Best Conditions For Guppies?

[OldMan47]

Your GH at about 10 degrees should be plenty for guppies. You need to watch your pH more closely than I do because your KH is only a little over 3 degrees and is in the danger zone. It would be all too easy for your pH to move around between water changes Brujo.

 

[waterdrop]

OK, the laggard (me!) is back (getting a few too many minerals between my toes at the beach ) and I'm caught up reading the followups in this good discussion. I do feel there's something useful in practical terms to be captured here for our soft/acid water people.

I completely know where Robby is coming from (since I live up the road a bit in the next state up and its probably some of the same geography that gives both of us pretty small values for GH, KH and pH.) I have a bad back and I know we both appreciate using Pythons to avoid carrying buckets. So I'm glad the question eventually got out there and we've settled that it really makes no difference whether the epsom/bicarb mixture is bucket-mixed or directly added to the tank at the time of the fill.

I suspect the real niggler in the back of Robby's mind is the one that gets in to mine that having to be an "active" adder of your mineral booster (as opposed to a -somewhat- passive monitor of whether what's in the filter is still doing its thing) tends to force one to face up to one's responsibility to be a good maintainer of the water, week in and week out, lol. Its those weekends that get missed because one is out of town, that sort of thing. Anyway I think you get my topic there (of the four of us I'm sure the other 3 of you, OM, Robby, Neale, would be better stewards than me!)

BUT, its a second topic I also want to get to and is of more practical importance. I think Neale has made me realize that if we were to divide our beginners into those with small tanks that have small filters and large tanks with large filters, we might gain some practical advantage in splitting our advice about boosting mineral content a bit. What I'm thinking is that its the small filters that are more likely to not easily give up biomedia space to CC as easily, whereas a larger cannister can easily give up part of a tray to some CC. I realize that technically, tank size makes no difference as far as using one method or the other (salts vs. CC) but am just thinking that overall size (really the filter type and size) might give us a handle for a simple division of advice.

WD

 

[OldMan47]

You could well be right on that WD.
I find that any of my conventional filters have tons of room for things like special media. I always run a lightly stocked tank when I can and use all available space in it for one or another form of bio-media. In any of my conventional filters, I would not hesitate to give away 20 to 30% of the space to something like crushed shell or crushed coral. The remaining bio-media would be far more than enough.
On the other hand, a tiny tank with a tiny filter demands that every bit of available space be devoted to exactly the right media to avoid a condition where not enough biological filtration would be present.
I sometimes wonder if my box filters would have that problem if I were to load them with the old fashioned carbon and filter wool mix using the manufacturer's instructions. Instead I am using the ceramic Matrix as the fill material with a tiny layer of floss on top. That means they are much better biological filters than they were designed to be.

 

[waterdrop]

Oh glad you agree with this idea of mine.. I hope we shall all remember it at some point in the future when the right beginner comes along. Another thing I'd like to do is to compare the concoction of Neales with that of Tom Barr, who has one that can help out plants in tanks that are getting low-mineral water.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[OldMan47]

Tom Barr is a favorite of mine when it comes to plants, but he is really good at plants, not fish. If I have a fish question, I would never ask him. If I had a plant problem, he might be one of the first people I would ask.

 

[waterdrop]

Completely agree. Its certainly a blessing when serious hobbyists (such as these two and any number of others around) take the time to participate and do writeups.

~~waterdrop~~