know how hard it was for me to get used to sleeping without...

You could make a 'River Tank". Either buy one of the pre-built ones or make your own :) http://www.rivertank.com - http://www.geocities.com/river_tank/ (if rivertank.com doesn't work) http://www.abundantearth.com/store/rivertankecosystem.html

Some of that is right, and some is wrong... at least in my experience. Mine will pick up food intended for my cories, but it doesn't prevent them from eating algae. They'll eat the tablets until they've dissolved, and then they don't seem very interested in burrowing for food like the cories...

Amano shrimp are great, if you can find them. They eat algae, but like ghost shrimp they're also scavengers. They'll eat anything they can get their little pincers on. So, if you want to get amanos, you might do well to get some cories or something else that can scavenge faster than the...

I have 4 Anubias in my tanks, and all of them have "flowered" at one point in time now. However, flowering is not what you'd think of. If you want to break monotony, get a few reddish plants as accents, like Alternanthera Reineckii... Myriophyllum Heterophyllum.... or perhaps the easiest...

Ghost shrimp could be cool, and should get along well with whatever small fish you end up putting in there. Don't know if they'd work in brackish water though.

Okay, made it to Petsmart today. Despite the fact they molted own their own the other day, I bought a little container of "HBH Crab & Lobster Bites". They didn't have "Crab Cuisine".... if that's an actual brand of food. I made sure to look over the list of ingredients, and "Iodate" is on the...

If you can find the reflective mylar, that would probably be your best bet. It's SUPER shiny and thin enough to put it on there just like paper on the inside. It's fairly cheap, too... if you can find it anywhere. Problem is, I don't know where to tell you to look for it.

Well we've been doggie-sitting all weekend and haven't made it to Petsmart yet, where I was going to buy some of the crab cuisine you suggested. This morning I walked in and found a shrimp "eating" something white/clear. I figured out quickly that it was the exoskeleton and that he had just...

It won't hurt your fish, and in fact will probably be about 3-4 months underwater before it starts showing signs of dying. I did the same thing, bought Cherry Hedge thinking it was an aquarium plant. After I found out, I took it out and my grandparents planted it in their outdoor fishpond, and...

Power compacts are smaller and put out more light, but I don't really know that they're in the "DIY" realm. If anything, they're gonna be special order parts, not something you're likely to find at the local hardware store. I think CurrentUSA makes a 20" long Compact Flourescent fixture... if...

You say you have 2WPG with 30 watts... that means a 15g that's about 18" long, I'm assuming. 24" long bulbs are 20 watts each, so a dual tube 24" flourescent rig will get you 40 watts. The smallest Power Compact strip you're gonna find is 24" as well, and it puts out 55-65 watts.. depending on...

We have soft water here, but the Onyx Sand substrate in this aquarium raises the hardness a bit. Out of the tap it's about 3 dGH.... with the Onyx it's about 7-8dGH I believe. That enough or is more required?

Today my nephew called me asking if I would help him with his science experiment. His teacher had suggested doing something related to growing plants. What she suggsted was plant growth using chlorinated water versus dechlorinated water for daily watering.. using normal house plants...