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I recently upgraded my 20L tank for a 90L tank (AR620), currently has 6 x serpae tetras and a young BN catfish. Substrate is sand, and I am keen on setting this up to be as happy an ecosystem as possible (inc live plants to replace the silk ones I have). I have heard that snails are beneficial...

with LED lights as with fluorescents, the phosphor coating and thus the spectrum of light it emits is everything. if you are getting more light at the wavelength of the plants' peak sensitivity then they will grow better. it's hard to tell just by looking at them which LEDs are suitable, but a...

you can try polishing them with a mild abrasive (toothpaste works well) but if the scratch is deep enough to catch your fingernail you won't get rid of it.

one of the biggest influences on algae is sunlight (and to a lesser degree aquarium fluoro lighting). overfeeding will also add nutrients to the water. cut down on these and your algae problem should improve.

you are bringing the water over as a buffer for your water chemistry, so instead of a 100% change you are doing a 75% change. it means pH swings and hardness swings aren't as big, eg my tank stabilizes at pH 6.5 and my tap water is pH 8. That said, unless you have particularly sensitive fish...

Smaller changes won't change the chemistry much and they also won't change the nitrate level much. If you do a 50% change between pH 6 tank water and pH 8 tap water you will jump to pH 7. If your fish are very delicate you may have issues but most tropicals should cope. My tank water reaches...

Your first idea was the right one - transfer everything into the new home (most importantly fish, original water, and filter material). Most of the bacteria are in the filter and you will avoid a cycle if you start the new tank this way and then fill the rest with dechlorinated water...

Well you should probably give her a hammering now and then but that's different :D

Are you sure it wasn't the next biggest loach that had grown in size after eating for two?? :lol: I barely ever see my BN catfish, he is very adept at hiding. It's amazing the places fish will find to hang out that make them invisible to you.

agree 100%.. good luck with it!! :good:

I don't think it's porous in which case I'm sure you could do better.

To be honest both styles are good - the very first shot you have shows really strong saturated reds (they're even blown out a bit, either too much colour saturation in the camera or from photoshop?). After changing flash position there's nowhere near as much red, specifically.. but the other...

You can get in a bit of trouble for that, normally when girlfriend shouts the best thing is to ignore her and go about your business :D

You want a diffuse water outlet, not a jet.. a focussed jet or stream of water will set up strong currents, if you diffuse it eg with a spray bar that has lots of small holes in it then the current will be a lot less

plastics can also develop a haze from oxidisation over time. it yellows the surface. can be polished out but you'd need to strip the tank down. some plastics more affected than others, and the problem generally only starts after a few years so it might not be worth worrying about.

you can sell it for whatever price someone's willing to pay for it.

By the looks of that fitting they are just a standard fluorescent fitting. NOT water proof. and certainly NOT idiot proof. Occasional water splashes will only touch part of the fitting, there would need to be a continuous patch of water from one end fitting to the other in order for a short...

read up on tank cycling, there's plenty of information in here about it. in short, 6 days is nowhere near long enough. fish produce ammonia and this poisons them if nothing takes it away. bacteria will grow that turn ammonia into nitrite, but this is also poisonous. other bacteria will grow...

too well fed? i notice mine are more timid when their stomachs are full. hunger brings them out.

I remember it well, cycling a tank with fish in is very frustrating. If you're diligent about it you'll pop out the other side and things will be OK, it just requires lots of effort and patience :) Feed them less. Fish don't need to eat every day, so only feed them a little bit every 2nd day...

Don't drop it and put 20" chromies on. Aside from looking stupid, chrome wheels aren't practical in a battlefield. If you must spraypaint it I recommend sticking with the original random dark greens and browns. Gaudy orange will get you blown up. don't worry about cleaning...

the problem with prime is how much do you dose and how often to "lock away" nitrites? I've always been a bit sceptical, I'd rather see low numbers on the test chart. nitrites are a pain to control because they are produced at 3x the rate of ammonia, but you'll have to just keep up the water...

do this, put the mature media at the entry point of the new filter so the water runs through the old media and then into the new media.

A few points, from my own (admittedly limited) fish-in cycling experience 1) You must use a LIQUID test kit, like API master kit, test strips are hopeless. 2) If your pH is above 7, then freak out whenever you see Ammonia on your water tests. If your pH is between 7 and 8 then freak out if you...

As already mentioned, pH is secondary to all the other parameters in your tank and stability in your pH (rather than an absolute number) is desirable because it means all the other levels of chemicals are not changing dramatically. You don't want to ever change the pH dramatically though, as...

Any time your pH is above 7 you cannot let your ammonia get over 0.50ppm or it will be instant fish death. If your pH is near 8 or above than 0.25ppm is your maximum, ammonia is a big problem in alkaline waters. I would not trust Prime or any other ammonia "converter" to safely lock it away...

as above, WD's the expert! it's worth remembering that fish rely on bacteria to survive. at least, they do if you don't fancy massive daily water changes to remove ammonia. a low maintenance aquarium is where you try to get close to a full ecosystem happening, so you need as little external...

The surface area of your filter material determines how much ammonia you can process, so yes you can overstock. Plants will help remove some of the wastes (be it ammonia or nitrates) as well. However a heavily stocked tank will still be a nitrate factory so you'll have to do larger water...

The whole "fish would rather be in the wild" thing is humanising the fish and giving it the power of being self aware. It's bullsh1t, sorry to be blunt but it's utter rubbish. Fish don't know the difference they just know how to swim, eat, and poop. You can condition them to a degree but this...

it's a relief when that happens!! my tap water has 0.50ppm nitrites in it already so the nitrite peak was an exercise in frustration and water changes (fish-in). so happy to see that pale blue colour.

by what metric? 55L is about 15 gallons, which by the usual metric (which is not that accurate anyway) that's 15 inches of fish. 2 x 7 inch fish yeah that's probably about it. But those are big fish. Small fish produce less waste per size than big fish so you can put a lot more in. Jenste is...

petrol genny is overkill for the amount of power a fish tank takes to operate, and is manual start so if you're not home you're out of luck. a UPS would keep going for maybe an hour or two for a mid-sized unit. 3-4 hour outages is hefty.. ouch. (how's all the stuff in your fridge!) battery...

You've got a few choices: 1) use bottled water if suitable - but this is expensive. 2) Take the bogwood out so your tank pH stays closer to the tap water pH, while the cycle completes. Put the bogwood back once you're doing fewer changes. 3) Leave the bogwood in but let tap water sit...

yep read the above link for more information. in short, they will but the nitrites phase is a battle as 1ppm ammonia will be converted to 2.7ppm of nitrites. I was having to do daily water changes to keep my levels down too, and I wasn't helped by my tap water having 0.25ppm of nitrites...

I have this, and also that Ammonia inhibits/damages N-bacs so whenever you have Ammonia in your tank the N-bacs will die off. For me, the A-Bac cycle took about the same amount of time as N-bac, but the N-bac was actually more frustrating because of the 2.7x production rate of toxin which meant...

I've noticed that if my tetras are hungry they will go nuts for food. If they are well fed they will often play with it by spitting it back out again, lose interest in that piece and even go find a new piece of food and repeat the same process. So it probably means you could get away with...

It's a good feeling :) Especially since my tap water has 0.50ppm nitrites already, keeping them low was a little difficult. All good now, put in a bunch more fish so hopefully it doesn't cause a mini cycle I think I'd put the tank out the window if that happened!

Because fish tanks are full of bacteria you have to be quite careful with cuts etc. One of our neighbours got quite sick after he cut himself cleaning the fishtank, it took some time for him to get rid of whatever it was he caught (sorry, can't remember exactly what it is). Anything that...

How heavily chlorinated is SA tap water? You may be lucky in the sense that A-bacs and N-bacs are already present in the water, and hence your filter establishes itself very quickly. If water was pristine, heavily chlorinated and devoid of all bacterial life and nutrients then it will be hard...