Stocking Check and Questions

[TucanSam]

Hi everybody. I had some questions about stocking. I recently got into the hobby and have a 75 gallon tank. My sister gifted me some fish that were not correct for her smaller tank and now I'm trying to make sure they are as happy and healthy as can be. My setup is as follows :

Cascade 1000 filter
Sponge filter (rather large cube from angels plus)
5 silver dollars
A dwarf gourami
A gold spotted pleco (L022)

I'm unsure of how much my filter can handle or if they have enough room. I'm aware most of these fish get quite large Am I OK so far? Any suggestions?

Thanks for any help!

 

[Colin_T]

Hi and welcome to the forum

I wouldn't keep dwarf gouramis with silver dollars because the silver dollars can be nervous and panic and that might stress the gourami. Also dwarf gouramis are riddled with diseases and have 2 main diseases (Tuberculosis and the Iridovirus) that are incurable. If your gourami dies, don't replace it with another one.

If you can find out what the general hardness (GH) and pH of your water supply is that will give us more information.

How long has the tank been set up for?
How long has it had fish in for?
How often do you do water changes and how much water do you change?
Do you gravel clean the substrate when you do a water change?
Have you cleaned the filter and if yes, how did you clean it?
Is the sponge filter a different type of filter to the Cascade filter?

 

[TucanSam]

Hi Colin ,thanks for the response.

I can check out the hardness when I get home (about to head out to work in a moment) but I believe it was in the hard side from my tap.

Ph is about 7.5, the tank has been up for about five months. (I got some filter media from a friend and the sponge from angels plus was also supposedly from a cycled tank. Not ideal, but this had to be set up in a hurry. The tank is fully cycled though)

It's had fish in it for those entire five months. Normal water changes are once a week at about 30%, but one of my fish got ick (luckily has not spread) so I'm a week into the heat treatment method and doing two water changes a week.

I normally vacuum half the sand substrate but have been doing it all with the ich issue (no ich is visible atm so it's going real fast thank goodness).

I clean the canister filter once a month and shake out the sponge filter once a week in a bucket of tank water currently. The canister filter also gets rinsed off in a bucket of tank water once a month.

I'm running biomax media and purigen in it as chemical and biological filtration.

Here is the sponge filter. It's the blue 5 inch cube with glass balls as weights
https://www.angelsplus.com/FiltersSpongeCube15.htm

I think I answered all the questions? Tanks normally runs at 78 degrees.

So far my gourami is doing fine with the silver dollar fish but I'll take your advice to heart At the moment they all like to school together as if the gourami is also a silver dollar. It's adorable.

Thanks for the help!

 

[TucanSam]

Well, my water hardness test is.. gone. Don't know where it is. I did find a water quality report by my city, which states that my water is "moderately hard". I will look into getting a new test soon