sharn

unsure about plants but anything below 40ppm i consider ok for general keeping, most of my tanks sit around 20ppm (except the discus tank) but i do around 50% a week and none of my tanks are heavily stocked. i would keep your nitrates around 20 or lower for the panduro, im guessing they are like most other apistos with the fact they dont like much nitrates?

why not just re-arrange your hills each time you level them out with a w/c or whatever? only takes a quick flick of the siphon or hand... sorry i dont have any crafty ways of doing it :oops: :lol:

malaysians arent made to live up on the plants and so on, they are substrate dwelling critters most of the time (come out at night though). i keep them in my planted and i dont mind them as i hardly ever see them during the day. it may be best for you to find out what type of algae you have and then rectify it without the use of chemicals/fish/snails, that way it would be gone for good? like Humming ive never had issues with my ramshorns eating plants but i guess indian fern could be a favourite (i dont keep that)?

i add my metro to the fishes favourite food normally. tetra bits absorb it well and most fish readily accept them, i also have some in a beefheart recipie but if your BN are still eating why not use algae wafers? when i made mine up i got the mg/gram of food dosage, measured out the food and metro accordingly, dissolved the metro into a tincy bit of water then soaked the food in it and popped it in the freezer

sounds like a workable mix to me id advise waiting till the tank has been established a while before adding the rams, and possibly the whips depending on what species you get (not sure how sensitive they are). rams are fairly sensitive fish and often have problems in newly set up tanks having a browse thru sites with tetra profiles may help you decide what species of tetra you want and that would save you potentially buying fin nippers only to have to return them not sure if the gouramis and fighter would hassle each other though, i havent had any experience with the pearl gouramis.

i recently made the trip to bunnings and got a few metres of tubing that fitted the ends of my siphons- out the window the hose goes and voila! you just have to start it, vacumn the tank then let it drain to where you want. you could hook up some sort of doohickey fitting onto your tap with a hose to pump back in if you liked or you can set up aging bins with heaters and powerheads and attatch the hose onto the powerhead to pump back into the tank. the powerhead has to be fairly large though, i attempted to use my smaller 1000lph to pump into my discus tank that stands 5' foot and i ended up bucketing it back in cause i wasnt waiting hours for it to refill :lol:

id say just. theyre like thick, solid bullets at that size. im not sure how they would be as a lone fish though, especially as they are schoolers by nature, i think they would be quite flighty.

heres my little Hoover (temporary name) in quarentine till he grows up then he will join the big boys/gals in the Oscar tank. Hes just a baby (3"ish) so still has his little spots, his mouth isnt so little though Can imagine how big it will be once hes older :lol:

so in theory, if we take away the 'fail off and cook' factor you would use the same amount of power at the end of the day to heat a 100L with a 1W heater as you would heating a 100L with a 100W? I suck at maths and putting my thoughts into words :lol:

told ya i would be wrong :lol:

so its a numbers thing? cause i had around 15ish males in there the other day by themselves and well... a few knocked a few off i think i shall stock up then!

i remember reading an account of a lady using it in her discus tank that had several hundred baby bristlenose and they were fine. perhaps planetcatfish would be able to advise you if it was ok or not?

keep in mind PP will kill all your good bacteria so make sure that after treatment you keep up with the w/c's while the tank re-cycles. When i used PP on my discus i sat by the tank for the 5 hr treatment and didnt leave except for food and the toilet :lol: Every account i have read of things going belly up was when people werent vigilent enough. I used a differnt method to the one alan is describing. mine was a 5 hr bath (in tank which is a barebottom, just removed the filter media) at 2ppm and i used hydro peroxide to neutralise followed by a 75% w/c. Rams are sensitive fish so i would advise watching the treatment out if you do a short term bath if possible. Best of luck

i am most likely totally wrong because i suck at maths but doesnt it work on how long its on for? Say you are heating a 1000L with a 300w heater and its on 24/7 that means its using 7,200W per day (300w/hr). Now if you were using 500W worth of heating and they were only on for 12hrs a day (cause its more wattage and heats water quicker) it would use 6000W per day? *note, this isnt to scale. probably doesnt matter all that much i guess, depends on what your paying for power and so on *shrugs*

The main thing with sand is making sure it doesnt compact too much and go anerobic but with Geos you shouldnt have too much of a problem with that as theyll turn it over for ya :lol: If the sand does get into your filters it most likely will get your impellors so get the inlet as high up as you can, especially if your fish will be fluffing around in it. I got my sand from benchmark, 5 bucks for a 20kg bag and it works a treat, its quite fine though.

I wouldnt follow Ofishs advice too closely, and the info they have given you is a good example of why :-? You can most certanly keep more than two oscars in that size tank! Sure, two would be in heaven with a 540L to themselves but as a fairly experienced oscar keeper i can safely say that you can keep a fair amount more in a tank that size. Odd numbers = bad in an oscar tank so either go two with more tankmates of different species(even then when they hit puberty its anyones game as to if they get along) or four with no tankmates (maybe a plec or something though). With two that gives you a good range of other possible tank mates. I agree with Bec, Sevs go wonderfully with O's (mine live very happily together). I also have silver dollars, a RT shark and a common plec in my 460L with my O. Tinfoil barbs get big (12" or so) and prefer to be in schools, they need lots of room and may take the focus off your O's although you could fit them in. Silver dollars are a great fish to go with them as they get large, are fast and arent super flashy. Jack dempsies are a nice flashy fish but they like a cave to call their own. Alot of the plecs that get large enough to not be eaten are a good choice too. Synos can be a neat addition, along with talking cats. Oscars really arent as bad as everyone makes out on a whole, you can keep quite a good amount of species with them if you have a tolerant fish and go about mixing them wisely. Of course every now and again youll get a fish that wants to be on its own regardless of tank size... I havent had much experience with dats (if theyre the borneo tigers i think they might be a bit nasty?) so will leave that to someone else.

havent seen any on ours few within the last couple of weeks...

I know fancy goldies prefer slightly higher temps but oscars and so on prefer around the 26-27 mark which im sure those ones wouldnt be too happy about? i wonder what temp hes keeping them at. Bet the goldfish would grow quick and die quick (whole metabolism thing). Not something i would do personally owning both goldfish and oscars *shrugs*

If your filter isnt run on air then dont turn it off. Im not sure how potent those bombs are but a couple of heavy blankets and possibly an air line run from outside the house (clean air gets pumped into the tank then) may be a good plan? You may need to make the tank as airproof as possible depending on how strong the bombs are.

the tank is roughly 100Lish at a guess and normally has around 15 by themselves (sometimes has a skunk loach for snails too)

if theyre the larger plecs (commons, goldspots, redspots etc) they can get pretty territorial from what ive read/seen so watch out for that. my two commons hated each other when i had two (360L tank) and were always chasing and ramming each other and the amount of poop from two was astronomical :lol:

Thanks blue, i love him to bits! He will make the perfect addition to my O tank once hes grows up some, hes already quite thick so i can imagine what he will look like when hes close to my Oscars size *drools*

could be a way to get out giving real chocolate eggs to the kids for easter :lol:

ok guys, so im far from a guppy expert (i know they breed lots and thats about it) and im having some issues at work with them nipping. now at first i thought it was perhaps the males competing for females, so i removed all of them to another tank and put a few extra plants and what not in in attempt to break it up a bit. the males continue to nip each other to the point they kill each other and whaddya know the females do it too! apart from 1 male to 3 females is there anything else i can do? female guppies dont sell as quickly as the males so if i can get away without having 3 times as many females as males it would be preferable. any advise would be greatly appreciated cause im at a loss as to whats up with them, these guys are worse than my large cichlids!

:lol: