whetu

Good thinking, supasi. I put one in a glass of vinegar and there was no fizzing. I even broke it open to expose a new surface & still no fizz. Looks like it's all good. whew!

Just to add to the info in this thread for future reference, the manual for the Eheim 2026/2028 says "the upper edge of the pump head should be at least 10cm below the water surface. It is better to place the filter underneath the aquarium."

In order to get the most out of your lights it would help to do the following: Add a reflector to your fitting (and keep it clean) Clean any top glass or perspex light cover (or anything else between the tube and the water) Have the light close to the surface of the water Keep the water clear of suspended particles Replace the light tubes regularly But of course those steps will only help if you have the right light (brightness and spectrum) to start with.

I have a 3-foot 'biolux' tube on my planted tank. Although it's 30 watts you wouldn't know it to look at - it's quite a dimmish looking purple/blue to the naked eye. I have set it to come on 30 mins before the main lights, and off 30 mins after the main lights. I love the way it looks on the tank. The plants seem to fade away into the background and the fish stand out like startling little gemstones! It brings out all the reds and blues, so the gold and cherry barbs look lovely and the cardinal tetras are absolutely stunning! That last half hour in the evening is like having a whole new magical tank, and my partner and I both end up gazing at the tank no matter what's on TV. :lol:

Oooh I bought some of these a while ago from the same trader but just put them in my filter last week! I will go and check the pH immediately. Thanks for the warning!

Just don't put your seedlings anywhere near any gold barbs :evil:

Thanks for NOT posting the pics directly in the forum! :lol: There is no way I'm going to click on that link! As for learning interesting lessons, I am now intrigued. I think I will try doing everything with my left hand only for 24 hours and see if I can manage! Anyone else up for the challenge? :bounce: (I suspect bottom-wiping may be one of the problem areas )

All those veges already mentioned by others, plus most other veges you can think of and a lot of different fruits! Yes you can feed them lettuce and silverbeet. I use plant weights to hold mine down but you could just put a rock on the leaf. Whatever you feed them, remove any left overs before they go too soft and squishy and start to fall apart. Your plecos will probably devour the green part of the silverbeet leaf but leave the fibrous stalk uneaten if they can get away with it. Just tell them they can't have any pudding until they finish it.

Excellent piece of work, Twinkles (and great proofing, Stella). My suggestion would be to put the really important stuff in one short paragraph at the beginning and assume that 80% of people will only read that paragraph! So something like: "The wetlands at [location] are threatened with removal by the council. Please join us in our attempt to save this important natural feature." Not exactly that wording, but just something that summarises what's going on without them needing to read through the rest of it. Also it would be good if you could put all your lovely prose in a covering letter format that takes no more than one side of an A4 page, then all the rest of it as supplementary info attached to the back, and with your photos too if you can! (Of the people who do read past the first paragraph, the vast majority will only read the front page then flick through the rest of the detail without reading it.)

Thanks for the link, Stella. I just read the article and some of the recommended links and it helped to refresh my understanding of ich and its treatments. It's a very thorough and sensibly written article and was definitely worth the time to read again. So, applying the article to helen's problem, we would advise her to: Do a thorough gravel vac Remove any carbon from the filter but otherwise keep the filter running as normal Use the White Spot Cure at the dose and frequency recommended on the label and follow the recommended water-change regime Black out the tank (the effectiveness of Malachite Green can be reduced by sunlight) Raise the temperature of the tank to speed up the life cycle of the parasite while under treatment Increase the surface agitation to ensure there is plenty of oxygen in the water Observe the fish carefully for signs of stress (the combination of meds and higher temps can stress some fish more than others - and it looks like cories might be one of the more susceptible fish) Continue treatment for the period recommended on the bottle of White spot Cure, or possibly longer if she has any reason to doubt that the treatment has been effective. Have I missed anything?

Well... you could re-home them by sending them to someone else's home or you could re-home them by getting them a new, bigger home within your home!

Interesting. My paua shell ended up very, very thin and porous, and some parts of it dissolved completely. Obviously it would depend on how soft and acidic your water was in the first place - but mine was just 'normal' Auckland town supply water.

Clown loaches get notoriously big! Think 30cm and 30 year life span! Considering there are lots of different loaches around who eat snails, others might be more suitable than clowns (unless you are prepared to re-home them when they grow too big).

My personal feeling (based on no evidence whatsoever!) is that paua shells may be marginally worse than other shells to put in a freshwater tank. Not only does the outer white stuff dissolve, raising the pH and hardness of the water, but the colourful innner stuff ends up coming off in quite sharp flakes. I deliberately had a paua shell in my tank a few years ago in an attempt to buffer the pH. I thought if I was going to have a shell in there, then it might as well be a pretty one! But as the coloured bit started to flake off I had several mysterious deaths amongst my usually indestructable gold barbs. I suspect they may have swallowed some of the sharp flakes. Like I said, that's only my speculation, and I'm definitely not going to do a controlled experiment to find out if I'm right! Poor little fishies.

Thanks Helen! That's all good stuff to know. Danios are incredibly tough little blighters so they will withstand both the heat and the meds just fine. I'm not so sure about the cories - perhaps someone else can advise on that? I believe the active ingredient in 'White Spot Cure' is malachite green, which disappears spontaneously in the presence of organic material. The instructions usually say to keep adding so many drops a day per litre, over several consecutive days. If that is the kind of instruction on the bottle then I would suggest that you definitely wouldn't do a water change after treating for a couple of days as this would just dilute the medication. If the cories can handle the heat, you could put the temperature up even another couple of degrees but I would take two precautions: - Ensure you have lots of extra air going into the tank - if you can lower your water level and get extra surface movement from your filter output, that would be ideal. - Only use the very high temps for the time you are around to supervise the tank. Drop it back down to 28 degrees before you go away. That way you are available to take action if your fish show signs of stress. I have only had one outbreak of white spot and that was some years ago. I treated with a combination of heat and meds over an extended period and successfully treated the clown loaches and various barbs without loss. Unfortunately I lost all my otocinculus. Apparently they would have withstood either the meds or the heat but using both was just too much stress for them (so I was told at the time). Good luck and let us know how you get on!

I prefer to use non-toxic cleaners around the house for my own health as well as my pets! I find a combination of hot water, baking soda, vinegar and Ecostore dishwashing liquid (rinsed off well afterwards) will move all sorts of dirt and grime off surfaces. I also use micro-fibre cloths that clean without needing any chemicals. Well worth the investment! :bounce: If you really, really want to bleach something (and if vinegar or lemon juice don't work) then you could try some laundry oxygen whitener or even hydrogen peroxide. Again, rinse well afterwards.

I have a nitrate test kit and my main problem is getting enough nitrate in the tank, not too much! Mine is a rather heavily planted tank, so I suppose if you have a planted tank and keep an eye on the nitrates you would get a feel for it if that was becoming a problem. Another potential issue would be a dropping pH so that would be something else to keep an eye on. My tank has driftwood and (had) peat in the filter so it tends to keep the pH low anyway. If I was also adding CO2 I would need to monitor the pH and make sure I didn't make pickled fish in vinegar!

I took the protective covers off the seedlings in the tank, thinking they would be big enough to resist being eaten by fish. When I looked again 30 minutes later they were gone! Those gold barbs are like the rabbits of my tank in so many ways. :roll:

Hello and welcome, Grant. It's funny - I feel like I already know you... Do you know Caryl tells us all about you on here? :lol:

Oh that's good to know - I'm not the only person here with a filter that hasn't been cleaned since Adam was a fry! Actually after looking in my 15-month-uncleaned filter today, I would be confident that I could have left it for much, much longer without touching it. I mean sure there was a heap of gunk in the bottom but the flow was still good and like I said nothing was nasty and festering in there. So what media do you all run in your low-maintenance filters? I assume not the fine filter wool that would get clogged reasonably fast? Do you have one mechanical filter and a different biological filter? Do share!

It's not actually as bad as it sounds. I run two Eheim cannister filters. Filter#1 I run 'properly' with genuine Eheim media, regularly cleaned and maintained. Filter#2 is just packed full of cheap ceramic noodles and hasn't been cleaned since we moved to this house in May 2008! Anyway I cleaned Filter#2 today just for fun. OMG it was eeewww inside! :lol: Well actually it just had a lot of black gunk in the bottom - didn't smell bad or anything (which is what I would expect from a filter that's got water flowing through it at a reasonable rate). It was a bit like doing an archaeological dig though. I had forgotten that about a year ago I made a sandpit for my fish to play in. Actually it was a peat pit - a shallow dish full of peat, with food pellets hidden under the peat. Well it seemed like a good idea at the time, but a few vigorous tail-swishes from my clown loaches and all the peat was out of the dish and all over the tank. :lol: Today I rediscovered where about half a kilo of peat had gone... inside the filter of course! That's all the news from me - just wanted to share what I did with my day off! :bounce:

I don't think it looks like a guppy fry... must google some and see. I'm also surprised nobody has eaten it. I must have fat, lazy over-fed fish who have lost the hunting instinct! :roll:

Oooh what a good idea, Stella! I have seen things made of that stuff - I recently saw a kitchen bench and a bathroom basin (in a shop) made like that. But they were very expensive!

Barbs are fun and easy to breed! :bounce: All barbs are egg scatterers and they will eat the eggs if they can find them, so it's good to have something in the bottom of the tank for the eggs to fall amonst so the adults don't eat them - pebbles, marbles, dense plants, etc. Also the adults like to do their spawning dance amongst soft, fine-leafed plants. If you have the breeding tank in a room that gets bright morning light, the barbs tend to spawn in the morning. Then you just take the adults out and wait very patiently to see the little fry growing up! The survival rate and the quality of the surviving fry will depend on them having plenty of suitable nutritious food available, while keeping their water clean (it can be hard to get the balance right between feeding enough and feeding too much, resulting in dirty water). Good luck to all the barb breeders! Let us know how you get on.